The Yellow Abakada Book and Henny Penny

I cannot live without books. is a description I have written in my Friendster and FB profiles (sounds like a pretentious egghead, but, never mind…). It was just recently that I found out it was once quoted by Thomas Jefferson. This quote sounded exaggerated (even geeky), but seriously, it is an honest description of my passion.

I read books. Voraciously. Fervently. Insatiably. I love to read. Anywhere. Anytime. Most of the time. All the time. I spend hours reading, mainly at night, until I fell asleep or until I was surprised to find out that it was early morning (when I’m into a very good one). I read anything and everything under the sun – from classics to contemporary, from novels to magazines, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauri (yes, I read the entries, not just use them… something wrong?).

Why do I read books? As a teacher, I love reading because I want to be entertained and educate myself at the same time (the expected reply, safe and academic). But as Meenataur, I read books because I always find comfort in reading. After a day of work (where I sometimes have to squeeze out every trickle of thinking neuron from my brain), I read to find peace and solace, to get a grip on myself, to stop and pause and just have sometime alone. Books serve as anti-depressants and sedatives that calm me down. It even energizes me and makes me see points of views from different angles (the way an author describes the characters and their feelings in the omniscient pov) which aids me in my decision-making moments at work. If I stopped reading for a long time, my mind becomes sluggish (as if I’d just had a session with my friends and La Lola or DBar [giggles], or as if I was sleeping in the cabin of a ship amidst a thunderstorm, or as if I was in a tricycle skirting along a bumpy road, you get the point…).

(courtesy of rai'sgarage)

 I vividly remember when my love for reading started. I was about four then. My aunt used to read lots of books and magazines and I was so fascinated watching her lips move while reading (I thought she was praying). I also grew up seeing my father read the newspaper every day. So whenever they’re done reading, I’d pick up the material and stare at the page. I would look at the pictures and mumble, whispering nonsense sounds, pretending to read. When my mother caught me ‘reading’ the newspaper, she thought it was time for me to learn how to read. And so my journey began.

The first book I owned was the yellow Abakada book (a phonics booklet) where I first learned the sounds of the Filipino consonants and vowels (ba-ka, ku-bo, gi-ta-ra, pa-yong). I will never forget the sentence “Ang paru-paro ay pula.” because of the bucketful of tears I cried trying to decipher the words, while my mother hovered over me holding a yellow wooden ruler, shouting Mali! Ulet! (toink!) 

(courtesy of Amazon books)

Upon learning how to sound letters and words, the very first stories I was able to read were those from my grade 1 textbooks. I have memories of reciting the story of Henny Penny from my Reading book (Henny Penny is a hen. Henny Penny is a red hen. Henny Penny is Ben’s hen.) and a Tagalog story of a monkey atop the banana tree. When I was eight, a neighbor gave me a very old, coverless, dirty and battered book of stories in Tagalog. The very first short story (actually, it was like a novel to me because it was six pages long) I finished was the story of Beauty and the Beast (I’m not sure if the title was Si Maganda at ang Halimaw, but it was that sort). I felt that I was in a different world. I cannot put down the book, too mesmerized at the descriptions, too excited to find out the ending. It took me the whole afternoon to finish it, pretending I was asleep whenever my mother checked on us for our afternoon nap.



Beauty and the Beast
(courtesy of cghm.org)

 One day, it rained hard and our roof leaked, so most of the things in our room got wet including my precious but fragile book, which miserably turned into a big brown lump. But that tragedy didn’t stop me from reading; it just ignited my passion. And so, I became an English teacher (where I have to read a lot and read to the kids), then an editor (reading English grammar and literature textbooks to correct errors), and then a hopeful author (working on a textbook that teaches children how to read).



As of now, I have read more than a hundred novels and thousands of stories and countless poetry (and still counting). I love Jose Garcia Villa, F. Sionil Jose, Nick Joaquin, Amado Hernandez, NVM Gonzales, Jessica Zafra, Bob Ong… I love Poe, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman, Hemingway, King, Steele, Mead, Meyer, Brown, Riordan… I love Shakespeare, Austen, Shelley, Chaucer, Milton, Marlowe, Keats, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Carroll, Bronte, Tolkien, Rowling…

Sadly, one lifetime is not enough for me to read all the good books out there. I will be gone one day, but Henny Penny will never cease to exist, along with the immortal yellow book Ang Abakada.

 (And now eggheads, let’s have our first project. Read any story you like. Identify the protagonists and antagonists, the setting, and the plot. No copying and plagiarizing, understood?)