In the shallows

LAST year, I listed the books I read and finished. I finished less than two dozen titles of fiction; I read nonfiction books but none from cover to cover. I reread five.

In contrast, I acquired easily more than this number. The disparity between the intent to read and the actual dispatch concerns not just parents and teachers. It gnaws even at readers who maintain a habit of reading but still wonder if we are just wading in the shallows.

Distractions are no longer just excuses not to open a book. Checking out every alert from Messenger and tending to our 101 online personas do more than divide our attention. This digital hyperactivity also prevents us from taking what William Landay refers to as the “deep dive” demanded to immerse in an imagined world or explore new ideas.

“Linear deep-focus reading” is only possible when one sits down with a traditional book and follows a single narrative or argument without undertaking the multitasking that reading online or e-books eases us into, argues Steven Johnson.

Technology has altered us as readers. We are more impatient for our rewards and less trusting when a writer digresses into and meanders among the dense undergrowth of imagination before leading us down the path of narrative clarity, as in the days when an open book did not compete in one-sided competition with a smart phone.

Old-school reading is as different from watching as scanning or browsing. More than time is warped when has followed all seven seasons of the HBO series of “Game of Thrones;” binged on YouTube 10-minute rewinds and 30-minute GoT recaps; or sat still for hours running into days and weeks with “A Song of Fire and Ice,” the first five tomes, each as weighty and as dense as the sheets of steel folded and folded over in a Valyrian sword, in the planned seven-volume heptalogy, written by George R. R. Martin, which existed long before the television series.

A collaboration between a literature scholar and neuroscientists discovered in the MRI results of college undergraduates that “close reading,” as opposed to browsing or surfing, of a chapter in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” showed an increase in blood flow to the parts of the brain associated with touch, movement, and spatial coordination.

According to Elizabeth Randolph in the Winter 2015 issue of “Vassar: The Alumnae/i Quarterly,” the results show that focused reading makes readers think “as though (they) were actually experiencing being in the story”.

Paradoxically, getting lost in fictive worlds demands we are in touch with the present one with all its, yes, distractions.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 27, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Reading in bed

RECENTLY, I rediscovered reading in bed.

I read in bed as a child. Growing up, we had an old black-and-white television in the living room. Until my father replaced it with a secondhand color set, this temperamental box required tedious tinkering with its antenna or wires to project a picture that had a mist of snowfall overlying the scenes, even those set in sweltering jungles.

Coupled with my father’s implacable rules—no TV on weekdays; the last full show on Fridays and Saturdays aired at 7 p.m.—it was no contest between a book and that artifact.

Even during the interminable summer, when a book was never not beside me during the day, I still read in the evenings until sleep crept up and stilled the turning of the page. For the young, sleep is a waste of time.

When I heard my father’s snores, I read by the glare of the family flashlight whose batteries were regularly replenished, my father decreed, for “emergencies”. Sudden brownouts then made reading challenging but not impossible.

Bedtime reading was a juggling act. I could not be caught reading by flashlight because my father worried about the abuse of my eyes. I made the batteries reasonably last because I could not imagine explaining to my frugal parent that the absolute need to discover what lay beyond a chapter’s cliffhanger fell under the category of an emergency.

In summer, when no novels could be borrowed from the school library, the book at hand had to last until the next batch of borrowed paperbacks.

Ah, but how else should youth be lived except on the edge? In spite of astigmatism (my father’s fear realized), reading in bed became a habit, a tic, a reflex, along with reading while waiting, reading in the toilet, reading during breaks, reading in the car, reading despite next day’s exam, etc.

Marriage and children paused the nighttime binges. I couldn’t withdraw into other worlds while starting a family.

Then graduate school and its regimen of reading made this trickle of fear: what if I forgot how to read? What was reading but retreating into other worlds?

Reading again fiction at midnight or dawn, I note these changes: I time these binges no longer under the cover of my father’s snores but only when I sleep alone and no one gets jolted by a book, instead of a pillow, or the beam of my smart phone, instead of the family flashlight.

But these nocturnal readings—of the fantastic or the mythic, read in silence or reenacted on bedroom walls as shadows eloping with the storytelling or segueing into other excursions—I would still very much consider as a personal emergency: tell me, how does the tale end?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 20, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Reading in bed

RECENTLY, I rediscovered reading in bed.

I read in bed as a child. Growing up, we had an old black-and-white television in the living room. Until my father replaced it with a secondhand color set, this temperamental box required tedious tinkering with its antenna or wires to project a picture that had a mist of snowfall overlying the scenes, even those set in sweltering jungles.

Coupled with my father’s implacable rules—no TV on weekdays; the last full show on Fridays and Saturdays aired at 7 p.m.—it was no contest between a book and that artifact.

Even during the interminable summer, when a book was never not beside me during the day, I still read in the evenings until sleep crept up and stilled the turning of the page. For the young, sleep is a waste of time.

When I heard my father’s snores, I read by the glare of the family flashlight whose batteries were regularly replenished, my father decreed, for “emergencies”. Sudden brownouts then made reading challenging but not impossible.

Bedtime reading was a juggling act. I could not be caught reading by flashlight because my father worried about the abuse of my eyes. I made the batteries reasonably last because I could not imagine explaining to my frugal parent that the absolute need to discover what lay beyond a chapter’s cliffhanger fell under the category of an emergency.

In summer, when no novels could be borrowed from the school library, the book at hand had to last until the next batch of borrowed paperbacks.

