Column: The need for more libraries, or for better bookstores

The need for more libraries, or for better bookstores
Rebecca Arcega

Last year, I spent two months vacationing in Wellington, New Zealand and found myself having less control over my time than I’d hoped for.

Not having easy Internet access also left me out of the loop, so I wasn’t able to keep up with the online activities that inspired me to keep working on the Philippine Speculative Fiction blog (http://specfic.philsites.net)

Still, I found that there are some advantages to not being “wired.” One gets more time to think, for one. I think one of the many things about my trip was access to a public library. I was there at least twice a week, and in-between raiding my uncle’s private stash, I foraged in Upper Hutt and took home some titles that I was sure I wouldn’t easily find in the Philippines.

For me, the Upper Hutt Public Library was , quite simply, a little slice of heaven. It had been a while since I was last able to visit a decent library, about four years ago when I was doing research for a certain writing project, and I was able to enter the University of the Philippines Main Library again.

Every time I stepped through the doors of the Upper Hutt Library though, I was bombarded by conflicting emotions. One of them, I was surprised to find, was guilt. I kept thinking about certain people back home who would love the gorgeous selections. I made up my mind to email a friend about the extensive Dragonlance collection I saw, another friend about the newer Iain Banks titles, and someone else about the surprising number of Storm Constantine’s non-Wraeththu books. Hell, I even took pictures.

And I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there. I no longer set aside a sizeable amount of my earnings to books, and while I do love to read, I don’t dare call myself a bibliophile anymore.

Yet I was the one who had access to all those books.

It’s a more personal neurosis, I think - I wouldn’t ascribe it to a Pinoy trait, a “girl thing,” or anything so potentially explosive. I simply hate picking up a paperback at Powerbooks and sitting down to read it, because I feel like I’m depriving other more worthy readers of good seats.

I think things like: there’s a kid out there somewhere who needs to read more Rimbaud than I do; I’m just here rereading Un Saison en Enfer for the nth time on a whim. I’ve already read enough and it’s time for me to write; I shouldn’t take up too much space or too many hours. It made me wonder if my self-esteem issues are still within normal, or if I should start seeing a shrink.

Also, it made me think about how quite a few of the active literati in the Philippines can afford to have their own private libraries. I imagine that really good writers consciously know that they will never have read enough, and in their heart of hearts they are always on the lookout for the next textual high.

The question is, how many of our would-be writers can actually afford that high, and how many can’t?

Loving libraries

Growing up, I was a big fan of libraries. I lived within campus during my university years, so I could library-hop in my spare time. My favorites at the time were the UP Main Library (treasure trove!), the Engineering library, and the Fine Arts library. The last time I had to do research there as an alumna, I had to go through a rigorous (and IIRC, somewhat costly) process just to secure a “special” library card. I just don’t know if students from other schools would have an equally hard time.

But in high school, I used to live one hour away from my campus in Malolos, yet I braved the heat and the traffic during weekends just to be able to visit the town’s public library. Granted, I was very much the little nerd at the time: I grabbed at whatever meant access to books that I could read almost for free.

2007 Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing once spoke of the need for good libraries, saying that “In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, with the tradition.” We always hear talk of Pinoy writers needing to write more. But as a good friend once said and I never forgot: “The more I read, the more I want to write.” Some of us tend to notice it off the bat - our most productive times are when we are in the company of other artists, when we’re being forced to catch up with a reading list, when we’ve just experienced something awesome and we’re driven to share it with other people. In short, when we’re being inspired.

And in other countries, they have places where you can just walk in and be inspired, and you have no excuse not to be. When somebody says “I think you should read ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke,” you don’t have to shell out P600 just to take that godawful thick but hugely entertaining title home. You don’t have to commute 20 miles to the library at the metropolis or strain your eyes reading pirated ebooks (which are usually badly formatted and poorly spellchecked, by the way) just to catch up with the artists you admire.

