Summer Musings: The Reads (Pt. 1)

There are a couple tell-tale signs indicating that summer is in full swing (other than, of course our epic battle with the excruciating heat): 1. the malls look like weekend sales everyday, 2. beaches(I’m looking at you, Boracay) start to look like one big blob of human flesh and 3. you’re broke as hell (no school=no allowance). Personally, summer is in full-swing when I get to watch my favorite shows like the Office (Jankrasenske!) religiously for the next two months, eat more than my fair share of halo-halo in a week and read and re-read books uninterrupted by school work every day. Some of the many geeky things I love to do during summer involve coming up with tentative reading list for the month, doing inventories of books I read for the past year and book hunting around the metro. But instead of boring whoever will read this with my “inventory” (Oh boy, that WOULD be something), I will share instead a couple of home truths I’ve gained over the years when picking out/buying/reading books. I don’t know what compelled me to think I have some authority to impose my truths on anyone, but maybe it’s just a nasty blogger bug that’s been going around called megalomania. Without further ado, here are…

THE 7 UNIMPEACHABLE TRUTHS Courtesy of Yours Truly (Pt. 1)

1. ALWAYS Get Down and Dirty

My sister and I are always on a hot-hunt for book bargains. We’ve pretty much rummaged through them all—Book Sale, Books for Less, and every other book shop in Carriedo—for hours on end. One of the techniques we’ve picked up in our “bookscapades” over the years is the “get-down-and-slide”. As name suggests, you get down on your knees, scour the lowest shelf (which is often ignored since it escapes the initial visual connection of the buyer to the bookshelves), then slide with the help of your knobby knees to get to another spot across the shelf.

We noticed that this works particularly well in Book Sale. If you think the books they stack on the built-in shelves are cheap, wait till you get to the big horizontal shelf in the middle of the space which we adoringly call the “treasure trove”. On the lower part of those shelves boasts books so marked down, you feel almost guilty and sorry for having found them. Imagine buying a Booker Prize-winning book for P15. And here’s the kicker: there is no remarkable difference between the books they display on the shelves and the ones they “stow” away in the deep, dark recesses of those middle shelves.

On several occasions, you might need to add another maneuver to the technique called the “stick-your-ass-up” because looking for books here would require you to stick half your body into the shelf, while your other half is displayed for the entire world to see. The minute you get out for air, prize book in hand, you really did look like you went on trek—cheeks flushed, dirty and sticky as ever, but with a wide grin on your face. Finding great books in dark, forbidden places like these test our “navigating” skills surely, but we have this romantic notion that tantamount what explorers call “the thrill of the hunt”, only we’re geeks and we kind of hate the sun.

2. What Won’t Kill Me Will Only Make Me Doper

From my book shelf, I elect (not select) the three books that really gave my head (and several body organs) a whirl: 1. The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2. Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis and 3. Crash by J.G. Ballard. And maybe a couple of William Faulkners. I don’t know maybe because one of them was so stingy with punctuation marks and turned each full chapter into one long paragraph. Or that the other ran the story backwards, so reading it was like watching a movie on rewind the whole way through, IN YOUR HEAD, only it’s not like watching a movie at all. And as if imagining the events that took place in Auschwitz ran forwards isn’t disturbing enough. Oh and did I tell you about this other guy who mentioned semen and blood at least a couple hundred times in the story? And that wasn’t even the worst part. But from these books I learned that sometimes the most challenging reads turn out to be the most rewarding—they can, in fact, even change your life. I, for one, can not look at the world the same way after reading them. They humbled and chastened me. Any book that could potentially do those things for you deserves at least a second, third, hell…a fifth chance, right?

3. Nothing Beats A Classic

For me, it all started with Dickens. But really it could all just have easily started with a string budget. And that’s what’s great about it—it’s priced cheap, the stories are topnotch and the words are impeccable. Classics are intimidating to many people because they assume you need an astute mind to follow the flow of the language or that the stories are a little too hard to relate to since it came out several hundred years ago. Like anything else, it’s all about taking the baby steps, finding your footing and getting comfortable with your own limbs (in this case a confidence in your ability to read them). Eventually, something switches on and you start to walk steadily, then run, and before you know it you’re doing a Tolstoy marathon. But in the end, everything else becomes secondary to the tale. And perhaps that’s the reason why they have withstood and will withstand the test of time, because they confront the mysteries of the human heart and mind that continue to baffle and astound us to this very day. These stories thrive because we live, we love, we lust, we suffer, and we die. They are our own stories made more magical by the fact that it’s written down by someone you’ve never met…someone long dead. Creepy, but pretty darn awesome. (To be continued...)

Song(s) of the Week: Haiti by Arcade Fire; Gila by Beach House; The Modern Leper by Frightened Rabbit; Lullabye by Grizzly Bear; Cruisers Creek by The Fall