Reader’s Choice: AA Patawaran
What a person reads tells a lot about them. It’s a window into their thoughts, interests, beliefs, and a reflection of how they see the world. That said, who better to ask than AA Patawaran, an independent writer and published author himself, who not only reads widely but also pens stories that explore the very ideas and experiences he immerses himself in?
He is known for works like “Write Here Write Now,” “HAI[NA]KU And Other Poems,” “Manila Was A Long Time Ago,” and debut novel “Misericordia,” and his reading list is a mix of fiction and nonfiction, with classics, historical pieces, memoirs, and more.
1.What book are you reading now?
I’ve been trying to finish the “Traitor King” by Andrew Lownie since December. It’s a difficult read for me because, despite everything that has been said about them, I remain fond of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
2. What’s your favorite book?
I read widely. My all-time favorites include “The Catcher in the Rye” by JD Salinger, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides, “DV” by Diana Vreeland, and “World War Z” by Max Brooks. My last true obsession was Orhan Pamuk’s “The Museum of Innocence,” which I read during the pandemic.
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh came close, but it didn’t stay with me in the same way.
3. What book changed your life?
Many have, but Neal Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God” stands out. It taught me spiritual independence and freed me from Catholic guilt, without undoing everything Catholic school instilled in me.
4. If you had one book you would like in your library, what would it be?
I doubt I’d have a grand time reading it, but I would want the “Boxer Codex” in my private library, even if it were the only expensive item in it. While it is a Spanish manuscript, commissioned around 1590, it is, in essence, a record of the gems Spain found upon arrival, the intricate gold, the sophisticated social hierarchies, and the vibrant ethnic identities of the Philippines and Southeast Asia before they were plundered and reordered.
I feel it is my responsibility to know more about my country and my countrymen through the earliest known visual depictions of who we were before colonization.
5. Which author would you want to have dinner with?
Vladimir Nabokov. I own a copy of “Strong Opinions,” a collection of his essays and interviews. I suspect he would think me unworthy of his time, much as he did Gore Vidal and Dostoevsky, whom he famously dismissed as a “claptrap journalist” and a “slapdash comedian.”
For that reason alone, his unapologetic intellectual snobbery, and the fact that he died in 1977, dinner with him is a deliciously impossible dream, like reading “Lolita” while perched on the rings of Saturn.
6. What’s your favorite library or bookstore in the world?
This may sound cliché, but I stumbled upon Shakespeare and Company on my first trip to Paris. I didn’t realize then that it was the bookshop immortalized in Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.”
I bought a book without knowing that the cashier was George Whitman himself. I had no idea who he was, which was probably why he liked me. He took me to a floor off-limits to customers, where I found a Colette biography I had been searching for. He handed it to me and said it was mine for free. When I asked why, he replied, “Because you want it.”
I also loved the Alexandria Book Café on Andrassy Avenue in Budapest. There were few books in English, but I would buy one anyway, just to read with my coffee beneath the frescoes of its Neo-Renaissance ballroom, with gilded stuccowork, massive mirrors, and enormous crystal chandeliers. Sadly, I believe the café has closed in recent years.
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