We already have a fair number of great bookshops and publishing houses, but I’m wondering if they would ever be able to afford customer-friendlier sales schemes. At Dymock’s bookshop, you can even return a brand-new book within a certain number of days, and as long as it’s in excellent condition you can exchange it for another title - with adjustments duly made to the cost, of course! To be honest, I don’t know if our local bookshops operate with a similar principle, but I’d sure love to see something besides the traditional “No return, no exchange” policy.

Right now, I live near a mall. This mall has a National Bookstore outlet. I notice one specific teenage boy poring through the books in the Filipiniana section almost every time I visit. But every time I approach him to try and ask him about himself, he shies away, as if he’s expecting that I wanted the space to browse through the Filipiniana section for myself.

I can’t help but think this boy should be in a library, not sneaking around in a bookstore.

I don’t blame publishers for wanting to make money. I certainly don’t hate bookshops, especially ones that make it a point to stock not only bestsellers, but Really Good Books. All this helps in furthering literacy in the country. But you still have to ask what’s slowing us down, what’s making it harder for the rest of us to catch up.

Make no mistake here, I’m not nursing a resentment for people who have the means to buy the next bestseller hot off the shelves and think P200 for a hardcover is a great buy - for the record it’s a huge bargain, but I think I’ll wait for the paperback to go on sale. But I do want to call more attention to the rift that is being created by lack of access to information. Are we really asking to breed more novelists, when even local novels cost P500 a pop, our cost-effective presses can only produce a limited number of quality titles, and our benchmarks of modern literature are only available via Amazon.com? Are we serious about expecting people to become better writers, when it’s so difficult for them to even have an idea what good writing is?

Moreover, and just to be clear, what I’m saying is not “How can we guilt-trip the haves into slowing down for the have-nots?” but “How can we empower the have-nots so they can finally catch up?”

I’m aware that inequalities will persist. It doesn’t follow that just because we will have more and better libraries, we’ll be able to breed better writers - i.e., that people will actually go to those libraries, and read, and be inspired. It’s not that simple.

Still, if we’re serious about our dedication to literacy, and if we’re serious about wanting to pull our fellow writers up to global standards, we should at least acknowledge certain realities about the playing field. There’s “coddling” and there’s “helping,” and right now we’re still at that stage where we need all the help we can get.

May 6, 2008 | Filed Under Read or Die, Books, Reading | 4 Comments

Column: Reading Dangerously

Promoting reading and love for books might seem the most innocuous of advocacies, and perhaps–from a certain perspective—kind of boring. Other people seem to harbor an existential sort of fascination with the name of our organization; on our part, the only advantage is that we are not in any danger of being automatically considered as unreconstructed bluestockings, especially when confronted with lofty frat boys. Not that we—or any reader—should care. However I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve run into our share of Lovecraftian weirdness. Publishers and editors have recounted numerous stories of being stalked by aspiring writers. But reams of psychological suspense and slasher novels are written about and starring bibliophiles, and for good reason.

A mysterious self-confessed male person sent me a caustic text message asking why most published Filipino writers are “elitist, pompous, boring, university-bred asshats” and “why can’t we have Filipino versions of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs?” A day or so later he followed it up with a question–addressed to ‘Read Or Die’–what ‘a priori’ meant because he’d started reading Arthur Schopenhauer. I didn’t reply to his earlier messages and had no phone credit when the a priori question came up. He repeatedly insisted that I reply because he had nobody to ask and he was only a minimum-wage earner employed by the government and a lapsed alcoholic with poetic pretensions who’d started to get back to reading again, specifically philosophy texts. I had to bite and replied via Yahoo Messenger with a hash definition of ‘a priori’ (throwing in ‘a posteriori’ for good measure). He thanked me politely enough. I found the entire thing rather intriguing. Civil servants reading Schopenhauer! There was hope for this country yet.

