A bookworm in SM

Back in the ‘60s, when we were in high school and beginning to cultivate what would become our best and worst traits (some of them quite interchangeable), my buddies and I found ways of going home as late as we could — in other words, of loitering around the city, just so we could prolong our time together and find new adventures along the way. (For me, that meant taking a bus with the guys from Diliman to Quiapo, then hanging out there for an hour or so, before taking another bus to Pasig.)

Maybe that wasn’t the best filial thing to do, when I could’ve been home much earlier helping with the housework, but I had my reasons: my friends and I were bookworms, and we used those trips to scour the bargain bins of bookstores like Goodwill, National, Alemar’s, PECO and Bookmark — not to mention the stalls of C. M. Recto — for cheap paperbacks from the likes of Ian Fleming and Isaac Asimov. We’d hop from one place to the next, running the gauntlet of pickpockets and toughies that infested downtown Manila.

As we grew older and our tastes in books became a bit more refined (i.e., the Grove Press editions of the erotic classics), we began to frequent the specialty bookshops that often become every large city’s best-kept secrets: Erehwon and Solidaridad on Padre Faura, Popular Bookstore on Doroteo Jose. (“Amazon” was still a big river in Brazil.)

We capped these bookhunting forays with chicken sotanghon soup at Good Earth Emporium, burgers at Goodwill, and coffee and cakes at Hizon’s in Ermita. All this good-timing meant gallivanting for hours from here to there, taking one pleasure at a time.

And then something changed in the environment. Before we knew it, something called a “mall” emerged in the urban landscape, and what it did was to collect everything in one place and make it easier for people to zip through their entire list of to-do’s and wanna-do’s without crossing the street.

In no time at all I became a mall rat, attracted (like most Pinoys) by the arctic air conditioning and by the sheer plenitude of things in malls for the eyes, the tongue and, yes, the mind. There’s a common notion that the mall’s a place where you lose your mind (not just in shopping, but in what snobs will perceive as a sudden drop in the average IQ), but it’s a rep poorly deserved.

Sure, it’s not the British Library nor is it the Louvre, but it’s a bit of everything and more — a home for movies, food, fashions, décor, gadgets, appliances, and even paintings and, of course, books. And the best thing is that it’s open to both the high and low ends of the economic ladder; not all can buy, but all can browse in a democracy of sorts under one roof.

Living where I do in Quezon City, the two malls I frequent the most are SM Megamall and SM North. A horde of other malls has cropped up around these two bastions, and they each have their own attractions, but being first has its advantages. Over the decades, I’ve come to know these places like the back of my hand (the first thing you always ask when entering a new mall is, “Where are the restrooms?”), and the familiarity has bred not contempt but comfort. (This, more than any other element — even more than novelty — is what I think every mall developer should live or even kill for: the customer’s sense of control, of being welcomed and not overwhelmed by the place. My wife and I figured out SM North’s The Block within a couple of visits, and is now our preferred cinema station; its competitor across the street came up at about the same time, but despite many sorties there, Beng and I still can’t get a mental map of the place in our heads.)

But back to books: Megamall for me has been as good a place as any (and better for its other attractions) for bookhunting, given the presence of Powerbooks, National Bookstore, Goodwill, and some smaller but no less interesting purveyors of books and magazines in the area. Powerbooks can always be relied upon to provide the latest and greatest books from overseas, while NBS — the titan that it is — covers practically every interest, with an annual sale always worth the wait. (Truth to tell, however, I’ve found some of my best bargains at the BookSale bins in the basement — there’s nothing like the thrill of the hunt to unearth an overlooked Garcia Marquez or a Richard Selzer I’ve been chasing for ages.)

Over at The Block, there’s a sprawling Fully Booked branch that caters to the smarter set (I mean, smarter than me), following through on FB founder Jaime Daez’s vision of bringing the Kinokuniya experience to Manila. (Going back more than a decade, one of my favorite SM North encounters had to do with writer NVM Gonzalez, whom I met stepping out of a bookshop specializing in computers. “I was looking for something on multimedia,” he told me with a twinkle in his eye.)

If even a National Artist — already then in his late 70s — thought the mall worthy of his bookhunting presence, who was I to disagree?

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.