Why I read much

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

Percival Byron S. Bueser, is a BS Nursing student at Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, but a mathematician at heart, who has won numerous math contests in college and high school. “My literary reading list has changed, at least for this vacation; it has become less crowded. Count Somerset Maugham, Sam Shepard, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, and any poem within my reach. Then recount Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and George Orwell.”

Why so much? The question came to me shortly after I read Anna Quindlen’s book How Reading Changed My Life. Reading her enabled me to obtain a summary of how all the books she read while growing up determined her destiny.

Quindlen’s book is a good starting point for readers who want to justify their reading habits by reading someone who may have thought of the same before. The question splits into two: Why do I like spending 30 minutes reading a book if scores of other possibilities surround me like blazon? Why am I willing to put my life on the line for the book I am reading, and how much of it? Many of us have answered the questions substantially, Quindlen included, but to borrow someone else’s reasons for reading, apparently with the hope of succeeding in life in an equivalent fashion with the admired reader-figure, is just as indecent as borrowing someone else’s reasons for eating, sleeping, or making love.

So I am going to write my own reasons.

As a form of leisure, reading books has many advantages. Books are relatively affordable, compared to other recreational activities. All one needs is a good book and a good chair, and there is no excuse for not reading because the living conditions are unfavorable. No class has an exclusive claim to readership. Even if a book-reader will find it more conducive to read in an air-con room on a fluffy bed with thick pillows, under bright lights, any shack with the ambiance of a public library will suffice.

However, reading is not so comfortable, if we mean by “comfortable” the average level of comfort that a stuffed animal provides. Reading is almost always a struggle, and it is the struggle that makes for comfort, which signifies the pleasure of having traveled a thousand times a minute, or of having heard a thousand dialogues, for a modest fee.

Finishing a book is like having exhausted a shop of ideas, and usually it leads to the next one. Once we court reading, we automatically marry it.

I prefer reading novels in my spare time, and the characters attract me more than the plot. Of all that I have tackled, I always feel that a carefully planned story with precise architecture is more artifice than art; it looks like the tyrannical plot swings the characters to and fro like puppets.

Characters in books, Quindlen says, better be “more real than the real people I know.” With TV and music continually playing the ancient sport of follow-the-leader, and everyone fearing to lose money, real life is increasingly becoming more and more plotted, and books offer ample emergency exits.

Personally, the characters I like most are those who are remarkable in design but whose appearance in reality is indefensible. Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) comes to mind, for example. He’s not a role model. He swears like a parched parrot in a desert cursing the dry ground. He is sex-tripping, flunking school, and quarreling with guys twice his size. But in a world that scrambles for role models, Caulfield is the pinnacle of reality in his time for the abandoned who see part of their souls in him. With his immunity to classification, he represents those that want a niche but can’t get it. With his spontaneity, he represents those that dislike fakery and compulsion. With all his decorative exaggerations, he is human nature pushed into the extreme, a possibility accessible only to fiction and poetry.

Only when in front of a book do I recognize I am a character myself, not a token being jammed around unceasingly by the crowd, mass media, public opinion, the academic-labor complex, etc. Dissent that can’t be shouted in the open is usually written, and reading is a way to participate. When there is something I think wrong, books like 1984 or A Clockwork Orange put the raucous world temporarily away for at least 30 minutes and make me objectively reexamine myself and my relations with it.

Reading is the favorite pastime of and recommended to those who want to explore the unsung challengers of “established order” and how they did it — whether the writers who penned them made them witness new writing styles, chart unexplored themes, grapple with existential problem in a commercialist environment, or just wish that evil would be analyzed, if not eradicated. Today, our real challengers are often frightened, silenced, jailed or executed; the remaining ones are confined in countless pages, waiting to be resurrected. 

For these reasons, book lovers are often stereotyped as escapists and loners who overhaul reality into the sea. On this, I have some remarks. What appears to be escapism is actually intimacy close to religiosity. Its solemnity is as grave as a prayer. The writer worthy of readership pours his heart out in buckets to the pages, without acquiescing, as if slaying himself on an altar, and then I read as if I feel the pain and beat strongly. A sacred bond forms. Every page is a confession, and if the performance is good enough my sense of curiosity will regret it if I missed it.

Books allow room for thoughts that are worth confessing, mostly politically and socially taboo. Only a book will allow statements that contain maximum compassion, intelligence, or harshness. Such sentences demand an about-face from the world and require intense concentration that enables us to stare at the Bible without blushing. A level of intimacy is required that is too uncontainable for a world where every message is confounded and weakened a thousand times by stultifying conventions such that the final product nearly resembles gossip, and a book is the best refuge for words wishing to remain pristine.

As for the loneliness that follows, I would rather be lonely with a book than seek solace in antidepressants or kill myself. But although book readers are usually physically isolated, to get away from distractions, spiritually they are not. Because in some mysterious, ethereal manner, everyone who reads similarly as I read, probably the same books, or even opposing ones sharing a topic, is linked into a community of souls inseparable by the expanse of continents and even by the irreversibility of lost time. The other one who read Plato’s Republic, which I also read in my study in the second floor of my house, has his fate sealed into mine, and we are mutually responsible for it, although he lived in a tent in Athens and died in the Peloponnesian War. The “go out and get going” of readers is reading; whenever the world demands that I socialize, I read.

So back to the two questions: Why do I like it? After all these, it is only my temperament that makes me do it. Maybe on the surface, it is to protest everything, the satisfaction of my analytic and aloof personality, and books will provide it, just as a habitual drunk is satisfied by beer. But deeper than this protest-everything is an attempt to grasp everything; for a discrete moment handling a book is like holding the universe and facing it in the eye while it doesn’t have us by the tail, similar to what a writer does when using experience as a raw material without surrendering fully to its caprices.

Combine it with my playfulness with words which makes me sensitive to style and we are done. Is the activity worth a life? If all the comfort, liberty, intimacy and fellowship I mentioned matter, then yes, it is! For every new book, I’ll keep saying to myself: Reading changed my life an hour ago, yesterday, years ago.

I shall give it a chance again.