The next day he sent another message to ‘Read Or Die’ saying that he’d also started reading the Marquis de Sade and then followed it up with a polemic bemoaning the inadequacies of English-Filipino dictionaries. I sent a brief reply saying that this could possibly be addressed by mass circulation of translated texts but wasn’t sure if it was ever going to happen. He made some sort of derisive rejoinder–I’d begun to notice that he was rather touchy and unpredictable–and then asked for my email and MySpace page. I didn’t reply.

That’s when he started flooding. He kept sending ‘Hey, Read or Die’ messages and ‘Why aren’t you answering me? Are you feeling threatened?’ I deleted the messages as they came because my inbox had very limited capacity, and honestly, only an idiot would take the bait this time around.

The next day he seemed relatively calmer and told me about his band and said in a self-mocking tone that for some reason he’d started thinking of me as the the Jack Kerouac to his Neal Cassady. I didn’t reply. Despite the underlying mockery, I thought the comment must either point to an incredibly naive and romanticized view of the Beat poets or to an equally incredible conceit (Neal Cassidy was Jack Kerouac’s psychedelic muse, Ginsberg’s ’secret hero.’) He recommended several books for Read or Die to read–aside from his obvious partiality for skid row writers with destructive personalities and European philosophers with more of the same, his taste also seemed to run towards biting suburban American novels with soft and dry cores, like ‘Bridges of Madison Country.’

He spammed me again later that evening with more demands and goading sarcastic comments. I turned off my phone. The next afternoon he ventured with an almost timid question asking me if I’d read Nietzsche and if so which books would I recommend. I should also have ignored this, but I found him interesting and quixotic and sad despite his rudeness and high-strung temperament. I replied with “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “Beyond Good and Evil.” He asked me why I did not pick something like “The Gay Science” which was purportedly symptomatic Nietzsche. I said that I hadn’t chosen the books I did based on whether or not they are ‘representative,’ but on the basis of philosophical and aesthetic continuity. He asked me who Zarathustra was. I replied and recommended a few books on German history and philosophy and left it at that. He didn’t, of course.

”Wow,” said Anon. “You’ve even read Nietzsche? You must be a famous professor, writer or columnist. Or somebody really old, which is why you take so long to reply, your fingers must be rheumatic.”

I did not reply.

Anon continued: “You must be all of 60, I’d say. Why aren’t you replying Ms. Read or Die? Have I offended your refined intellectual sensibilities again with my lower-class boorishness? Somebody like you who’s read German philosophy and has the luxury to found a book club for equally privileged bourgeois kids… I wouldn’t be surprised. How old are you?”

I wondered where he got the energy to write polysyllabic texts.

”You must be horrendously ugly as well. Buried in your books.”

Well, I was only human. I replied that I was not elderly, rich, refined or privileged. I also didn’t know about being ugly.

Anon shot back with a rather nasty query about what sort of milk formula my parents fed me so that I would have developed a penchant for the canon of German philosophy.

I didn’t reply.

“My dear Ms. Read or Die,” Anon sneered. “Cat got your tongue again? Please spare the time to talk to me and bridge the gap, however fleeting, between the working class and the upper class.”

”I don’t know why you keep harping on the question of our respective backgrounds, Mr. Pseudo-Semi-Proletarian,” I sneered back. “Please keep your illusions to yourself. As for mending the class war, if you’d read Marx–which I assume you have since you’re so obsessed with your social condition–you would know that’s rank heresy. You should be shot in the head. Good day.” My fingers were starting to hurt.

”Pseudo?” howled Anon. “I’m a true-blue-dyed-in-the-wool peon, Ma’am. I was a gasoline boy, sold sweepstakes tickets, worked in a farm, subsisted for a while as a gutter poet, took out an eleven-year research fellowship in Alcoholism, and am now staring at a bleak, pathetic and altogether boring future as a cog in this accursed government machinery. But you wouldn’t know that, of course. What’s your name?”

Didn’t reply. He went on to talk about classical music, jazz (inclusive of malicious asides regarding Steve Cooke) and why am I not replying, was I guilty, was I threatened.

