For Sonny Angara, King Lear, John Lautner & Lee Kuan Yew rock

As chair of the House Committee on Higher and Technical Education, Rep. Sonny Angara is pushing for measures that will make college entrance exams free in public colleges and universities (Free College Entrance Exam Act), provide benefits to New Graduates (Bill of Rights for New Graduates), require all basic education schools to have an anti-bullying policy (Anti-Bullying Act), establish an efficient and effective national student loan program and increase further the salaries of public school teachers, just to name a few.

In between his busy schedule, I asked him to share with us his favorite books:

1.  The Art of Living by Epictetus — “Possibly one of the world’s first self-help books. Eminently practical and wise counsel from centuries ago, most still useful today.”

2. 20 Speeches That Moved A Nation by Manuel Quezon III — “Like taking a walk back through the last century’s political history — speeches by Bonifacio, Aguinaldo, Quezon, Don Claro, Marcos, Ninoy, Erap.  I do wish Manolo would one day update and expand this slim compilation, but what is compiled here is, like the title says, moving stuff.”

3. Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going by Zuraidah Ibrahim, Han Fook Kwang, Rachel Lin, Robin Chan, Chua Mui Hoong, Lydia Lim, Ignatius Low

“A clever man who made a small nation-state one of the world’s success stories shares here his advice for the younger generation of Singaporeans. Oftentimes, I hear people say you can’t compare the Philippines to Singapore because we have 100 million citizens and they have three million. But really, nothing prevents our local chief executives from having the same sort of clear vision and ruthless integrity in our provinces and towns.”

4. Holidays in Hell by PJ O’Rourke — “Published in 1988, this is a funny and irreverent journey through many of the world’s trouble spots during the ‘80s—Korea, Lebanon, Central America. There’s a hilarious chapter on post-EDSA Philippines, including his impressions of Cory Aquino (“the most upright, kindly and honorable person running a country today….But it would be nice if cashews on top always meant ice cream on the bottom.”), cockfighting, balut, insurgencies and our love of basketball (“The tall kids in these precincts of malnutrition are 4’11” but do layups like Air Jordan. If the NBA ever raises hoops to 20 feet, the Chicago Bulls are going to have to take up field hockey”).”

5. 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene — “Part Art of War, part Machiavelli’s The Prince, with a bit of Clausewitz for good measure, distilled and digested for modern day combatants in not just the political arena.”

6. The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader by John Maxwell — “A short book on leadership, but one of the best. Full of memorable quotes, stories, and anecdotes. One can consider this and Greene’s 48 Laws the yin and yang of this type of literature.”

7. The Architecture of John Lautner by Weintraub/Hess — “The only coffee table book in this list. Lautner was a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright but he brought his own brand of spectacular California Modernism-meets-sci-fi to his work. Movie buffs can spot his houses in, among others, the Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, Charlie’s Angels, and one of the Lethal Weapon flicks.”

8. The Classic Hundred All-Time Favorite Poems edited by William Harmon — “Most of the greats are here from the odes of Keats, to Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’ and Ulysses (“One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will…”), to Frost’s ‘lovely, dark and deep woods,’ to Coleridge’s ‘Xanadu’ and ‘Ancient Mariner,’ Shakespeare, Yeats (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”), Shelley, Byron (“Though the night was made for loving, and the day returns too soon….”), Dylan Thomas’s raging ‘against the dying of the light’ Wordsworth, Poe, TS Eliot and Auden.

9. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell — “A very readable book that seeks to find the root causes for success. One finds case studies from Bill Gates to the Beatles, big-shot lawyers, high school hockey players, students in poor communities. Success, Gladwell finds, is a mix of good fortune and hard work (10,000 hours at the very least), not a surprising conclusion, but instructive nonetheless.”

10. King Lear by William Shakespeare — “Shakespeare’s greatness I would probably not have appreciated if I were not taught his works while at boarding school in England, since they are far from easy reading. We also studied The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice but it was this tale of a great King who falls from power, but finds himself, that really made an impact.  I could no longer find my copy from 20 years ago (although I do have books that old), but the last lines of the play are very memorable: ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say;  The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.’”

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The Reading Club recommends The Audacity to Win (The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory) by David Plouffe for all hopeful candidates in the May 2013 elections. It may be available at all National Bookstore or Powerbooks branches.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome at gr.rodis@yahoo.com.