The books I’ve read as a kid
I couldn’t have resisted even if I tried. The title on the dust jacket, torn and ripped along the edges, suggested it was a compelling read: The Book of Torture.
I cannot now recall the author, and searching for it on Google proved futile. It was already old and quite worn when I first bumped into it, lying on a stash of my father’s collection of penny Westerns and spy thrillers holed up in boxes formerly reserved for large milk cans.
I was somewhere between seven and eight, and given that I was your garden-variety weisenheimer — that diminutive, smug excuse for a brat with strong anarchist tendencies — I felt entitled to steal it and keep it under the covers.
I was unico hijo to whom no book was ever safe. Yup, the inveterate book thief in today’s lingo. Even for one so young and innocent, I felt that the information might come in handy in the future.
I hardly touched my father’s penny Westerns, those pocket-sized novellas about a third of an inch thick. I recall the covers as sloppy excuses for artwork, bedazzled with horses, blonde horsemen whose hands were latched to .45 long-barrel pistols, hoisted and ready to shoot.
Even at that young an age I found them trite, haphazardly composed, even some downright ugly. But the writers were good, more than sufficient to lure me into its few first pages.
The Book of Torture took me to the world of Medieval dungeons, their whips and chains, and the untold methods and gadgets used for inflicting the most horrible punishments. At nine, it was both thrilling and, well, terror-filled.
My imagination brought me to smelly prison cells reeking of piss and human excrement, of the fish-like odor of rotting blood and air heavy with the screams of the tortured, the musk of the dead. There was likewise the laughter of the torturers, giggles and guffaws one wouldn’t expect from venerable imperial majesty of men of the cloth.
The Iron Maiden, a metallic torture device with just enough metal pokes to keep the victim alive after being placed inside, was the stuff of sleepless nights.
If memory serves, I was somewhere between nine and twelve when I stumbled on an illustrated manual of Charlie Brown snippets and Playboy’s Party Jokes . Hid them inside my pillow casing. It introduced me to writing as comedy.
A hodgepodge of everything from pot-boiler Westerns to spy thrillers, my dad’s library contained some of the most out-of-this-world tomes for one so uninitiated in the world of books as I was back then. That, however, did not stop me from hitching a ride from page to page, regardless of whether these were adults-only books or not.
My uncle, a lawyer and the youngest male in a brood of close to a dozen siblings, also kept a library in his home. I was already a teenager, if I’m not mistaken, when I stumbled on my latest steal: a hardbound copy of The Book of Insults: How Writers Insult Other Writers. Fact is, I still have the book with me.
Time and again, you’d see me consulting its pages for those rare gems in the art of literary mockery. I feel social media needs a dose of classy tongue-in-cheek repartees if only to keep it from degenerating into these muddy excuses for profanity sports.
I kicked off my collection, or rather, my rush to build a home library, somewhere between 10 to 14. Having a filthy rich grandfather made it only too easy. Soon, I saw myself buying books by the dozen, then holing myself up in my room for days.
My mother took it as a sign that I was losing my marbles. “He’s talking to himself again,” I overheard her whispering to my aunt one muggy afternoon.
If I remember that moment correctly, I was reciting the first line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
I never thought I’d turn out to be a journalist and a critic some years later.
My teenage years reading saw me devouring Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution, Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Antonio Gramsci’s The Modern Prince and Other Writings and Prison Notebooks, all the spy thrillers of Robert Ludlum, the collected poems of Dylan Thomas and Rainer Maria Rilke, the German political and theological theorists, most of the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (save for the Gulag Archipelago), the short stories of Anton Chekhov, then much later Albert Camus’ Lyrical and Critical Essays and The Rebel, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and seven English translations of the Bible, including a double-language (Greek-English) edition of the New Testament.
I read them all under the cover of darkness, or inside the comforts of my room. In college, I dragged my books way into the gloomy, musty corners of the University of Santo Tomas chapel where no one can see me indulge my geeky self.
By then I had cultivated a “bad boy” image, something I wouldn’t risk disfiguring even for the pleasure of being a hopeless book nerd. Thus, I always made it a point to bury my books inside a duffle bag packed with Playboy magazines. Outside of satisfying my boyish curiosity, the magazine introduced me to the writings of Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Soon enough, I got hold of books once declared as ‘banned’ — 1984 by George Orwell, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (my favorite being the translation of Soledad Locsin from the Spanish), among others.
Tomes I’ve read growing up did not provide me an ‘escape,’ as some readers may have eagerly claimed for themselves at one time or the other. What these books did was give my altogether cloistered self a peek outside the walls of my little prison home. They served as my cartography to a world I hardly knew existed.
Even the most fantastical stories provided me a vision on what was out there — the violence, the atrocities of the powerful, the absurdity of it all—and paved the path for my profession as a journalist.
These were my strongest influences, the wind that pulls me by the hair and drives me to look the devil in the eyes and tell him to fuck off.
