RAIDING THE READERCON

What do you say to publishers, authors, and educators of both local and international reknown? How do you connect with people 20 or so years your junior who have read twice, even thrice, the number of books that you have read?

I got the answers to those questions during the 2nd Filipino Reader Conference on Aug 18, at the Filipinas Heritage Library, Makati City. My free ticket to the event was my 10:40am 15-minute panel presentation on "Reading Programs That Work in Schools". I shared the panel with a Master Teacher from Ayala Foundation's Center for Excellence (CENTEX), and the Reading coordinator and program designer of the award-winning POWER Reading program of Kalayaan National High School in Caloocan. Two of my online friends and prolific book bloggers invited me to share our school's reading programs and activities, and of course I jumped at the chance to represent our little school and its big programs.

photo by Mr. Rhett de Jesus, via facebook

I am both happy and humbled by the experience. Happy? Nay, ecstatic! It has always been my dream to mingle with published writers of this generation. It was a pleasure talking books with enthusiasts and teachers. Humbled, as I listened to the trials of public school children, whose hunger for books are hardly filled by the education budget, prompting their own reading teachers to beg and source for books just to feed that hunger. I was so moved by that presentation that I promised the teacher, Ms Asuncion, that I will donate my personal copies of The Hunger Games trilogy to their POWER Book Club.

In the afternoon, I caught part of the book discussion on "Pacific Rims" by Rafe Bartholomew, who interacted with his "fans" live from the United States. If not for an emergency, the teachers and I would have stayed until the end (According to the program, A Readers' Choice awarding ceremony would cap the conference).

Kudos to the organizers and volunteers of the 2nd Filipino Reader Conference! Truly a heroic thing you are doing to propagate the love for books and reading in this country.:)

My loot from the ReaderCon 2012

More on the ReaderCon:
http://filipinoreadercon.wordpress.com/

GOT BOOKS? I'M THERE!

I am so excited to go bookstore hopping this week! More than thrice-postponed, this sojourn into stacks upon stacks of tomes and pre-loved paperbacks is my ultimate favorite when it comes to making school purchases.

I'm proud to note that our school library, though tinier than most libraries, is packed with what students actually LIKE to read. I heard that in some libraries, the Harry Potter and the Twilight series were banned by school authorities. That's pointless, actually, as the kids could easily have bought their copies from any commercial bookstore. What librarians and reading teachers must realize is that popular books ought to be discussed in class, and not be treated like forbidden fruit. I remember the many enchanting hours I spent with students, throwing quotes from the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Twilight back and forth in intimate gatherings for readers. Popular fiction opens up many doors for young readers, and banning them in schools is like shutting the doors in their faces.

Once inside a bookstore, I'm drawn to the graphic novel section. In the early nineties, I was devouring them like crazy, and for over a year, I was on a special Sandman diet. From Preludes and Nocturnes to A Doll's House, I've made it my life's mission to read every single one of Neil Gaiman's gothic masterpieces. The DC, Marvel and Image graphic novels were a no-brainer. 

Where to buy, where to buy…

Besides the ubiquitous National Bookstore, Fully Booked and Powerbooks  there are many other nooks and crannies in the metro that hold a treasure trove of books that won’t make school finance officers’ hearts palpitate, given the much lower prices. The aptly named Booksale, with countless branches and one fantastic warehouse in Paranaque, still tops my list of the best bargain bookstore. I have completed book sets from Booksale throughout the years--Crichton, Ludlum, Uris, Anne Rice, and those tingly historical romances by Judith McNaught and Jude Deveraux. I am forever grateful to Booksale!

Sadly, the Scholastic Book Fairs have lost their charm for me. Perhaps it’s because in the last three years, I have been seeing the same old titles, and too many 39 Clues and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Or it could be the dwindling stock of teacher’s references that I know, looking at the online catalogue, Scholastic is famous for. Sure, the company gives us a percentage of total sales in the form of books, but the stuff we get is mostly eye candy.

I have yet to check U.P. Diliman's own cache of bargain bookstores. I know I've bought several bestsellers and some classics there during my college days. LOTR:The Two Towers for P10! Beat that! As for the bootleg book stalls in Recto...dare I visit again, after 20 years? I wish I had the time to drop by the university presses of UP, DLSU, UST and Ateneo. Though most of their titles are scholarly, collegiate and post-grad types, and thus more suitable for teachers and researchers.

