Reading Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was like eating a bag of potato chips. You pick one and put it in your mouth, and before you know it, you empty the bag. I’ve not been so active a reader, gluing to the pages for hours forgetting meals and forsaking sleep until the bitter end. But then, like eating a whole bag of chips, there is that empty feeling and what the hell? A rush was what I got and I kicked myself for wasting my time, especially upon the last chip, with a James Bond like conclusion, it tasted stale.
Reading good literature is hard work. I usually can’t read more than half an hour in a sitting. My brain needs rest and time to digest when the language is rich. However there is always a sense of elation, a feeling of accomplishment when I finish a good book. An author’s use of language and their subjects’ character, to me, are much more essential than plot. But of course it cannot be overdone. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow comes to mind, and also Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things—both of which I humbly put away, unable to finish.
The good books? Nabokov’s Lolita, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes, Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Reinaldo Arena’s Before Night Falls, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road… and on and on. These books are my teachers as they demand as much as entertain. But there’s one book which I recently finished, which is quite curious and odd, that I would like to talk about tomorrow.
There’s something about eating. Besides being a pleasurable experience all of its own, it goes well with other activities, like reading and watching movies. Food seems to double the pleasure and encourages focus. Picking the right kind of food then, is important, so that it might sustain the activity but won’t cause too much bodily harm. Chips of any kind and popcorn are not recommended. If you find yourself digging into the bag more often than turning the pages of your book, it’s a bad sign. A bowl of grains or a big salad is preferred because they can be worked on at a much slower pace. My father used to chide me for eating and reading at the same time, said it was not good for digestion. I think that was a myth.
