I’ve long associated reading with people I’ve come to cherish. My mother is an avid reader. She can pass whole days reading if she could. When I was 9, she gifted me with my first full length novel, Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the 99 Steps. As an aside, perhaps I could credit my mother with my early introduction to nonlinear storytelling since this particular volume is 43rd in the series. Anyway, from that moment on, I fell into the enchantment of words: how one word followed another to create and recreate worlds, peoples, creatures, emotions, conflicts that took me on thrilling roller coaster rides.
From then on, I read anything I could get my hands on, so the parade of authors in my early years included Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott and Agatha Christie, punctuated by the occasional Sydney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, M.M. Kaye and Mario Puzo stealthily procured from the shelves of the women in my family. I grew up in the Philippines, so from the recesses of the concrete jungle where I lived in Manila and during those childhood summers I spent with family in the sleepy coastal fishing village where my grandmother was born, I could only imagine the places in these books far removed from my own: meadows and moors; deserts and dungeons; and snow followed by the splendor of spring.
I was initiated into the world of magic realism in my early teens when a beloved uncle, a voracious reader, told me about the blood that ran resolute from the slain son to the house of his mother in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. This particular scene has stayed with me since, though it wouldn’t be until years later when I would finally read the novel. I hope to be able to read this book in its original language someday.
Over the years, dearest friends have steered me to other reading trajectories, from the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, Raymond Carver, Graham Greene, T. H. White, Mark Haddon and the lyrical and mesmerizing text of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, to nonfiction, traveling along with Paul Theroux and Rory MacLean. When I moved to Barcelona and fortuitously crossed paths with writer C. Adán Cabrera—now mentor and friend—I discovered more wonderful authors who have held me spellbound with their use of language, the way they re-colored worlds and ideas: I fell in love with the works of Toni Morrison, I felt an affinity with Edwidge Danticat, I marvelled at the seamless marriage of English and Spanish in the hands of Junot Diaz, and I got my heart broken over and over by Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.
Books are also about self-love and self-care, because of this I am particular about the books I choose myself. Much older now than my Nancy Drew days, I still read for pleasure but also with purpose, as an unceasing lover of words. Writing in Barcelona, writing about the country I left behind, I’ve found myself looking to James Joyce’s Dubliners and more recently to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. In their writings, I again find love—for place and its people. To write is to love. I write a lot about women, about race and color. Now removed from the place of my birth, these are themes that gnaw at me, that nag, that haunt. I was maybe 12 when I first came across Kate Chopin’s Désirée’s Baby. I remember loving the dreamy quality of her prose, but I also remember being moved by the woman’s despair and disturbed by how color played such a part in her undoing. So I will go on, as far and as much as I can, to read, to love and to keep working on becoming a conjurer of worlds with words.
