Grand dame reading

For young reader Bianca Ysabel Lolarga Susi who turned 10 years old today

Of the hundreds of pictures that our grandmother, Telesfora Cariño Lolarga, arranged in her scrapbooks that have survived changes of residence, this one retrieved from one of her vintage suitcases stored in another Baguio house is a favorite.

On the Play List of this blog is a site called Awesome People Reading devoted to authors and celebrities doing just  that--reading hard copy (scripts, letters, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers and books, of course).

Lola's gesture of reading (she must have been in her 30s here in the original family home on Pepin street, Sampaloc, Manila, since then sold and demolished) is typically her, a woman who was both solitary and social.

Sometime between the years 1992 and early 1997, I bought Suzanne Juhaz's Reading from the Heart: Reading, Literature and the Search for True Love (Penguin Books, 1994). The title jumped out of a bin of yellowing titles in a Baguio bookstore (Nini and Pancho Lapuz's late lamented Legato) when I was full-time mother to two daughters, part-time freelancer and all-the-time reader. In the lulls when the kids were in school or I was waiting for a kettle to boil or the coffee to drip or giving up on the idea of doing the day's house cleaning and dusting, books were my refuge, haven of rest, escape and enduring passion. As they are today.

These days, I go into debt because of book purchases I cannot curtail. My priorities are all skewed, family members like to reprimand me.

And after I'm done with the last page, it's time to hand the title over to the next similar spirited reader or add it to a bundle of read books for turnover to a group that Prof. Delfin Tolentino Jr. put up in the 1990s--the Friends of the UP Baguio Library, friends who love the printed word enough to want to share their "loot."

I am reminded of the group because two nights ago, Rita Ledesma, fellow First Draft member, turned over to me two big and heavy bags of book for the University donated by her former grade school classmate, Pinky Farolan, another passionate reader. Thank you, Pinky and Rita--these books, once brought up to Baguio, will fill the hours of some incoming students there in the new semester. No frigate like a book, indeed.

Meanwhile, some lines from Ms. Juhasz's prologue describe how reading makes the real world tolerable. These lines explain why the people I read about, whether in fiction or non-fiction, have always been more real to me than the ones I live and have to deal with:

"Talking about books with other people is a delight, which may be one reason why I made it my profession. It complements those many hours spent alone with a book. And yet, reading isn't exactly solitary, either. I'm alone in the room when I read, but not in my mind. And maybe that's the key, because the society of the book--its world that I can enter, as well as the deeply intimate and always developing relationship with the author as the book incarnates her--keeps me from being lonely. I am lonelier in the real world situation I've just described--when no one seems to understand who I am--than by myself reading, when I feel that the book recognizes me, and I recognize myself because of the book."

That said, let me now get on with what supports my addiction--meeting a writing deadline.