I’ve been to the F. Sionil Jose-owned La Solidaridad bookshop twice before, while waiting for my dad to finish his dialysis treatments. I would describe the place  as quaint, and the books, mouth-watering. All the titles were rare, and unfortunately, quite pricey. I remember buying just two books from there, an anthology/of Langston Hughes poems, and  Teaching Shakespeare Into the Twenty-first Century. Wouldn’t hurt to take a detour to Padre Faura to check out the LS.

I'll definitely blog about this bookstore-hopping experience soon. This teacher ain't resting without a cartful of books for the school library, and sigh...for her own humble bookshelf.

About alternative bookstores:

http://telebisyon.net/balita/Review-A-Different-Bookstore-Dymocks-La-Solidaridad-Filipino-Bookstore/artikulo/127112/

Hey! July is Children’s Book Month!

http://www.pbby.org.ph/awardees.html

http://www.pbby.org.ph/downloads/pbby_rizaldy.pdf

A million reasons to love e-books:


http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

ENTERTAIN OR DIE: THE HUNGER GAMES REVIEW

Blogger's Note: I first posted this review of YA novel The Hunger Games in my Lexaprone blog on December 2009. Soon afterwards, it was reposted in the New Worlds Alliance website. I honestly tried to write reviews of the two sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, but I've been to lazy to do it, probably because I felt those sequels missed the mark that the first book so potently hit.


Imagine fighting to the death just so your loved ones could eat. We who have food on our table take it for granted, but not Katniss Everdeen, 16-year-old resident of District 12 in the country of Panem, a make-believe world where hunger, poverty and deprivation are everyday occurrences. The Capitol, Panem's Ruling District, has decreed that the 12 districts, as an indelible, chilling reminder of a quelled rebellion by District 13 against the Big C, should send one boy and one girl, aged 12-18, every year, to compete in The Hunger Games, a live action TV reality show broadcast throughout Panem. But The Hunger Games are no "Survivor", "Amazing Race", or "Wipeout." Competitors aren't just eliminated, they are murdered. The victor, the last man (or woman) standing, gets the ultimate prize: food for his/her district for one year.

I just described the Games. Wait till you meet the characters. Katniss, a coal miner's daughter, volunteered to compete in her 12-year-old sister's place. Her male counterpart is Peeta Mellark, a baker's son, who confesses on National TV that he's had a crush on Katniss since they were five. Media hype or true love? That's for the rabid televiewers to decide, and they seem to love the idea of star-crossed lovers with only one, or none, surviving in the finale. Katniss and Peeta, along with 22 other contenders, battle natural and artificial disasters, and each other, but in the end, the real enemy, The Capitol, becomes the target of social unrest once again. What happens next is in book 2 of the trilogy, Catching Fire.

As adventure stories go, this belongs to the family of "dystopian" literature where an alternate world is viewed as dark and depressing, where the characters are forced to compromise their very human nature due to their dire circumstances. William Golding's classic "Lord of the Flies" is an example, where boy scouts stranded in an island gradually lose their civility in the battle for jungle supremacy. Collins wrote a gem of a young adult novel, balancing bittersweet romance with often brutal cunning. Whether she intended it or not, The Hunger Games is a commentary on a materialistic society that preys on young people, making them crave, claw, and clamor, and in the process, lose their dignity and humanity.

Like the garden variety reality shows that smell suspiciously scripted,The Hunger Games has its contrived moments, beginning from the lottery that brought about Peeta and Prim's names, and Katniss' volunteerism. Put that aside, the book is a beautifully-written, character-intensive, techno-adventure novel teeming with love for family and simple joys of living. Older teens (15-19) will surely like it, and jump right into the sequel.

ELIZABETH KOSTOVA'S THE HISTORIAN: SORT OF A HOMAGE TO TEACHERS

Blogger's Note:
I posted this in my personal blog on January 3, 2010. I tend to make connections between the books I read and the real life I lead. This is an example.


I closed the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova over a year ago with a mixture of exhilaration (what a great book!) and disappointment (what an awful ending!). I won't review the book here, so please check out my FULL BOOK REVIEW BLOG of The Historian over at www.xanga.com/millette_espiritu. More than just another book about vampires--actually The Vampire of lore, Dracula/Vlad Tepes, the novel is a testament to the nobility of the teaching profession.