Anon: Forget about being Jack Kerouac. You are clearly Tinker Bell to my Peter Pan. Hey, Tink. Are you there?

I turned off my phone again.

Received more text messages the next morning, which I again ignored though it was getting harder to send my own text messages, and met a fellow RoD member for lunch, who was witness to yet more messages. Apparently Mr. Working Class had taken a half day from work and biked home and on the way came up with ever sharper and provoking retorts guaranteed 100% to ensure him a fair hearing. This included a vague Marxist critique of Vivaldi and rhapsodies on the jazz canon as well as more sly digs about my status in life and possible intellectual pretensions.

Anyway, you get what we’re up against. If it’s not bleeding heart writers, you have pseudo-proletarian poets who think we’re their ticket to fame (Lord knows where they get the idea). Mia was of the opinion that—from a strictly interpersonal perspective—it was another variation of sexist playground behavior. Get the girl’s attention by calling her rude names, shivering, in the meantime, with the delicious anticipation of having her pull your hair in retaliation. I don’t exactly revel in the attention but I did find this person interesting and wondered how he conducted his real-life interactions. He struck me as abrasive, lonely, insecure and a bit schizophrenic. He’s also terribly articulate (in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a good poet–he did style himself in those terms) and I think his anger at social injustice is very real. There’s also quite a lot of vain grandstanding and self-delusion. All in all, a novelistic package.

I don’t think that I’d like to be his friend, though (least of all a readymade amanuensis/Muse), and I could really do without the provoking messages and constant demands for attention. Ignoring him seems to be a good way to force him to temper himself. He apologized one night for his foul comments and said that he was only trying to get my attention. Well, I don’t know if he’s that desperate for my upper-class conversation or if he sees me, possibly the first female of his acquaintance who’s read his German philosophers (for whom he professes his usual mixture of contempt and ambivalent admiration), as a reflection of his own brilliance. He does seem intent to carve out some sort of half-crazed, half-fantastic, overall debased Beat-Marxist fairytale where rich girl dwelling in ivory tower breathing in the rarefied air of dead books and dead knowledge meets poor boy, the genius poet with a violent and melancholic past. And together they fight illiteracy and capitalistic exploitation.

March 8, 2008 | Filed Under Read or Die, Books, Reading | 11 Comments

Reader’s Quirks (Sorta)

I like hardbound books more than paperback books. I can’t help it – hardbound books are easier to carry around because you don’t ever have to worry about their covers getting bent at every slight movement, and you don’t have to fear them splitting at the spines like with paperbacks. Course, they’re heavier, thrice as bulky, and more difficult to stuff in your bag, but they’re hardy enough that you don’t need to.

By this time, you can tell that I’m the kind of person who’d rather endure pain than damage her books. It’s mostly true, though I’ve also been known to dog-ear a few favorites here and there. It’s more like: I want my books to live a long life, so I want to preserve them in their best condition as much as possible. You should see my old shelf – I had my books covered with a towel plus the glass just to keep the dust out. On that same note, it’s also obvious that I’m not the type to eat while reading, or the type to read outdoors unless desperate. I don’t use bulky bookmarks, either; instead I use plain paper (I don’t fold it, goodness, no).

The thing is, I don’t really particularly mind if my books get damaged. I think I may have an obsession for trying to keep them looking new, but when I damage them, I get over it fairly quickly (two minutes). It might be because I used to lend books to classmates as a kid, and they always returned to me all bent and ratty, and they always told me that I gave the books to them in that condition. Excuse me? No way! Hence, the obsession.

I think if I had a reader’s quirk, this would be it, the manic obsession for trying to protect my books. You probably have some, too, like reading your books upside down or something. Share and explain!

If you have articles to submit, please to be e-mailing me at yukitsuyk@yahoo.com .

November 13, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Miscellany, Reading | Leave a Comment

Adventurous Me

Admittedly, I’m not a very wide reader, and I haven’t really read many different books in my life. I’m not very adventurous with what I read. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most adventurous, I’d be on a pathetic three.

