By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

WHEN I returned from a vacation abroad with my bag full of new books I had bought years ago, a customs person at the airport examined my bags and looked at me quizzically. What did I do abroad, she asked. I was on vacation, I answered. She scratched her head and then said irritably: If you were on vacation, why did you bring books with you?

This anecdote comes to mind with something that really bothers the book lover in me. Several people much smarter than me have commented on this issue recently, with my personal favorite being Manolo Quezon’s May 4 column in the Inquirer. He said it perfectly, so I’ll quote him:

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By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

IT’S that time of year again when I feel I’ve died and gone to heaven. Once a year just before Holy Week, books, books and more books drop like manna from the sky, giving us staff an excuse to lounge around feeling like Tom Sawyer chewing on a blade of grass while studying the clouds. Except we’re popping our eyeballs reading the latest book releases so we can write reviews that, hopefully, will guide readers into picking the right titles to pack with their swimwear and goggles for the Lenten break. This is one time when we really get to say–with a dolorous sigh and buckets of crocodile tears, “Tough job, but someone’s got to do it!” Yeeaah, Momma!

Here are some quotes from five titles I’ve chosen for the diverse audience they address: “The Independence of Mary Bennett” for the hopeless (or rather, the hopeful) romantic, “The Mayor of Castro Street” for gays, gay advocates, social scientists and history buffs; “the Many Ways of Being Muslim” for the literati, Muslims, and anybody who wants a good read, “Cory: An Intimate Portrait,” not just for Coryistas but also those seeking another definition of leadership beyond tantrums at Malacanang, and “The Philippines Through European Lens,” for anthropologists, historians, senior folk and just about anybody who finds interesting the grainy but striking black and white photographs of Filipinos and the Philippines during colonial times. Ideal for photo buffs (and which Pinoy isn’t?), this last is the perfect foil for the flawless (thanks to photoshop) digital shots of the here and now.

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IT is always weird to be sitting somewhere quiet and then someone reading a book suddenly bursts out in uncontrollable laughter. But such is the power of really, really funny books. Sense of humor being relative and all, some books are clearly funnier than others. Here are a few recommendations, books that, if read while you’re drinking soda, will send softdrinks through your nose:

1. “Twisted” by Jessica Zafra: The first of Zafra’s smart, acerbic essay collections remains the best. Originally published in 1995, it is still sharp after over a decade.

2. “The Best of Pugad Baboy” by Pol Medina Jr.: These small books gathering Medina’s strips about the overweight denizens of Pugad Baboy are particularly effective when read in moving vehicles and waiting rooms.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

AS a dual-layered way of expressing affection, choosing favorite romantic movies, books and whatnot resonates. It is not only a choice of a specific form over another (It loves me, it loves me not…) but also of specific content. Living up to the fact that I am very much a book nut, I’ve decided to impose on you dear readers certain books I’ve recently read, books centered around a love story (as compared to plain old romances). Take note that this is a list of book’s I’ve read within the last year or so, not an ultimate all-time list of books about love stories. That would be a truly intimidating task, though I imagine Pablo Neruda and Nick Bantock should make that list easily. But this is about new reading material. Some may be a bit out there, but at the end of the reading, each one exemplifies the magnetic pull of romance, a force strong enough to mend or rend lives. In no particular order:

“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” by Rachel Cohn and Dan Levitan: My current favorite. Ostensibly a novel for young adults, “Playlist” is a stunningly winning tale of a single night in New York built around punk rock, Judaism and a yellow Yugo (the car not the defunct nationality) named Jessie. Oh and two lost soul mates named Nick and Norah, duh. There’s a charming movie based on it starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, a thoroughly enjoyable adaptation that diverges away from the book rather heavily. The movie is pretty good. The book is awesome.

“Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane” by Sean McKeever and Takeshi Miyazawa: Why is a comic book series included in this list? Because McKeever and Miyazawa, through a reimagined contemporary take on Mary Jane Watson, (she has a cellphone now) tackles the bittersweet and yet broadband-quick world of high school romance with just the barest dappling of superheroic high jinks (though the bit with Firestar was very nice). The series has been restarted with Terry Moore at the helm, but the original two hardcovers are just lovely.

“The Post-Birthday World” by Lionel Shriver: Perhaps the saddest good book on love you will find, Shriver’s novel is easily compared to that Gwyneth Paltrow-John Hannah movie “Sliding Doors,” where a woman makes a choice and two timelines emerged. We find out that sometimes things are beyond our power to change. This book is the intelligent, nuanced, heartbreaking but unforgettable iteration of the idea.

“Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer: Yes, this book has its share of flaws and yes Stephen King hates it, but this book won over readers because of ideas. One of them is the forbidden and problematic attraction between a vampire (how much badder can this boy be? He’s dead) and a human (a self-involved ninny at times to be honest). But it’s the other element I’m impressed by: Meyer’s ability to accurately or at least convincingly depict the modern teenager’s thought process when falling in love. It’s the best of the series even if it was the first because—painful dialogue aside—it made us think that the vampire-human pairing could happen.

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro: Ishiguro knows how to write about the slow burn of affection. “The Remains of the Day” smoldered with it. But “Never Let Me Go,” an unusual concoction of sci-fi and romance, takes the idea to a new level. If clones, grown only for their organs, fall in love, what are they to do? This book has the haunting but subtle answer.

Read about other things Valentine’s Day related in the February 8, 2009 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.

By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LIKE a twist in one of his books, news of Michael Crichton’s demise arrived as a shock. No one knew the author was even sick, so finding out Crichton was really dead at 66 after a battle with cancer was truly startling.

What it also does is remove one of the few authors who really had a following after all these decades. Crichton was never the easiest author to read. His prose tended to be heavy with dense paragraphs of explanations, often moving at the speed of crawling magma. The movies adapted from his books essentially pared down his narrative to just action. He always considered explaining how these things happened as important as why.

What he never lacked was the big idea. This was partly because of his truly unique background. He moved from studying English at Harvard to studying medicine at Harvard, writing in his spare time before finally quitting med school. Most readers know Crichton hit the big time when his dinosaur-redux novel “Jurassic Park” gobbled up the competition on the shelves in 1990 and then the box office in 1993. That movie changed our idea of modern day monsters forever, launching a merchandising empire and making dinos cool again.

The real defining moment of Crichton’s writing, in my mind, came much earlier, in 1969, when he wrote “The Andromeda Strain.” That novel, plus the 1971 Robert Wise movie, came to define our idea of pandemic panic. Its claustrophobic setting became the definitive environment for any unseen bug that runs wild in a lab. That very same paranoia informs every single sickness movie today, from “Outbreak” to “28 Days Later.” Plus the stark, minimalist 1971 film is superior in every way to the slick but stunted, nearly unintelligible 2008 TV remake. He made us fear the biohazard symbol. It was then that Crichton hatched his idea that science can indeed be scary.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I REALIZE I’ve broached this somewhat in an earlier blog entry, but I think it is important to emphasize how books can have a second life.

Instead of just lying somewhere in your abode gathering dust or (worse) being used as appetizer by rats, books can begin a new journey, be appreciated by another person. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Give them to someone specific: Books can sometimes be valuable precisely because they are used–by you. When you give them to a friend, it is an act of affection for both the friend (only good friends would have his experience) and the book (precious enough to be given to someone who will take care of them). It is just a matter of finding the right book for the right person; blindly giving your books away is fine if the whole point was to be giving them to just anyone. Irrepressible readers can appreciate pretty much any book. But the closer the book to the nature of the recipient the better; cookbooks
for that aspiring chef, biographies for that friend in HR, and so on. Popular books like the Harry Potter or Twilight books work for pretty much anyone as long as they don’t hav e those yet. Your scribblings among the pages serve to make the book even more personal; do make the effort to write a dedication.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

EVERYONE says reading is dead or dying, the victim of shortened attention spans, TV or the Internet. Others says that reading is merely changing, migrating from the page to the screen. I’ve been asked why I haven’t moved to Amazon’s impressive little Kindle; I say it’s because I don’t just like reading, I like books: old-fashioned, made from dead trees books. It isn’t romantic, it’s just nothing matches the tactile feel of freshly minted books, the smell of the book paper, the sound of those crisp pages. I’m a holdout, and will continue to be so. My living spaces continue to be invaded happily by piles and piles of books; no shelves are enough to contain all my little treasures.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

EVERYONE is an expert; it’s just a matter of finding what that area of expertise is. Sometimes, that area is a crossroads, an overlapping of two specialties, creating a unique one. Sometimes, it comes by accident. Since I review mostly books — and some movies — I am often asked what I think about motion pictures adapted from books.

