On Aneurysms and Book Bins

Oscar Campomanes and E. San Juan Jr. are this close to giving me an aneurysm. While their focus on Filipinos writing in english concern me and their ideas will be indispensable to my own studies and process as I try to express and reconciliate my own predicament/privilege as a Filipino writing in english, I'm really having difficulty deciphering their meanings.

Thankfully though, I have some rewards waiting with my latest finds at the buy one take one bin at Chapters and Pages. For 200 bucks, I got The Handbook of Non-Violence by Robert Seeley which includes Aldous Huxley's An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, Ismail Kadare's The Concert, Picasso My Grandfather by Marina Picasso and uh... Pipe Dreams, A Surfer's Journey by Kelly Slater.

I like that Chapters and Pages at Market2. That's also where I got my art books of Alice Neel and David Hockney. But I think my best finds have been Andre Gide's The Immoralist and Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal somewhere in Cubao. I'm not sure if it was in the Booksale there, the thrift shops or the surplus shop where books are scattered among football helmets and old bowling balls.

I have a small library of different versions of classics. I found an old edition of the Hobbit when the Lord of the Rings trilogy films were introducing a younger, hipper generation to Tolkien with an anxious looking Elijah Wood or defiant, smoldering Viggo Mortensen on their covers. I remembered my brother then. How he loved those books growing up and how I texted him when I found more expensive versions without those movie covers. "KICK ASS! GIMME! GIMME! GIMME!" was his text back.

I don't know how many versions of 30peso Shakespeares, Thomas Hardys and Jane Austens I have weighing my shelves down. I just feel I have to rescue those books whenever I see them unceremoniously dumped together with pocketbook romances and action thrillers.

Admittedly, among my shelves also sit books that I have not gotten around to reading yet. I don't worry about it though. I'm a big believer in impulse buying when it comes to books. I think there's a reason why you're drawn to a particular book. I think actually, the book calls you. It knows something that you don't. Something that you don't even know you don't know. But one day, when you're ready, you'll open its pages.