Books!!

I personally find it hard to imagine a life without books and yet in the Philippines, I realised what a luxury they were. The poor school I taught in had a library stocked predominantly with old school textbooks and cast offs. There were no colourful children's books, visual encyclopaedias and beautifully illustrated children's Bibles or story books. The homes I visited had few books - maybe a set of old encyclopaedias if one was fortunate but mainly religious tracts and pamphlets and old school textbooks. The public schools I visited were even worse. A class of 60 may share about 10 of fewer textbooks.And without books around them, children did not develop a culture of reading. They watched TV, played computer games but generally did not like to read and did not read even signs - a visual people.

I have been blessed with books all around me from birth. As a child my grandfather, uncle and parents used to read to me every night; as I grew older, I learned to read these favourite stories for myself and I would exasperate my grandmother asking her to buy yet more books for me to devour... As a child I had bookplates with this phrase that captivated me: "Books fall open, you fall in". How true that still is for me and as my appetite for answers to my curious mind developed, I read more and more non-fiction. In this way, I discovered Catholicism!

Everywhere I go, I have an irresistable urge to enter a bookshop and browse... and my attention is drawn by a myriad subjects and topics - theology and religion of course and then philosophy, history, popular culture, anthropology, fine arts, architecture, poetry, popular science, computing, marketing and economics etc. It's odd but as I grew older, my reading taste veered away from fiction, although I do still enjoy (some) fantasy and Sci-fi, historical novels and the odd Asian novel.

One of the more fascinating books I read recently was about the "History of Reading" by Alberto Manguel. It was written by a bibliophile for bibliophiles and it was amazing to see how reading as a skill and past-time had developed and evolved. I often keep many books on the go, reading as many as 20 books concurrently. At the moment I am reading "Reformation" by Dairmaid MacCulloch and it is really interesting. I am also reading "Principles of Catholic Theology" by Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), "Truth is Symphonic" by Hans Urs von Balthasar and "The End of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs.

Everywhere I go, I have accumulated a library of books around me. I had to ship a box of them back from Manila and I have three shelves full in Kuala Lumpur and boxes and boxes in Skipton. I recall one trip I made to London and Oxford and I bought so many books that in the course of lugging them from one city to another, train station after another, the wheels of my pull-along baggage broke! When I returned to KL from Skipton 2 years ago, I sent back 25kgs of books... I simply cannot bear to be parted from them!

I remembering reading once a caricature of the Dominican as one who is typically burdened with books and dragging them behind him from place to place. And yet there is a touching story of St Dominic selling a precious annotated book in order to give alms to a poor man...

As I continue to drag my books from city to city, I wonder if that is not the wiser action or perhaps I should establish a library somewhere, such as Dagat-dagatan?! My other vice is music and CDs... but I shall leave that for another day...