Anyway, my point is, I’m not widely read, and when I go to bookstores, I seriously don’t know what to buy. Well, I buy it if it’s on sale, or if it’s gay, or it has something to do with main male characters, and if it has as little romance as possible. I’m very loyal to authors. If I know that this so and so author has a book that I’ve liked, I’ll buy his other books, but I’m not the type to pick up a book that’s not familiar to me. (I’ve done so a few times and they mostly all nice, though, like Geisha of Gion, and I think it would be nice if I buy stuff that I choose on my own once in a while, so I can also recommend things to my friends, among other things.)

So anyway, the books that I read are usually recommendations by my friends, Lyn and Pam in particular. I trust their judgment, and they know what I like (crack, main males, crack, crack). I also pick up books that I hear my other friends gush about all the time, or whatever’s familiar. As long as I’ve heard of it before, I have no qualms about buying it, but otherwise, they have to be on sale or very attractive (which means that half of the contents of my book shelf are stuff that you can also find in my friend’s shelves). It usually takes me a very long time to decide if I want to buy something on my own, especially if they’re books that even my very widely read friends are not familiar with. The good thing about it is, my friends are, as I have said, very widely read, which means that I DO get to buy and borrow and read books of different themes. I suppose it’s a vicarious wideness, if I may label it as such.

I don’t know why, exactly, I’m such a chicken about picking up a random book and just reading it. Is it because I don’t want to waste time and money reading a story that I don’t like? I read to enjoy myself, and not really for anything else. I know some of you here read to write, or read to learn. I… just simply do it for entertainment. Of course, there have been many books that I read to gain knowledge from, but mostly it’s just because it’s a good story and I like immersing myself in it. That’s not to say that the way I read is shallow, but it’s more of, I first enjoy it the way I think it should be enjoyed, and breaking the elements down come after I’m done with that (if I want to study it further). Some of you may find my approach very naïve or… dare I say, dumb? though.

If you want your article to be published in this blog, please email me at yukitsuyk@yahoo.com

November 2, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Miscellany, Reading | 6 Comments

Abridged or Unabridged?

So here’s a question that popped out in my head when I was looking at my copy of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: Abridged or Unabridged?

When a book has been ‘abridged,’ it basically means that it has been shortened and parts of it have been cut out. Of course, ‘unabridged’ means that nothing significantly lengthy has taken out of the book.

Personally, I prefer the unabridged version unless the book is something that I have to read for school. I’d rather read the book in its complete form rather than miss out on anything. People can edit and translate and make the book more readable, sure, but I don’t like it when whole chunks or chapters of it are removed, no matter how unnecessary people say these parts are. I just—I feel cheated! It’s like eating oreos without the middle, or ending up having to sit with just half your butt on the jeepney seat.

My opinion may be because of past experiences. I first read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, as well as Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask abridged. I didn’t quite enjoy it as much, given that I thought some of the chapters didn’t connect well enough and I was pretty confused when the characters referred to something that just wasn’t in any part of the book. Don’t get me started on the abridged version of Sherlock Holmes – detective stories with missing parts? Blasphemy!

Since then, I’ve tried my best to keep away from abridged books. ~~I find that their book covers aren’t as pretty, anyway.~~ Of course, I still don’t know if a book is unabridged or abridged if it doesn’t say so anywhere on the book cover in big letters, but here’s to hoping that I didn’t get any abridged books last book fair.

What about you?

If you want to submit articles to the RoD blog, just email me or any of the members so we can put it up for you~ My email address is yukitsuyk@yahoo.com.

October 19, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Miscellany, Reading | 2 Comments

Reading Mix: Ethnographies: Argonauts of The Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski

Previously: The Golden Bough by James Frazier

I have a secret guilty fondness for Malinowski. Perhaps ‘guilty’ isn’t quite the right word, and it shouldn’t really be a ’secret’ since Malinowski’s influence and the integrity of his scholarship are unquestionable. But.

