I officially started becoming a reader with The Mysterious Mannequin from the Nancy Drew series. On Sundays, our family would go to my grandmother's old house on Guerrero Street in Mandaluyong. While my uncles would play cards, my aunts gossip and my cousins play, I would usually sneak to my aunt's room to get books. She had the entire series of Nancy Drew in yellow hardbound lining her shelf. There were a few blue ones too, Hardy Boys. I didn't take to those as much as I took to Nancy, Bess and George and all their adventures. I would usually read on my Lola's bed or in the large living room couch until it got too dark. While my cousins were watching power rangers or doing whatever it was that kids did, I was in Istanbul tracing the codes woven into carpets, and learning the fact that Istanbul was the old name for Turkey. We'd leave my lola's house after dinner. I'd take the books with me and return them the next Sunday. Finally my aunt tied the books with straw and told me to fetch them. Mills and Boon paperbacks were mysteriously included in the pile. I read those too, especially before exams when procrastinating.
I clearly remember reading The Hobbit for an entire year. Most of it was read in a hospital bed at St. Luke's. I had dengue fever the summer before fifth grade. Then came the rest of The Lord of the Rings series. Then came a James Clavell and the historical fiction stage. My mother recommended that I read the book Shogun. She told me that once upon a time before I was born, my uncle was reading that novel. My lola wanted to read it too even if my uncle was not finished. They tore the book in half so they could read it at the same time. I inherited the tattered copy until a couple of years later when my lola wanted it back.
I didn't stick to fiction too. In sixth grade, I chanced upon Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I would have been an astrophysicist if I wasn't so bad at math.Sure, I didn't understand the figures and formulas but I loved the idea of black holes, that the universe was expanding and that time was the fourth dimension of space.
Before chick lit, there were the Austen and the Brontes that I read during lunch hour in school. I borrowed Keats, Hemingway and Poe from the Homereading Section of the high school library. Then there was also the Russian phase: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and boring dead guys. It didn't matter that I didn't understand half the words on the pages. I was bent on finishing every single book even if they took months. Evidently, I was trying my best to look and sound serious by reading books that some people twice my age did not understand. I even tried my hand (but failed) at my mother's political philosophy books when I was thirteen: Curtis (I didn't know this was college text), some books on French existentialism and even Marx. There were also the Great Books series inherited from my grandfather. I was reading treatises on duty and other such noble themes. Yes, I was a dork. I didn't have any friends. Maybe I still am a dork. At least the difference is now I have some friends.
Of course, at some point during undergrad, we were required to read Graham Allison, Robert Pape and the giants like Morgenthau and Fukuyama. Later I found them too mainstream, uncritical (in the leftist sense of the word) and in dire need of passion and inspiration so I started reading Chomsky and Negri for fun.
Also, while in college, I started puling the large stick from my behind and read Dave Eggers, Audrey Nifenegger, Eugenides, and some immigrant American fiction. There were also the popular titles like Girl, Interrupted, Memoirs of a Geisha and An Unbearable Lightness of Being. There were also the readings from English 11 and 12. At one point I seriously thought about shifting to comparative lit. But who am I kidding? How was I going to buy books if I didn't get a job with that course?
Anyway, maybe I'm making up for my former dorkness or perhaps venturing over to a different sort of dorkness because, lately I have been reading beat poetry, Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Gorey. I can't stop reading, but I have to read some seriously entertaining nonsense to make up for all the words with more than five syllables that I have been ingesting. Of course, I cannot help but stay a geek at heart and try to impress other people with the things I read so I still read Rushdie, Coetzee and the other Booker and Nobel authors. Umberto Eco is up there too.
I guess that is my Shelf in a narrative form with books borrowed or stolen from my lola's or mom's library, books which were lent to me but never given back, some used and new ones that I bought for myself and the small minority of those that were given to me. To add to my ever-growing dorkness, I would like to declare than more than a good career and children, I would much rather have enough money and time buy books, enjoy them and build a library. Thus are the hopes and dreams of a self-confessed dork.
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