Booked

Unless you’re Neil Gaiman and I’m absolutely in love with your fiction, I don’t exactly buy freshly published books. I prefer second-hand’s with pages already caressed by the fingers of wary readers. Besides the considerably lower prices, the thought of them being read before prevents my need for book reviews, thus shrinking the chance for unwanted spoilers.

Since I’m going to Marbel on Saturday, I thought, what better time to catch up on reading. So today I decided to visit a few good bookstores and stock up on books. Which second-hand’s should I buy?

I first went to the old Book Sale in Cubao, the nearest bookstore from where I live. The selection ranged from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to the more down-to-earth Stamp Collecting for Dummies. It's funny how none of the books there interested me today.

So I decided to go to Padre Faura and ditch my old perspective on buying freshly published books. Anyway, the ones I had in mind are authored by who else but my favorite essayist F. Sionil Jose.

Since everything in Manila is now 33 degrees Celsius or hotter, I took a cab to Faura. It's fascinating how you see the landscape change from the post-modern Gateway to the old Quiapo church and how everything in between tries to blend in, sometimes awkwardly but that's just Philippine urban planning to you.

Sure, I could have bought the books of the Rosales Saga from National Bookstore, but I've always wanted to buy them at the author's publishing house itself. I even hoped to bump into Sir Jose this afternoon but I wasn't that lucky.

Location: 531 Padre Faura, Ermita, Manila

Obscure and solitary, the Solidaridad Bookstore stood at the corner of Padre Faura and Adriatico streets just a few steps away from Robinson's Galleria. The taxi driver missed it as he was busy running 531, the shop's number, in his head. I had to walk two blocks back to get there.

The books in Solidaridad weren't cheap, but they weren't as costly as they would have been in a local Powerbooks. J. Baldwin's A Fire Next Time. God, I wish I had bought that but I came here for Sionil Jose's original works, and I only had money for second-hand's.

So I bought Tree, a book out of the Rosales Saga. I have just stopped on page 20 so I could blog about it here. Contrary to popular opinion, the book is not hard to read at all. It even makes me wonder why we weren't required to read it back in high school. I only discovered Sionil Jose when I started reading his essays on nationalism during college. Had I not done that, he would have fallen to the category of great men whose names I've only memorized but never really knew.

I also bought Gagamba, The Spider Man. No, it's not the Pinoy version of Peter Parker swinging his way to walls and fighting mutated villains. Gagamba is a cripple who sells sweepstakes tickets at the entrance of an Ermita restaurant. I haven't started on this book yet, but knowing F. Sionil Jose, I presume this work will be another form of social commentary questioning the meaning of life and the role of the ever-evolving Philippine society.

That being said, for the next couple of days, expect me to be even less sociable as I will uncompromisingly and unflinchingly be "booked".

Leave it to F. Sionil Jose to post a sign as moral as this on the window of his bookstore.