As I mentioned, Sir James Frazer marks the transition from a broad conception of anthropology, produced by well-educated amateurs and museum curators, to a more fragmented form of discipline, produced by academics who specialized in its branches: most social anthropologists studied the biological dimensions of humankind and their evolution. Prehistory and archeology became separate disciplines, ones of marginal interest to most modern anthropologists. The leading proponent, and most skilled promoter, of a self-defined modern form of social anthropology, one marked off from historically related intellectual developments, was Bronislaw Malinowski. Since evolutionism at that time was falling out of popular favor (and with its decline went much of the market for anthropology), Malinowski was much concerned with ways of making his new brand of the discipline known to the general public and of winning respect for it within intellectual circles. Read more.

October 18, 2007 | Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment

Books for the people, by the people

(Kind of).

Zarah Gagatiga posts a great entry about Galing Foundation, a US-based literacy group which ships books to rural areas in the Philippines. I was disheartened to learn about Books For The Barrios‘ financial troubles since I really appreciated the work that they’ve been doing. I’m not sure if they have already folded or if the organization is still somehow afloat. I’m thankful that Galing Foundation is now in the picture though. At some point we need to hook all these book drives together under some sort of wide-ranging and efficiently run interface — maybe the DepEd’s Library Hub will do the trick or a putative reading campaign by the National Book Development Board. I’ve been testing a system which can keep track of donors and sort of match them up with donees but so far it’s still in beta (again, is there a way for me to do these things while sleeping?)

Filipino-American friends have been asking me if they can form RoD chapters in their communities in the US and–quite apart from the OMG FILIPINO READERS THE WORLD OVER SUPPORTING FILIPINO LITERATURE FOR GREAT JUSTICE factor–I’m really hopeful about what this could mean in terms of shipping books to the Motherland. The friends in question are young and dedicated and a few of them are working for publishing concerns in whose warehouses there are apparently BOOKS waiting to be donated. Should email them about Galing Foundation as well. Maybe they can combine powers.

October 15, 2007 | Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment

Review: Purposes Of Love by Mary Renault

Kristel and I were talking about ~~ancient Greek gay sex~~ Mary Renault’s historical novels the other night. I mentioned coming across an early novel by Renault and promised to post a review which I’d written right after I read it (in lieu of lending the book which um must be somewhere in my bookshelves back home).

I actually have a bit of an atavistic? haha interest in the early or more obscure works of certain writers. I’m not quite sure why. Some impulse to connect the dots, maybe.

Purposes of Love by Mary Renault (Promise Of Love in the American edition) — Found this book in a strange little garage sale in Los Banos and took it home post-haste. I’ve read somewhere that Mary Renault wrote a number of contemporary novels during and after World War II before the successful publication of her historical novels on Ancient Greece. “Purposes of Love” is apparently her first book.

The story is set in a London hospital, a setting that Renault knows intimately and makes use of with great deftness, drawing on her experiences as a professional nurse. At the simplest level, “Purposes of Love” is the story of Vivian, a nurse, and Mic, a newly arrived pathologist who meet, fall in love, have the usual jealousies and reconciliations, and work it all out in the end. Renault, however, complicates this standard plot by introducing a host of characters whose relations with the leads are of a sexually (and emotionally) ambiguous nature. One of these characters is Vivian’s brother, Jan. The reader learns that Mic is first attracted to Vivian because of her resemblance to Jan, for whom he nurtures an unrequited longing. Vivian, too, has a more complex sexuality than was usual in 1930’s fiction; she is not repulsed by the advances of Colonna, an openly lesbian colleague. What passes between them is left to the reader’s imagination, but Renault, in her subtle way, has sketched the scenario in terms that are very clear.

