Where it all starts

This blog will be different from my personal blog. Instead of the whining, bitching, and unstructured thinking, Book Smarts will be about books. Reading books, how books are made, book trends, and maybe a few pieces on writing here and there. Some literary stuff might pop up from time to time, in the event that I come out of my three-year literary coma.

Book Smarts is my foray out of the literary and into the slightly academic. Whenever I'd try to start on a short story, I'd be stuck because of the very little life I've had to draw upon. I don't have the ascendancy to write about great existential dramas if I haven't had an existential drama, right? In the end, I decided to stop forcing it and go with what I know, which is books. I don't have any weird trips, I don't have any great loves, I don't live the bohemian artist lifestyle, but I do have a lot of books.

The only thing I can say about my reading habits is that I'm eclectic. I'm not drawn to a particular genre or author, since I've hopped from interest to interest depending on what age I am and who I was hanging out with.

As a reader, you can consider me:
The 80s-90s Kid, who read and collected a lot of the old Young Adult series available at the time. I was exposed to a lot of books from the 80s because of my older sister and brother. Choose Your Own Adventure, Sweet Valley (Kids, Twins and Friends, High, Junior High, University, and even the Sagas), The Babysitters' Club, and then some of the series that quickly went out-of-print: The Sleepover Club (shudder) and GirlTalk.

Of course, my childhood reading wasn't all fluff. I read a lot of the classics, like Afternoon of the Elves and Harriet the Spy. Judy Blume, E.L. Konigsburg, and Madeleine L'Engle were some of my favorite authors. I also inherited a big collection of Enid Blyton books (Brer Rabbit and Animal Tales), and when I reached the "big kids library" in elementary, I borrowed the Malory Towers and St. Clare's books.

Admittedly, my childhood reading was very colonial. There were efforts from my parents to make me read more Filipino books, so I had whole sets of Adarna books. Unfortunately, I only remember snippets of each book, not even whole storylines. However, one particular set of books stuck with me: Nick Joaquin's Pop Stories for Groovy Kids. It was a holdover from my brother's and sister's childhoods. (Expect a bigger post about those books later on.)

The Bimbo, who can only read books with shiny lettering and bare chests on the cover. Actually, I exaggerate. My trashy reading was limited to VC Andrews and Sidney Sheldon, which, for some reason, my sister pushed on me. The Flowers in the Attic was a brilliant piece of plotwork, in my opinion.

I also read some cleaner stuff, like those pastel-colored chick lit books. Again, because of my sister, who's in a chick lit phase right now. Chick lit is a dime a dozen nowadays, so I try to stick to the best ones. I'll own up to cracking open The Nanny Diaries and the Shopaholic series more than once.

The Pretentious Intellectual, who can only read "world literature". On my shelf, I've got Murakami, Allende, Garcia Marquez, Neruda, Mahfouz, and a lot of other authors I have yet to start on or comprehend. I guess it's the pressure to be "intellectual" as a literature major that gets me to start these books.

The Lover of Dead White Guys (and Girls), who sticks to the canon. As a (pending) Anglo-American Literature major, I like to explore the classics: Dickens, Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Fitzgerald are on my current reading list.

The Teenybopper, who will read anything with a trendy, anorexic girl on the cover. I read a lot of Gossip Girl, the Princess Diaries books, the Georgia Nicholson series, and a lot of Sarah Dessen novels. The one I enjoyed the most was the Jessica Darling series by Megan McCafferty. For a teenybopper book, it was extremely witty and well-written, and Jessica was a really complex character, unlike the stereotypical heroines in other teenybopper books.

The Mainstream Bookworm, who'll read anything on a bestseller list. There's a lot of crap on the NYT Bestseller Lists, but there's also some good stuff. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was great, apart from the awkward ghost-human sex scene. Memoirs of a Geisha, for all the flak it gets for the throwaway ending, had really vivid descriptions and mood-setting. A reading for CW10 if I ever saw one.

So there. Anything's fair game for me when it comes to reading, as long as I've got the time. I've been looking for a niche for quite a while, and I'm hoping this is something I can stick to. For now, though, I've got to tear myself away from the books into less pleasant obligations. Cheers.