April 24, 2025
MANILA – I just reread “Fahrenheit 451” for first time in almost 15 years since first finishing it as a highschooler, and it wasn’t required reading, just a gift a nerdy, geeky friend gave to an equally-nerdy, almost-as-geeky kabarkada.
I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience of revisiting media previously finished, returning as a different person reading the same book—seeing familiar plotlines flesh out with new layers, some unseen before, an adult joke here, a sobering reality there.
Either way, no book welcomes the same person twice.
Alas, my original copy of “451” was lost to Metro Manila’s persistent flooding, together with many books from my childhood up to my fresh grad era. What hurt more was losing out-of-print books from my parents’ and grandparents’ younger years, some of which we took to Manila from their respective home provinces.
How poetically ironic, isn’t it? In Bradbury’s fiction, books were lost to fire, but in our climate change-infused Philippine reality, books also get lost to water.
It’s been said we don’t only suffer from low functional literacy but a lack of leisure time, too. I think these two are intertwined.
In recent, overstimulated and digitally-saturated years, leisure has come to be redefined not just in terms of free time out of work or casual entertainment but also as “serious” detoxification from the mad rush of modern life (which Bradbury already warned about in “451,” first published in 1951).
We can be endlessly entertained by scrolling but still feel tired after, like how a gambler feels spent, likely more exhausted compared to when they started, after the highs and lows of roulette.
It’s been argued thus that leisure should allow the mind to wander and wonder, a state incompatible with a mindstate of endlessly raging and changing emotions, something which our current entertainments seem to foster.
Reading thus can be considered leisure, requiring sustained focus and effort on the reader’s part, something which other entertainments don’t enable. Can books make us better at being human?
A 1967 essay by George Steiner observed how a concentration camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke before heading off to work at Auschwitz.
Said essay moved cultural critic Olivia Laing to write “art can give us material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.”
This National Literature Month, here are some titles I’ve collected through different friends and contexts, highlighting how book hunting can be a community-wide endeavor, proving that word of mouth is still the most viral method.
“Isabela: A Novel” by Kaisa Aquino (2024)
While classified as a novel, it’s more an anthology of interrelated vignettes occurring in the same universe at different eras, where points of view switch between characters. There’s no singular protagonist, but there is a shared plot.
Despite not being set exclusively in the titular province, “Isabela” tracks the lives of people, especially women, involved one way or another with the red struggle dating back to the Martial Law years, while spotlighting events—and consequences—felt in the 21st century. One poignant story features two childhood friends reuniting as fighters for opposing sides.
There is tenderness in Aquino’s prose, never straying from the human faces so obfuscated by the noise surrounding this ongoing conflict. I’ve held off finishing the last “chapter,” disbelieving that the ride, which I picked up at a recent book fair, will soon have to brake.
“The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin (2008)
For someone steeped in Hollywood depictions of an alien invasion, it’s refreshing to see an Asian culture’s take on this well-worn plot. One of my geeky friends lent their copy, as it’s nice having your personal library expanded by books from others.
In this book trilogy spanning generations of characters, the cast never meets “the enemy” until the closing arcs, the narrative focusing instead on humanity’s reaction to a crisis they’ve awakened to yet which will only hit in hundreds of years.
What can you do when you know a hostile, advanced civilization from outer space is arriving in about five centuries? What faces of humanity reveal themselves thus as we all struggle to survive as a species?
“Tablay Universe” by Katrina F. Olan (ongoing)
What’s nice about this era is how art can develop through fan input. Media in the 20th century has been defined by theorists as one-way, whereas two-communication defines the 21st century.
Creators can now tweak their works based on instant fan input, ideally in service to the story, whereas before, the audience could only critique after the fact.
Tablay is one such 21st century franchise, recommended to me by a university literature professor who’s also a viral Wattpad author (never judge an author by their medium!).
The current edition of the story’s novel version (there’s a radio play and comic book in the works, too) is vastly different from its first edition, seasoned by both fan input and the author’s life experiences over the years. Hopefully, Olan keeps the first edition in print, not just for posterity, but for the meta-story of a community-built universe.
“Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture” by Doreen Gamboa Fernandez (1994)
Doreen Gamboa Fernandez has such a way with words, she made me cry with a paragraph about soy sauce. It’s like you can have your essay, and eat it, too.
Finally getting a reprint of this seminal classic of Filipino food writing (and cultural anthropology) was a gap filled in my library seeing as mentors and co-advocates in the cultural work sphere always bring up Gamboa Fernandez’s work one way or another.
There’s both joie de vivre and reverence infusing each sentence, like storytelling over merienda on a lazy Saturday. Gamboa Fernandez doesn’t just love what she’s writing about, she lives it too, an unintended glimpse of her approach to fieldwork.
“Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality” by James Kwak (2017)
An economics book that turns economics on its head?
Rather than take established axioms like the laws of supply and demand and unions-being-bad-for-everyone as gospel, Kwak, a lawyer with a background in investing, questions the very assumptions behind these so-called “economic laws.”
In the process, a history is revealed of how vested interests upended social welfare and labor protections in the United States over decades and through the educational system, paving the way for the current brand of neoliberal policies.
I picked this book up for free, in pristine condition, in the book swap nook in Gateway Mall, Cubao after trading in some books from my annual declutter. I don’t think I’m going to let go of this one for a while.
“How to Read Now” by Elaine Castillo (2022)
If there’s metafiction, it seems there’s also metanonfiction, and Castillo’s book is one example of this emerging (or was it always there?) subgenre.
I first read Castillo during the pandemic’s peak, ordering online her debut novel “America Is Not the Heart” (2018), a play on Filipino American Carlos Bulosan’s 1943 novel “America is in the Heart.”
Having enjoyed the themes and scenes established, I wanted to see her explicate the former further through her nonfiction, here a collection of three essays.
Writing as a person of color living in a polarized America, she takes a meta approach to reading—and writing. When we read a book, are we actually the intended audience? What assumptions about their readers is an author making? What biases and prejudices go unexamined in the author’s use of language?
I for one have learned how to write now.
“The Essential Rumi” translated by Coleman Barks (1995)
One of America’s most beloved poets in recent years is a Farsi man who lived in the 13th century during the Islamic Golden Age. It’s easy to see why, as his poetry carries both levity and reverence, a refreshing duality coming from a more inclusive time where “Muslim or Jew, Zoroastrian or Christian, all are speechless in the grandeur of God.”
“Enter Deeply” by Niccolo Rocamora Vitug (2022)
In this intimate collection both spiritual and sensual, a gay man comes to terms with his enduring faith. I recall a study interviewing Christian LGBTQIA+ folk and the delicate balancing act they’ve played for decades. We can grieve with those who endured less enlightened decades while also being happy for those to come or otherwise coming of age, hopefully into a kinder world.
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While not an exhaustive list (is this even possible?), I hope this love letter for National Literature Month nonetheless inspires you to explore a range of genres and in the process, (re)discover your own range of selfhood, how multifaceted you can be a person, beyond career and title.
A lot of these books I stumbled upon during leisure days, taking an intentional day off from work and social and family obligations to get reacquainted with Manila’s streets, casually walking into secondhand bookshops or trade-in book nooks after trying out local eateries and holes-in-the-wall.
Some of these I picked up right after donating older books during decluttering season. Even in segunda mana, budol is real. Nonetheless, all books here rekindled a sense of wonder and I hope, despite life’s vagaries, you find that spark again and again.