I don’t think that “Purposes of Love” is intended to celebrate homosexuality in any direct manner; rather, Renault proposes the idea of a broad spectrum of sexuality along which people move, settling for a time at points which are not as fixed as some people would like to imagine. Indeed, the book makes it clear that it is not Vivan and Mic’s ‘internal’ problems which hamper their relationship, but the ‘external’ stumbling blocks thrown up by the hospital itself, its rigid disciplines and capricious hours, which cohere themselves into the dual concepts of power and control as exercised by the people trapped in such a potentially destructive hierarchy. Vivian embarks on a disastrous fling with the surgeon Scot-Hallard, which almost wrecks her affair with Mic. Where Scot-Hallard has refined his relationships to a polished set of finely orchestrated physical satisfactions, Mic reacts to jealousy like a wounded adolescent. Brought up by strangers, taunted throughout his childhood because of his illegitimacy, he has no defense against betrayal. Where Vivian is delightful, extravagant, impulsive, he can be cold and humorless. Unless he can defeat jealousy, she will be lost, for the underlying theme of the book is not deviant sexuality but, like I said, power. When Scot-Hallard’s ruthlessness manifests itself, he is referred to as “something between Hitler and the Archbishop of Canterbury,” and this side of his character is brought out by the interest he shows in a new experimental weapons factory working day and night producing poison gas.

When Vivian casually enlists the aid of the nurses’ drug cabinet to cope with a delayed period, she cannot resist telling Mic what she has done. Her excuse, that she has protected him from fathering another bastard, masks the unspoken urge to exercise power by hurt which she has so roundly despised in Scot-Hallard. Here Renault is suggesting that when the desire to enjoy control proves irresistible, it leads to a deadly self-deception. When Vivian buys a new dress for an assignation with Scot-Hallard, she tells herself the garment is to please Mic and that by sleeping with the surgeon she will somehow be sprucing herself up for her real love-making with the younger man. What began as an amusing love story has progressed into a subtler discourse on the nature of honesty and trust, hence the title, drawn — I looked it up — from the nurses’ prayer.

The ending may seem a bit trite and melodramatic at first reading, but I think it’s interesting to the extent that it foreshadows if not actually *references* Renault’s later work, specifically her novels on the Socratic circle.

Vivian and Mic’s break seems to be final after the extended battering their relationship has been subjected to. Vivian’s affair with Scot-Hallard was only the last straw. Jan, Vivian’s brother, decides to intervene. In order to talk Mic around, Jan takes him for a drive in his sports car. When he crashes it, Mic is only slightly hurt, but Jan is trapped and seriously injured. He is taken to the hospital where he learns there is no hope, the least movement will kill him. When he decides to put an end to his own life, he takes on the sacrificial status assumed by ancient Greek kings who accepted death at times of crisis in order to appease divine anger.

This sense of Jan as a scapegoat, a consenting sacrifice, and the fact that, once reunited, Vivian and Mic discover their love approaches the Platonic ideal of deep friendship untrammelled by desire, is very intriguing. Plato is constantly quoted throughout the book. I didn’t realize it until I was re-reading certain passages; the network of Greek allusions and ideas is tenuous, but it exists. One can say that it even holds the story together. It’s as if Renault is demanding that the reader view her characters as a double vision and consider them Hellenic souls, philosophers even, imprisoned in modern bodies. I’m not sure if this is true of the rest of her contemporary fiction, though it may well be a consistent and worth exploring subtext.

October 15, 2007 | Filed Under Reviews, Books | Leave a Comment

Your First Book Addiction.

Like other children in their elementary school, my childhood book was Hardy Boys. The truth is, I still get excited when other people talk about it with me, or even so much as mention it. People who were with me last RoD event would know, given that a handful of us spent a good half an hour reliving childhoodz and Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

I have an extremely fuzzy memory of my childhood, but I remember that my first foray into obsessive reading came about because of Hardy Boys. Of course, it wasn’t my FIRST book. My first was Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. It was a very heavy, very large, very thick, and very beautiful book. My parents were cheap back then, so I reread it countless, countless, countless of times before they took pity on me and dug out the random kiddy books in the attic (which belonged to an uncle who had kids older than I was). My parents apparently thought that at Grade 3, I’d like reading books like Cat in the Hat.