Ah, but how else should youth be lived except on the edge? In spite of astigmatism (my father’s fear realized), reading in bed became a habit, a tic, a reflex, along with reading while waiting, reading in the toilet, reading during breaks, reading in the car, reading despite next day’s exam, etc.

Marriage and children paused the nighttime binges. I couldn’t withdraw into other worlds while starting a family.

Then graduate school and its regimen of reading made this trickle of fear: what if I forgot how to read? What was reading but retreating into other worlds?

Reading again fiction at midnight or dawn, I note these changes: I time these binges no longer under the cover of my father’s snores but only when I sleep alone and no one gets jolted by a book, instead of a pillow, or the beam of my smart phone, instead of the family flashlight.

But these nocturnal readings—of the fantastic or the mythic, read in silence or reenacted on bedroom walls as shadows eloping with the storytelling or segueing into other excursions—I would still very much consider as a personal emergency: tell me, how does the tale end?

(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

While waiting

READING is a form of waiting. Recently, I settled down to read while waiting for my son to fetch me from a mall.

Long after I met friends, long after the mall closed, long after the café took final orders, long after taxis left the queue with indefatigable midnight explorers, I turned the pages of my book, which I bought when I decided to wait.

It rained steadily, miserably the whole day, which curtailed some of my plans. Since commuting home a bridge away was bound to be an interminable, miserable wait, I opted for an interminable, pleasurable one: reading until my son’s work was done.

If there is anything graduate school taught me, it is to read with purpose. It is the same lesson middle age teaches me: one cannot read everything ever written; therefore, one must choose, in keeping with a reasonable estimate of one’s lifespan, the writing one spends time with.

Lifelong readers may want to interject at this point to underscore the inestimable complexity of what seems to be a deceptively simple insight: how does one choose what to read?

A lifetime of reading is also waiting time to seek and find myself as a reader. In the first 50 years of my life, I read what was required, what was available, what was given, what was free, what could be borrowed. Most of all, what I wanted to read.

Looking back on the paperbacks, textbooks, classics, fiction, library books, pornography, comic books, newspapers, magazines, manifestos, poetry, and Jingle music chord books I picked up, I think, foremost, I enjoyed myself.

I also wondered what I was missing by being such a hedonist.

When I hit the middle of a century, I realized I couldn’t prudently expect another 50 years to fool around with. Besides, even if I wanted to, I quickly fall asleep now when reading in bed, roll over too many eyeglasses, banish peevishly to the bottom of the tottering pile those writers whose main thought I cannot ferret out after so many rereading, and so on and so forth.

Yet, middle age has slowed me down, too, to appreciate more the turning of a book’s last page. Instead of a fiesta, I gladly settle for siesta, grateful already when I finish a chapter or two before dozing off.

The book I chose to wait with on that evening vigil was VJ Campilan’s “All My Lonely Islands”.

It is a book set in the Global South: Batanes, Manila, Bangladesh. It is written by a Filipina. And while reading the novel in the company of other women checking their phones while waiting for their partners, I discovered that the narrator is named Crisanta, my sister’s namesake.

As a nod to my younger reading self, I am still curious about the world I have always enjoyed.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu January 14, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Her story

WHEN I first knew Candice Grace Cabras as an undergraduate student in my Journalism class at the St. Theresa’s College in Cebu City, she was already a “woman of substance”.

This phrase was the title of a romantic potboiler about a woman’s hardscrabble transition from poverty to wealth and power. The protagonist relied on melodrama’s conventions of “feminine” strength: physical beauty and sexual wiles.

Candice was a personable young woman then but it wasn’t just her ready smile and ebullient personality that stood out among many uniquely striking, passionate young Theresians.

When Candice’s father returned after a long absence, sickly and needy, Candice, her mother, and siblings accepted him without question. Candice voluntarily donated one of her kidneys to her father, which enabled him to enjoy life until his passing not too long ago.

In that bestselling novel, “substance” was equated with material possessions and worldly power. Candice’s gift to her father—and her lifelong adjustment to the challenges of living with only one remaining kidney—seemed to me of an essence eluding writers of romances and philosophy: what truly is love?

That question was partly answered when I read a SunStar Cebu Mar. 12, 2015 article by Michelle P. So about Candice’s participation in the 50-kilometer All-Women Ultra Marathon (Awum).

Two hours after the 10-hour cutoff, the last runner to cross the finish line, Candice fulfilled her “dream”: to finish the Awum. As So wrote, “Unlike the runners before her, there were no drum beaters to announce her approach”.

There were plenty of tears, though, from the small group of believers watching Candice take “one slow and painful step after another”: her mates at the Talisay City Runners Club (TCRC), the Awum organizers who waited for each runner to finish the “life event,” and Jerry Maque, husband of Candice and partner in raising their three children.

It was no small feat for Candice: “She's 31 years old, 5 foot three, and 250 pounds,” wrote So in the SunStar Cebu article.

Love and grit. When I recently embraced this deep wellspring of empathy and strength, Candice had marked another “life event”.

In 2017, she published “Life with JJ: Lessons from a Special Mom”. JJ is Candice and Jerry’s seven-year-old son with Down Syndrome, brother of Miguela Louise and Ezekiel.

As Candice writes in Lesson 11, “Education is Liberation”: “We have to educate the world that we are not sorry for our children… They can soar greater heights and like any of us, they deserve a special space in this world.”

One of the joys of being a teacher is being inspired by our students. Salamat kaayo for being among the best mentors, Candice.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu on the January 6, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”