A recent read about this thing called bibliotherapy - the practice of reading books for therapeutic effect - sent me some ripples of excitement. Growing up with an unremitting appetite for books, I know how it was like to be consumed, as if losing some sense of self, by a work of fiction. And this one - Can Reading Make You Happier? by Ceridwen Dovey for The New Yorker, came as a validation of that feeling, of being carried away into another realm of the universe. Reading fiction, Dovey says, “is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks”.
It sure is, undoubtedly. And I feel elated by all the voracity for books I seem to have bequeathed to my two young daughters. I have seen them salivate at the mere mention of dropping by bookstores each time we get downtown; how they drool at each new Neil Gaiman or Madeleine L’Engle that come out fresh into the shelves.
They devour books – like Liesel Meminger in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief - ravenous for stories that transport them into new worlds and people who lived exciting lives. They relish the joys and grief of the stories like they have personally lived them.
They knew, like Roald Dahl's famous protagonist Matilda, that if you read Jane Austen or Frank Baum, you’d find out there’s more to life than getting up every day for work or school, and that some grown-ups aren’t really grown-ups after all. I admit I get them miffed sometimes, and they retreat to their books for comfort. Unwittingly, bibliotherapy has been around the house for years.
Bibliotherapy, however, is not an escape from reality to an imaginary world. Books are much more than being a frigate than can transport you to some magical place. They draw you to self-awareness, make you bleed with ideas that either conform or disagree with each compelling story, or move you into action.
I came to love running even more because of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – a beautiful memoir about his obsession with running and writing. When my body is unwilling, his words resonate in my head, like a muse to some sluggish novelist on a writer’s block.
There’s so much about a day’s passing, but despite the blistering summer heat, weariness at work, coffee running out, ineptness to put thoughts into words, there are always stories from Umberto Eco, John Steinbeck, and Alice Munro to name a few.
But most, if not all of my favorite books by Filipino authors aren’t meant for bibliotherapy. They turn me into something else: a Filipino, infuriated by the exasperating slack in the country's development. But despite the frustration, they developed in me a heightened sense of patriotism . F. Sionil Jose’s five-book series, the Rosales saga, gave me a deeper grasp of colonialism, how it robbed the Filipinos of cultural integrity, and a realization where I stand in the immense economic and political divide in my country.
But there is still some sort of therapy in it. My Filipino soul, broken and lost by years of foreign dominance and the distressing economic quagmire, is eased by F. Sionil’s account of Istak’s bravery in Po-on. I want it transmitted to me, like a viral contagion, so I can stand in valor against what ails my country.
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