When they finally realized that, yes, their baby had outgrown 3-words-per-page books and needed longer things to occupy herself with ( and that it kept her from fighting with her brothers), they handed me a paperback copy of Hardy Boys. Ka-ching! I was in love. For some reason or another, our bookshelves in our attic had a lot of Hardy Boys paperbacks. I went through dozens of them in the following days, weeks, months, until I finished our stash.

I turned to the library in our school. I was delighted to know they had dozens of Hardy Boys titles, too. I would borrow one at recess, finish it by dismissal, then borrow another one again to take home. Seeing as I finished the stash in a month, I went through them all again. Apparently, I was a HUGE fangirl at 8 (but it can also be said that I didn’t have a life at 8, but shhhh). I loved Frank a lot, and always thought Joe was a jock. Chet Morton was often annoying, but Phil Cohen was my secret crush.

I went through other books, mostly all the other detective stories I could find in the library, regardless if they were for my age group or not. I went through Enid Blyton’s stuff, too, and tried out Nancy Drew for a while (my ultimate OTP was Frank x Nancy, in the crossover books). I had a short run-in with Sweet Valley High, the occasional Goosebumps, and as many books as I could get my hands on. (I even stole some of them from our library, but that was covered in the other post.)

Eventually, to my complete and utter delight, I found out that another room in our house had a secret – one of the untouched shelves had the Hardy Boys hardbound books, about 90% complete (as well as a huge pile of National Geographic magazines). I was in heaven! I suddenly had a collection! They were older than I was and I adored old books back then (they were cheap, haha, and I liked to fancy myself a collector). Most importantly — I could finally read Book One, the START of it all! The original 57 were in my hands! (Well, about 45 , since the 0s are missing) The books didn’t really last long. Finished all of them in about a month. The pride of having that many of the books never faded, though, and they’re still with me.

My parents were lenient enough to buy me a few more paperbacks, but I have a suspicion that the only reason they let me was because Goodwill way back sold them for 10 pesos each. Then I sort of ran out of Hardy Boys to read, and went off to other books again (and anime. Oh, anime). In grade six and first year high school, my favorites were the Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes, and the Golden Compass. There were the classics, like The Little Men, The Secret Garden, and The Prince and the Pauper. I had my Mills and Boons stint (my mother’s books when she was still young), a mild erotica stage (my uncle’s, I assume), and a Danielle Steel phase. Lots and lots of romance, some fantasy, a bit of sci-fi, a handful of suspense, and crack. The fondness for detective stories and crime fiction remained.

I’ve long outgrown it, of course. Hardy Boys eventually turned to ~~fanfiction~~ heavier books. Still, I have a deep-seated affection for Hardy Boys, and I still remember Frank Hardy as the first ever fictional character I ever crushed on, never mind that he was eternally eighteen years old.

So my childhood was Hardy Boys. What about you?

If you want to contribute your articles about your reading habits/quirks/meme, etc, etc, just e-mail me at yukitsuyk@yahoo.com and I’ll put it up for you~ Also, I thought today was Thursday. Ehehe. orz

October 12, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Miscellany, Reading | 11 Comments

Reading Mix: Ethnographies “The Golden Bough” by James Frazier

Another post, sorry. As mentioned earlier we have writing assignments and this particular assignment ought to have been posted yesterday (we’re supposed to run a non-fiction feature–or features–every Wednesday).

I’m putting my foot in my mouth again and proclaiming this entry to be the first of a *cough* series, which in turn I had been planning to submit for a reading mix challenge in another community. A reading mix is something like a literary playlist, wherein you arrange books less on the basis of a unifying theme and more in terms of how they might read together. Of course, one wonders, who’d be dorky enough to make up a mix about anthropological ethnographies? Ding ding!

Onwards–

October 12, 2007 | Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment

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