Book lovers suffer happily from the affliction (or delusion) that they will eventually find the time to read the books they compulsively buy, particularly those they find by surprise (Book Sale, I’m looking at you).
What happens is that bibliophiles’ domiciles, be they rooms, studio apartments or houses, begin to fill up with unread books (often still in their impenetrable shrink-wrap) that they swear they will get to.
But this is a compulsion that builds up through the years, and soon, you even forget which books you have and don’t have, and you swear as soon as you get the time, you will get to them. Well, the pandemic and the lockdown gave me and many book lovers that precise opportunity—and we approached the task with a combination of excitement and apprehension.
You see, it meant not only would we have to dig out all those books—not an inconsiderable task, considering the places we lay our bookmarks down at night are basically 90-percent books—but also because it meant we could no longer go out and buy the new books we were addicted to (told you, it’s a compulsion).
So, it was a moment of truth—just you and the books you actually already had, for an unknown period of time. I will not lie, it was a physically challenging task, and I didn’t finish. I think I got through unearthing half of the books I had stacked and arranged (plus remembering the fact that most book cabinets have a row of shelves that can accommodate (if you push really hard) two rows of books piled on top of each other (meaning four rows in total), not including the books you stick in sideways.
Oh, there it is. Oh, I didn’t know I had that. When did I get that? What is that?
Coming to life again
When I was physically unable to continue, I had amassed an impressive eternal to-read list. It included a book I had been looking for for so long, I was getting ready to buy a new copy: Haruki Marukami’s “1Q84,” which is my favorite Murakami novel. I’d been looking for this book for years and had been eyeing the much slimmer paperback, but here now, rising like a revenant, was my original hardcover with a slightly dirtier book jacket. I was happy to discover that I wouldn’t have to buy a new one, and because I love books about books, this is perfect, and Murakami’s books have a weird feel that kind of fits these odd days. But most of all, I am reading it at a pace that I think will enable me to hopefully finish it near the end of the pandemic.
Because isn’t that the best thing about books? After you realize that the content on the streaming services really is finite, books can be read as slowly or as quickly as you want. You can read all the books of a single author, which is what I’m trying to do (well, reread) with Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers” remains my favorite).
Sometimes, the books come to life again, as my cookbook collection did (out of necessity). Sometimes, you discover that you really did wind up buying the same book twice (you can now choose to keep both for posterity or take up the collector’s mentality, of keeping one and giving the other one away to share).
I reread a lot of Nick Joaquin and Gina Apostol (seriously, “Insurrecto” is mind-blowing)—and have more to go through. The idea is to build a to-read pile that is so formidable that you will not be finished by the time the pandemic is over. And since we don’t know when that is, you can make your to-read pile as tall as you want it to be.
Backlog
Even as I mourn the impending passing of my favorite comic book store, I soothe the pain by reading my immense backlog of manga, console myself that the stories from the big American companies just aren’t as good anymore, and exult in how Filipino komiks have gone where they have never gone before. I used my Kindle to the point of overheating, of course, but mostly I built a fortress around my bedside with my to-read pile to the point that I have to clamber over it: Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton,” Christopher Wylie’s “Mindf*ck,” among others.
And I will admit, as soon as the quarantine rules changed enough so that I could order from local bookstores, I did just that. I also looked forward to the day that Bookdepository would start delivering to the Philippines again and rejoiced whenever one of the much, much-delayed Bookdepository orders showed up at the post office (I have two more from March, PHLPost don’t fail me now).But this is my charm to ward off the fear and the tedium of waiting out the pandemic: rereading the books I love, reading the books I haven’t, abandoning the books I discover I don’t like, and then reorganizing them on the shelves in some kind of order only I can make sense of, deciding which ones I will give away when life returns to the “old normal.”
After all, I need to make space. Because I know life will be back to normal when I can browse a bookstore’s aisles without fear or personal protective equipment again. INQ