Bookworm manifesto (or, some snobbery if you care to read it)

There's a cliche about bookworms, and I come across it every once in a while: that they're the type to read anything they can get their hands on. I don't know about you, anonymous reader, and I have no idea if you consider yourself a bookworm or not, but I submit for your inspection the opinion that this cliche is really not true. (I've found it annoying enough to go and spend a full hour to write a short treatise on a useless cliché.)

Think of yourself as you go into a bookstore, whether it's the corner booksale beside the grocer's inside Robinson's Ermita, or a posh one in Serendra, or the Solidaridad along Padre Faura. Maybe even--if you care more for the books themselves than for the covers, like me--the dingy little booksale along Pedro Gil St., which holds a lot of treasures: it was there I bought most of my Inspector Maigret books in English, since the originals are harder to find. My first was Maigret hésite (Maigret hesitates). I also found a book I've been looking for, for many years, but which I hadn't seen at any bookseller's for the last eight years: A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, first read in high school care of my best friend, Michelle Calsado. Rereading the story was like reacquainting myself with my best friend--all over again. And who would have thought that this rat's hole of a bookstore would be the place to find many Dorothy L Sayersssss, which aren't sold (except by overseas book order) in National Bookstore or Powerbooks? And which, once found in Fully Booked, will cost you 600php apiece, while one may cost 95php here?

My purpose isn't to catalogue all of my booksale purchases or spectacular bargains, but to underline the fact that when a true bookworm goes into a store, there is a specific section to which he gravitates. I again submit for your inspection this anonymous, masculinized person, the True Bookworm. He may like Science Fiction and Fantasy; he might like the Mystery Genre best of all; he may have a penchant for biographies; he may enjoy most those thrillers that are always the second most numerous (never outnumbering the romance pocketbooks of the Mills and Boon/Harlequin variety). He may go through the bookstore through a circuitous route: first glancing at the bestsellers, hardbound and shiny; then browsing casually through the thrillers and young adult fiction; before concentrating more fully on science fiction and fantasy, saving his best for last. Or, pressed for time, he might go to his favorite section first.

As a True Bookworm he does not choose books based on how they will look, sitting with him and sharing his latté in a coffee shop, or propped on his backpack on a long bus ride. As a True Bookworm he hardly pays attention to what is popular--but unlike the snobby elitist (with all the redundancy this entails), he doesn't balk at reading something just because everyone else is. (How silly it would be, for example, to eschew Tolkien just because he's popular.) As a True Bookworm he knows what he loves, and there is a kind of program in his head for finding the specific books he's looking for. His eyes merely slide over titles and authors' names that he finds uninteresting or which provoke that lukewarm response, "I must get round to reading this author sometime" (for me: Robert Parker, CJ Cherryh and Sara Paretsky); his mind is programmed to stop and squeal with glee upon sighting a familiar and beloved book, whether or not a copy is already in his possession. (For me it's always The Beekeeper's Apprentice, of which I already have three copies; it doesn't matter that I already have it, but encountering it here is like meeting an old friend.)

Most importantly, his mind is also programmed to spot names of books that he doesn't already have, and wants badly to possess. (For me this is anything by Julian Symons. It was a victory for me to find his book, "Death's Darkest Face," at a sale years ago, but I'm still in search for the holy grail among crime aficionados, the seminal study called "Bloody Murder.")

Whatever genre it is, he does not, like the indiscriminate reader of the cliché, devour everything. The very point of becoming a bookworm is that you cultivate your taste, so that at the end of years--after accumulated experience of reading books both enjoyed and hated--you can choose your books more carefully. You can tell by looking at the cover or its blurbs if it is the kind of book you will probably enjoy. (That other cliché that is hardly ever true is that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover; apart from the Internet at home, the True Bookworm stranded in the familiar strangeness of a bookstore has no better tool with which to decide to buy a book.) For every bookworm may be all right with reading any given book if asked, but in his heart, there is a genre (or two, or three) that has made a home, and which will always spell out to this bookworm the things he most desires from the reading experience: comfort, or distraction, or escapism, or consolation, or stimulation. (For me it is all these.) So a bookworm is defined not by the diversity of the books that he reads (though diversity wouldn't really go amiss), but by the intensity, the voraciousness with which he hunts for the books that he wants and his enjoyment of them, and by the sheer ability, honed by experience, to know what he will like and what he will not.

Berthe Morisot, La lecture, 1869-1870.