My favorite character is Professor Bartholomew Rossi, a brilliant historian and quite an intellectual academic superstar in his day. Paul (as narrator in this chapter, while his daughter is his rapt audience) is his dissertation advisee, and clearly, the young graduate student has nothing but admiration for the esteemed Rossi. He was part-English, part-Italian, but the Anglo part, at least in Paul's worshipping eyes, stood out:"His face was of crisp English mold, sharp-featured and intensely blue-eyed...to look into Rossi's face was to see a world as definite and orderly as the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace." It was Rossi's keen mind that made him the American Paul's Idol: "His mind is another thing altogether...his encyclopedic production had long since won him accolades..." But above all else, Rossi was "the kindest, warmest friend I'd ever had." I found the latter to be true in the succeeding chapters. Let me jump the gun here by saying that when Rossi mysteriously disappeared just minutes after his last visit, it was Paul who risked his life to find his mentor.

I can sympathize with Paul. I was the ultimate "sip-sip" in high school, perhaps without meaning to be one. As a student, I remember hanging onto the coattails of my teachers. To my mind, long before I drifted towards the academe myself, teachers were God's gift to humanity. To this day, I believe it to be true. After a quick rewind to my days as a fledgling learner, I've come up with my top 5 all-time favorite teachers:

1. Ms. Dulce Atienza (Grade 5 and 6 Math, Manresa School)-Ms. Atienza is a motherly, articulate teacher who made Math meaningful for me. It has since lost its meaning in high school, when the teachers resorted to terrorism to drill cosines and square roots into my system.I love Ms. Atienza for being kind but firm, and, as my section adviser in 5th grade, for being my second mother.

2. Mrs. Pearl Santos (Freshman English, Manresa School)-My Idol with a capital "I." I lived for her 12-page exams on diagraming sentences, and her stories about her days as a hard-hitting journalist. She was a perfectionist, all business at all times, and she played no favorites when my other teachers then had not-so-subtle "babies." I began to love the English language because of her.

3. Ms. Angie Ureta (Junior and Senior English & History, Manresa School)-She was 19 when she zoomed into our batch's humdrum existence in 1985, and we were enthralled by her youthful candor and world-wise sensibility. I thought back then that she picked on me out of unreasonable cruelty, but I began to realize that she was bulldozing me into finding my niche--writing. What I am now, a writer, I owe to her.

4. Prof. Emmanuel Torres (Shakespeare on Film, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-Firstly, I loved his class because we met every week in the Ateneo Art Gallery. Secondly, he was a non-threatening, soft-spoken, brilliant man who brought us to the Globe Theatre with just a few panoramic sentences, as well as his hard-to-find films. But I will never forget, most of all, his comments on my essays, most of which he would read aloud in class, to my utter embarrassment. For my paper on Mel Gibson's portrayal of Hamlet, he wrote: "With this paper, and others like it, you have demonstrated a potential for being a professional critic." OMG.

5.Prof. Danton Remoto (Survey of Philippine Literature, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-I will never again read NVM Gonzalez' The Bamboo Dancers without thinking of Prof. Remoto's acerbic comments on protagonist Ernie Rama's sexuality. Our class of 6 students was clearly in awe of this man's literary genius, and I for one, was motivated to churn out academic papers that would hopefully meet his standard, which I'm afraid I never did. But that's OK. Today, I see him fight for gay and lesbian rights on TV with much tact and poise, and I'm proud to tell one and all that Danton Remoto was my teacher.


To my delightful surprise, a former student, Maika Bernardo, wrote about me in Inquirer.net:
"Miss Millette encouraged me to write more and head the school paper staff. Her words of praise helped aspiring writers to come out of their shell. With her encouragement, I earned a leadership award on graduation day."

To view the full article, see:
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20091004-228351

I believe that teachers impart learning more effectively if they are MENTORS, not instructors. I've tried mentoring, and I can safely claim that I've done more for my students this way, rather than give them lectures thay can always download from some website. This is confirmed in The Historian, particularly in Paul and Rossi's warm, genuine friendship forged by a common love and respect for history, and for each other as human beings. And this is affirmed by the many teachers I've thanked along my life's journey, and the many students like Maika who have thanked me simply by being good, God-fearing, productive citizens of the world.