Read loud

How to spend New Year’s? Firecrackers? (No.) Go out. (Maybe.) Have a drink with friends. (Perhaps.) Or stay at home and read? (Hmmm.)

If you think about it, of all the good things that were worth celebrating about in 2011, first among them (at least for me) would be that it yielded a lot of books  more than there was enough time to read all of them. So, before we enter 2012, book a flight to Bugarach, and greet the apocalypse with open arms, it’ll be a fine time to reread some of the best books that came out the past year.

Susan Orleans’ book about Rin Tin Tin, the star canine of both big and small screen, took the author a decade to write. It was well worth it. Along with newly-installed New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson’s The Puppy Diaries, it demonstrates that books about dogs need not only be Marley & Me. It also contains the single most painful paragraph that I’ve read in 2011. It relates how the dog food sponsor of Rin Tin Tin III served notice that it was cutting off the supply since his movie prospects had “not materialized as…expected.”

Sylvia Nasar’s Grand Pursuit follows up A Beautiful Mind with a subject we suspect won’t be adapted to the movies by Ron Howard ever. It’s a history of modern economics but more precisely the men and women who shaped the development of the “dismal science.” More importantly, Nasar’s prose brings the narrative of ideas and the people who espoused them into sharp focus and with such sheer drama that we can almost imagine Russell Crowe playing one or even two of them.

Marites Vitug and Criselda Yabes’ Our Rights, Our Victories: Landmark Cases in the Supreme Court should be compulsory reading as we wait for the impeachment proceedings against the Chief Justice to begin in the Senate or for Gen. Jovito Palparan to surface. There’s also The Seven Deadly Deals edited by Roel Landingin which presents not only “the story behind seven of the costly and crooked contracts and projects” undertaken during the last administration but also dares the current one to fix them.

Tweet Sering’s Astigirl is a gorgeous-looking volume of the author’s essays that elucidated as much it unsettled me enough to caution several friends about giving it to their girlfriends or wives to read as much as I encouraged them to read it themselves. It’s now available online as well.

The three books that Lourd de Veyra released this year are well worth your attention as well. The poetry collection, Insectissimo, is his third and it includes the soon-to-be-classic “Notes on Wasak.” A book collecting his essays for his popular blog, “This Is A Crazy Planets,” from Spot.ph is what people know him as a writer apart from his work on TV5 and his band, Radioactive Sago Project. And there’s his first novel, Super Panalo Sounds, which this column has already enthusiastically reviewed as the best debut novel since Rizal’s Noli, which might seem a tad too much but is only indicative of the kind of enthusiasm it inspires.

As New Year’s celebrations go, I’m all for a bit of noise. But maybe perhaps this time I’ll choose to sit down and reread some of the titles mentioned (and several others) to greet 2012 with a real, big bang.