That’s a trick question, of course. Even when adapted from a book, a movie is still a movie and has its own coherence. The book remains a book, even if a movie is made of it. They do not affect one another save for the initial shift from page to screen. Let me just say that devoted faithfulness to the original text is not required; indeed, sometimes, the difference between book and movie is what makes the movie special. Still, I look forward to seeing adaptations, particularly of novels. It is a very interesting case of fiction taking on a kind of three-dimensional life. Here then are five movies adapted from books that I thought were well done:

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

ANTICIPATION truly is half of satisfaction. Surprises are powerful but also elusive. It’s when we spend day after day looking out the window waiting for something, anything, in particular, that the little fragments of satisfaction are accumulated. Disappointment waits in the wings, of course, but that danger is part of the lure. Here then are the eight things I look forward to the most every year:

1) The Christmas season: It sounds cornball and can even be nerve-wracking as the activity and stress levels rise, but nothing comes close to the anticipation awaiting Christmas. From the shopping to the colors to the temperature, Christmas is the coolest occasion of all.

2) Last day of school: It is so primal for Filipinos to long for summer, but summer is most important because it heralds the end of the school year. Two semesters can stretch very long indeed, so when that final bell goes off, it is a cathartic sound.

3) The start of college basketball season: July was a ho-hum month when I was younger, but once college began, July was accompanied by the syncopated cheers, the synchronized drumming, the shrill whistles and the slide of sneakers against parquet. UAAP or NCAA: July is a month of welcome madness.

4) The Oscars telecast: Yes, the show’s too long. Yes, the gazillion commercials can be irksome. But the potent mix of movies (hopefully good) and good hosts (hopefully Billy Crystal) makes this a cinematic guilty pleasure by itself.

5) Formula One starts: March is a month that goes by so fast, just like the machines that inhabit the grids of Formula 1. The engines are started, the drivers get set and everything is go, go, go! At least until October. Luckily that’s when…

6) The NBA season kicks off: The best basketball in the world. Every day. The Celtics. The Pistons. The Warriors. The Cavs. The Suns. The Wizards… and whoever the Sonics are going to turn into. Hoop heaven.

7) The Manila International Bookfair: Wallets get lighter and book bags get heavier. For the Filipino bibliophile, the World Trade Center becomes the must-visit destination for the weeklong exhibition of book lust.

8 ) November 3: I don’t know about you, but the intricate craziness that builds around cemeteries on Nov. 1 and 2 is truly not of this world. I want to remain solemn about the occasion and remember lost loved ones, but it’s kind of hard when it takes two hours to get to the memorial park and people are trying to sell you cold pizza. November 3 sees the world go back to normal.

See 11 new talents to watch out for in 2008 in the August 3 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.

By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

“HEY, this book is all about me and my sisters,” I thought, awe-stricken, after reading the first few chapters of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.”

Well, how could anybody miss the similarity in the names and temperament of the March sisters and my own siblings?

Meg, the eldest sister, is sweet and domesticated, exactly like my Ate who even took up cooking lessons to perfect her sans rival. Jo, that tomboyish and spirited budding writer, is definitely me, with my baptismal name Josefina, my love of books, the penchant for writing poetry in grade school, and the physical scrapes I always got into with my male cousins. Amy, the pretty and vain sister, is my third sibling, whose fair good looks became her main ID. Elizabeth March, the sickly sister, is my fourth sibling, whose severe asthma attacks kept her away from school most of the time. Why, they even have similar names!

I must have been in fourth grade when I made this astounding discovery that I had a fictional twin. Only, it didn’t feel fictional at that time. After all, this was a real book, a hardbound book with no pictures, only pages of text that marked it as serious reading. It was worlds away from the household staple, the komiks that defined our childhood. We read them all — Pilipino Komiks, Redondo, Kulafu, Aliwan, Tagalog Klasiks, Wakasan, and those vernacular magazines Liwayway and Bulaklak. These were my parents’ favorite reading fare, a comforting habit they took with them to the city where they fled to start life anew after the war. Of peasant stock, they had to stop schooling during the “Japanese time,” forced to a hardscrabble existence in the mountains of Central Luzon.

Starting over in Tondo in the 1950s wasn’t easy, but they had their trove of komiks to turn to after a hard day, where they would cozy up with Mars Ravelo’s Dyesebel and Darna and vicariously feel empowered as these characters fought off evil.

It was this fantastic world we reveled in as kids, so it was quite refreshing to find out that people didn’t need to have a fish tail or fly in a costume to have books written about them, that stories could be about ordinary folk and their everyday life and still sound interesting.

“Little Women” made it so. More magically the book told my story, or so I thought, and I made sure to hew closely to the novel’s storyline as the years went by. I guess that’s how I wound up as a writer.

For more books — life-changing, uplifting or plain entertaining — check out the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s Summer Reading Issue this Sunday, March 30.