The Readers

1.
There's a window table at Sugarhouse Megamall that's perfect for checking papers, reading, and musing. It's on the second floor so it overlooks/ intersects the road between buildings A and B, and you can watch the cars coming towards/under you as well as the cars on the other lane moving away. It's good, after being drawn into pages of good fiction, to look up and hear and see the world moving around you. The apple pie---succulent apples, crumbly and cinammon-y crust, whipped cream---doesn't hurt, either. Sugarhouse apple pie is---hands down---the best and most sinful I've ever tasted.


2.
Last Christmas, Lem and Lia gave department friends postcards---photographs by a man named Harvey Finkle, who did a series entitled The Readers. I think of the series as a lightweight, monochromatic Hopper for bibliophiles and photograph-lovers. The black and white shots are mostly of solitary subjects reading in various urban areas: beside garbage cans, in a busy cafe, on a train platform, in a park in full sunlight. One of my favorites is of two upright figures reading the newspaper on the subway train. We only see the sides of their faces through the glass squares formed by the doors, which (we imagine) have just closed. They are oblivious to each other, to the seated passenger looking away, and we wonder: Did they arrive together? Did they just happen to be both reading? Why are they standing by the doors when the train doesn't look particularly full? Are they passing the time, actively shutting others out, or urgently scanning the news for something important? We never know what they mean to each other. They're on the brink of disappearing.

I want that photo, or something like it transposed to a Philippine urban setting, on the wall above my desk. Or on the cover of one of my (still unwritten) books.



3.
By Colette Brooks:

"What kind of a person is a city person? One possibility: the kind of person who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, pieces of stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the street.

A person who picks up crumpled sections of newspaper in the streetcar or subway and reads haphazardly until the next stop....

...Each of these city dwellers is studying for something. But the one who may learn the most, I suspect, is a young woman who has recently decided, on a whim, to read only the books that she sees others reading at random. Though she is working her way through a degree-granting institution, this course in the arbitrary that she pursues in her spare time may be the most valuable of all. For what better way to live in the city than to surrender, unresisting, to its rhythms?

If nothing else, she is preparing herself for a lifetime of learning."


4.
I did nothing for two days and nights but read the new Vintage paperback edition of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. It's really been years since I've devoured a novel of this length (615 pages) with as much sustained ferocity. I blame this rediscovered appetite for fiction on the ridiculous amount of time I'm now free to spend, and on Murakami's ability to engage readers with oddities.

The alternating narratives follow two unlikely protagonists: a 15-year-old who literally runs away from his Oedipal curse and calls himself Kafka; and a mentally retarded 60-year-old who can talk to cats, named Nakata. While the connection between them unravels, we meet a weird mix of characters: a cross-dressing, too-smart-to-be-true hemophiliac; a beautiful, post-menopausal librarian with a mysterious sadness (like Miu of Sputnik Sweetheart and Reiko of Norwegian Wood); KFC's Colonel Sanders as a benevolent pimp; Johnnie Walker of whiskey fame as a Lecter-like cat-killer; and Hoshino, the ponytailed truck driver with a criminal record and a loyal heart, who would definitely feel at home drinking with the bayaws on Monday nights.

There's (possibly incestuous) sex, (un)necessary murder, stones opening portals into another world, a lot of philosophizing, missing women, and sardines and leeches falling from the sky. An altogether rollicking ride. Read it!


5.
From Kafka on the Shore:

"At any rate, you--and your theory--are throwing a stone at a target that's very far away. Do you understand that?"

I nod. "I know. But metaphors can reduce the distance."

"We're not metaphors."

"I know," I say. "But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."

A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. "That’s the oddest pickup line I’ve ever heard."

"There’re a lot of odd things going on---but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth."

"Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?"

"Either way, I don’t think I can stand the sadness I feel right now," I tell her.

"I feel the same way."