The little bookstore around the corner

Hurrah, hurrah, there’s a month-long sale at Powerbooks. It’s Powerbooks’ eighth year anniversary and I feel like it’s my birthday. Nothing excites me more than a sale at Powerbooks. Not even a sale at Mango gets me as giddy as when I see all the discount signs in a bookstore. I walk along the shelves and pick out the books I’ve wanted to read during my past visits. I read the blurbs at the back and browse through a few pages. I try to remember books that my friends liked and check them out. I dig in the piles of discounted books and hope I find a much coveted title. I desperately look for my favorite children’s books The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Snow Queen (which I haven’t found to this day…someone help me prove these fairytales exist, please). I look at what kind of Sweet Valley books they have left and reminisce about how much I loved reading about Jessica and Elizabeth. I flip through coffee table books, cookbooks, trivia books, travel books, self-help books, and joke books. At the end of the day, I never know what I want to get for myself, and I always leave both satisfied and dissatisfied. Although I’d gotten myself a book or two, I always wish I could buy the entire bookstore.

I’ve always loved reading. I’ve been told than when I was a baby, I would actually tear off little pieces of newsprint and eat it. (On the other hand, I ate everything back then.) In grade school, after dropping my bag off at my classroom, I would go to our library and spend my morning with books. I collected all kinds of juvenile fiction series, from The Baby-Sitter’s Club to RL Stine’s Fear Street. My mother would leave me at a bookstore (when Powerbooks wasn’t around yet) and I would browse through the books for hours. Security guards there were probably suspicious of me. You could imagine my happiness when the first Powerbooks in Arnaiz Avenue opened. Two floors of literature, bliss, and very cold air conditioning. There was even a coffee shop on the second floor and even though I wasn’t a coffee drinker back then, I liked sitting there with a muffin and a book. I felt oh-so-Parisian in my imaginary sidewalk café. I spent many afternoons browsing through all genres, carefully choosing which books I wanted to take home with me. I no longer lingered in the young adult section, but was able to cover the entire bookstore. Once, I brought home a book about writing your autobiography, another time, a beauty and lifestyle book written by Tyra Banks, and another time, a novel about a quilting club. I discovered one of my all-time favorite novels, She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, in Powerbooks by just browsing. I found the sky blue cover interesting and the first chapter even more exciting.

I was always excited to receive my books in the trademark brown paper bag after buying them. Although I flipped through the books inside the bookstore, it’s always a different experience when you know the books are yours. Some people are obsessive-compulsive when it comes to their books. They try to avoid getting creases or folds in their books. I am the total opposite. I stuff books in my bag, eat while reading, open the book all the way, even underline lines that I really like sometimes. I love reading and rereading the book until it’s worn out. I feel like the real beauty in books is not having the book itself, but the experience that you have reading it. I don’t want my reading experience to be restricted by having to keep the book wrinkle free. So when I’m reading a book I borrowed from someone or flipping through books in a bookstore, I have to be careful. When I’m reading my own books, the feel of my books is immediately so familiar and comfortable and I enjoy reading even more.

With the month-long sale in Powerbooks, I can hardly keep myself from grabbing several books until I have a pile in my arms. This week my arms were full just from the general fiction section, and it broke my heart to choose only a couple of books to buy. I hadn’t even covered the Philippine publications, the classic literature, or the humor books. Of course, the great thing about the sale is the piles of discount books. One of my favorite experiences is finding a book I’ve wanted to buy for a long time in the 50 perecnt discount shelf. This week I found Sarelee Rosenburg’s A Little Help From Above, a book that I’ve been eyeing for more than a year, with a 50 percent discount, waiting for me to take it. But I also love sifting through the piles to find even more new books. I once found a P10 children’s book about Lady Liberty that I absolutely adore. It was just one copy, and it was such a cute and hilarious take on the life of the Statue of Liberty that I immediately bought it.

Today, there isn’t a Powerbooks in Arnaiz Avenue anymore, but there are six branches around Metro Manila, and I spend most of my time in Alabang Town Center branch in the South. If my friends and I don’t meet up there before going out, we usually gravitate towards the bookstore anyway. Whenever I’m there, I see that the place is packed, with people of all ages combing through all the books. Sometimes I don’t get why people spend so much time in coffeeshops (some of them aren’t even coffee drinkers). Everyone needs a bookstore to grow up in, whatever age you are.

See you in the discount racks!