More about reading

Growing up, I considered myself very fortunate to have at my relative disposal, the extensive girlhood library of my mother and her three sisters, assiduously maintained by my Tita G on the dark wood shelves in my grandmother's house on Espana extension. My Lola, so I've been told, would buy books by the boxful from school libraries and take them up to Baguio for her children's summer reading. (Something always struck me as wrong about that - why were libraries selling their books?). The books were like no books you can find today - Grosset & Dunlap editions of various series' - Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, The Dana Girls, Honey Bunch, and various one-off titles like Nobody's Girl and Understood Betsy and Family Shoes.

I recall spending Sunday afternoons among the dusty, yellowed volumes along with my cousins, trying to decide what I would "borrow" for the week. Sometimes, Tita G, who seemed to know her shelves like the back of her hand, would make a recommendation, sometimes she would leave us to our own devices. One of her most fervent recommendations was the Maida series.

She had three volumes in a dark blue green hardcover. Maida's Little Shop, Maida's Little House and Maida's Little School.

Despite their coy, cutesy titles, the novels were rich, graceful narrations about children who, it is very likely, no longer exist in this world. And that first story of the lonely little invalid rich girl, the daughter of a Wallstreet maverick, who decides that what will make her happy would be to keep a little shop and befriends the children of the town has lingered in my mind, even now that I am 40, as I am certain it lingers in Tita G's mind.

When it became evident that our K loved reading, we started doing what my cousins and I would do as girls led back then by Tita G. We started book hunts. What I found, however, was that many of today's books for girls, even little girls exhibit a certain precociousness and preciousness that I found myself resisting. I was uneasy about the inclusion of brands in the plots, the overly flippant, overly matter-of-fact characters and their excessively easy and accessible language. I also resented some of the characters themselves - seeming to be almost like imitations of characters on television. And I wanted K to experience the pleasures of rich, complex sentences. I wanted her to read about children who did not watch tv or play video games when they were bored. In fact, I wanted her to read about children who didn't get bored - whether it was because they worked or because they had so many activities of their own making, they had no time to be bored. I wanted her to learn about children who chose to be good, to be just, to be kind, to be generous not because it is right to be these things, but because these were the kind of children they were. So I thought back to the books I loved as a girl - and I remembered the Maida series.

We had already found reissues of Understood Betsy but Maida was more difficult to come by. Finally, I found it on Amazon under the imprint Biblio Bazaar, it was a 2007 reissue of a 1909 book. A month ago, we read it together, chapter by chapter. I would not let her go off and finish it by herself. I wanted us to savour it together. It still reads like a dream.

Now she has gone back to rereading Harry Potter and Anne of Green Gables, but I have already ordered Maida's Little House. I am also in the process of buying Maida's Little School second-hand. Perhaps it might even be that old grosset and dunlap edition that Tita G has. And we wait till we can once again escape into that lush, charming, innocent yet wise world of children who are able to spend their days occupied by nothing more than the green nature that surrounded them as well as the fertile fields of their own imagination.