An homage to my favorite books

This Week’s Winner

Lowena Buñi Consorio, 45, is a journalism graduate of UST and a mother of three daughters. She has been serving the government as a research-analyst for the past 26 years. Reading, movies, sports and American Idol are her biggest passions. She is also an avid NBA, tennis and Formula 1 fan.

MANILA, Philippines - They are the books that made me cry and laugh out loud; let my imagination run amuck; and enabled me to experience a whole gamut of extremely opposite emotions. They are the books that writer Edward P. Morgan describes as “one of those few remaining havens where my mind can get both provocation and privacy.” They are the books that gave me a conk on the head to remind me that I will always be a sucker for prose and poetry. They are the books that made me fall in love with reading all over again. They are the books that ultimately administered the coup de grace.  

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga: The bespectacled boy wizard with the famous scar who transformed a once struggling writer into an instant billionaire invaded my domesticated “muggle” world in August 2001. Before the Potter blitzkrieg, I had completely neglected reading books. In its aftermath, I realized that I was such a moron to abandon books essayist E.P. Whipple immortalizes as “lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.”

Eight magical books later (including the beautiful Tales of Beadle the Bard), I can now proclaim the day I discovered Harry Potter as the one defining moment in my renewed love affair with books. It is my personal equivalent of the Beatles’ invasion of America, the day that this legendary band appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and forever changed the landscape of pop culture. While the Beatles created a cultural upheaval with their music, the Potter books revolutionized my love and passion for reading. They revived the fanaticism, the passion, the most exciting years of my youth that I will always hold dear. Reading the final book was bittersweet. It had me sobbing and gushing from beginning to end. Even its dedication, which J.K. Rowling splits seven-ways, is a total knockout — the seventh she especially reserves for all of us Potter fanatics who have made Harry a global phenomenon.  

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion: Harold Robbins’ The Betsy was my baptism of fire although my dalliances with those steamy Mills & Boon potboilers had already taught me that love is basically a contact sport. With such pedigree, I presumed that I do not possess enough tolerance for old English literature. I was dead wrong. After all these years, I discovered that I still have a soft spot for those lovesick 18th-century damsels. By savoring romance in one of its purest forms, where almost all physical manifestations of love are largely taboo, I discovered that I am not hopelessly jaded, after all. Jane Austen enabled me to experience the nearest thing to a romantic rebirth. She has salvaged and resurrected the hopeless romantic in me.

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure: These novels distressed me not because of their dark themes of love gone sour, abject poverty, murder, suicide or other harsh realities — they demoralized me because they are stark reminders of my perennial, never-ending money problems. Yet, ironically, I credit Thomas Hardy, that quintessential pessimist, as among those who toughened my resolve to remain upbeat and optimistic despite all the odds, to count and be grateful for all my blessings.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera: Two of the most exquisitely lyrical and most beautifully written contemporary novels ever. These masterpieces from Colombia’s literary titan more than compensate for my more than decade-long sabbatical from reading.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement:  Is devoting a lifetime atoning for one’s sins more than commensurate to rebuild shattered lives? Is it more than enough to absolve one’s guilt; to be finally forgiven; and earn the right for a second chance to start again with a clean slate? This haunting, beautiful novel kept insisting that while such humility and selfless act of contrition are commendable, somehow they are still not enough to rectify the past. It kept telling me that while we can cite the absence of pre-meditation or deliberate willfulness in begging for mercy for our sins, nevertheless, there must be some sort of accountability and a time for reckoning. It kept nagging me that while we can blame our mistakes, our sins on human frailty or the folly of youth, sooner or later, we can no longer delay the inevitable confrontation with the ghosts of our sins. Sooner or later, we have to confront the consequences of our sinful past.   

The Diary of Anne Frank: There once lived a rather flirty young girl named Anne. She had everything going for her except for one glitch — she was a Jew in a country ruled by a diabolical monster named Adolf Hitler who happened to have major issues against Jews. Hitler hated the Jews so much he wanted to exterminate them all. To escape Hitler’s minions, Anne and her family were forced to hide. Trapped and scared to death, Anne turned to her diary, affectionately nicknamed “Kitty,” which became her refuge and main source of hope for a miracle to end their ordeal and finally live happily ever after. The miracle never came.

I never thought that the mostly trivial banter and incoherent ramblings of a young girl on the verge of womanhood could be deeply moving. It is heart-wrenching to witness a life of endless possibilities cruelly interrupted by the megalomania of the most despicable man in history.  

Anne Frank finally gave a face to the millions of nameless, faceless Jews who were slaughtered in the concentration camps in Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor, Chelmo and Auschwitz. Anne’s diary became the collective memoirs of the millions of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Today, her diary stands as a symbolic testament, reminding us that such inhumanity should never ever happen again. The miracle Anne was praying for never, came but her legacy ensures that the rest of us will at least get a shot at a happy ending.  

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Up to now, my quest for a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses remains futile. I am desperate to read this classic and discover why it is universally hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time. But I am deeply determined and committed to continue my quest and to read as many books as possible — the sublime along with the trashy. Truly, my love affair with books is much lovelier the second time around and I am absolutely sure that, this time, it’s for keeps.