If I were asked right now why the quality of thinking of most of the populace today is at an all-time low, I would offer this answer right off: the entertainments most people go for nowadays hardly require any thinking at all; in fact, they condition people to habitually act without thinking. We live in an age that puts such a high premium on convenience and ever faster reflex action to release pent-up aggression: movies on demand on DVD or video; nonstop, round-the-clock entertainment on cable TV’s more than 100 channels; and arcade and home computer games that foster addiction to the perpetual pursuit and annihilation of digitized villains. Make no mistake about it: ours is an era when fingers and not the brain do most of the thinking, when “speed to the max” routinely takes the place of good judgment, and when lives could be totally lived with neither introspection nor retrospection.
IMAGE CREDIT: AMAZON.COM COLLECTION IN PINTEREST.COMIn my own case, having to work most of the time with the keyboard and the computer monitor to earn a living, I often feel the compelling need to read a good book to counteract the mental vacuity that comes from viewing too much digitized information and pixelized images. That is the time when—like Ishmael in Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick taking off to sea when the gray November of his soul sets in—I hie off to the bookstores for a good browse, hoping to find maybe two or three titles at a time, new or old, to recharge and stimulate my frazzled brain.
I must admit that the prodigious offerings of a well-stocked bookstore never fail to overwhelm me. They always give me the sinking feeling that there are simply too many books being written than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. This is why unlike in my younger years, I have become obsessively selective in choosing books. I stay away from the obvious potboilers as a matter of principle; if I had my way, I suppose a good half of a bookstore’s fiction and nonfiction inventory would end up in the junk heap. I am also leery of heavily marketed titles that cater to the escapist in all of us; I am simply too contrarian ever to fall for the aggressive marketing come-ons that mask books with very little substance or lasting value.
I have my favorite authors, of course, but for the simple reason that I want to cover more ground in my readings, I have learned to resist the urge to read more than two or three books by any one of them. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has always been my favorite, but after
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Love in the Time of Cholera, and several of his other works, I decided to lay off from him in the same way that a cholesterol-threatened gourmand must shy away from still one more succulent feast. But now that I have just browsed his latest short-story collection,
Strange Pilgrims, I don’t know if I could keep my abstinence from Marquez any longer.
I think I’ll take him on once again after Ken Alder’s nonfiction,
The Measure of All Things, which audaciously says there’s a hidden error in the meter, which was meant to be exactly one ten-millionth of the distance between the Earth’s pole and the equator. Books of this genre have always fascinated me ever since reading Robert Jungk’s 1970 nonfiction,
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, which tells of how émigré scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer built the first atomic bomb.
This isn’t to say, of course, that I am totally averse to reading fine courtroom fiction such as Scott Turow’s
Presumed Innocent, or superb historical fiction such as Ken Follett’s
The Pillars of the Earth, an evocative tale about Europe’s magnificent churches that I still consider the most rousing novel I have read in years. But I know that I shouldn’t dwell too much on popular American or British fiction. There are simply too many more good English-language books to read from elsewhere in the world and here at home in the Philippines.
For instance, on the bookstore shelves just the other day, I saw
The Complete Franz Kafka and a new edition of Miguel Cervantes’s
Don Quixote—and to think that I haven’t even read our very own F. Sionil Jose’s “Rosales Saga” novels that I have been planning to read for so many years now…
This essay in conversation form, which forms Chapter 150 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge
, first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times
, © 2009 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Too many good books to readNext week:
Language as alphabet soup (August 15, 2024)
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
