As it is, do you see one wretched billboard marring the landscape advertising books rather than boobs? Of course not, and by this time you should also figure out that it’s not encouraged because knowledge is power and who wants an empowered, intelligent, and knowledgeable populace?

When my late husband, who was another bookworm, wanted to open a bookstore, a friend suggested – if he didn’t want to go bankrupt – that selling comics would be more profitable. Try asking people what they’re reading these days and you’d be surprised by some of the answers. The most common is "nothing; haven’t got the time." But think of how much time is wasted on texting jokes or for that matter going to the parlor where you could actually read a book rather than the glossies to see whether your photo appeared or not.

Be that as it may, for those who still believe in the written word here are some notable publications that you ought to have on your shelves or beside your beds or atop chairs if you’ve run out of space.

"Myself, Elsewhere" is Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s paean to an Ermita and a Manila that is gone. I once asked the author some years ago why no notable Filipino writer (herself included of course) had written about the war and her answer was that it was too painful. (There’s Javellana’s "Without Seeing the Dawn" but that was published ages ago and is no doubt out of print.) That is perhaps something that none of us who didn’t suffer a trauma can understand. There are things too difficult for words.

Ms. Guerrero’s style is a pleasure to read. It is succinct, sharply ironic (as she herself admits), and bitter. You do not lose a young husband, a home, relatives, friends and a "home" town without losing something of that belief that "God’s in His heaven/All’s right with the world." I imagine many of her generation will identify with observations about that world gone by like for instance her not being allowed to look out of the front window of her house! Certainly the prejudices and biases of the era come through clearly, propriety, religiosity, an emphasis on manners and appearances but a belief in culture and urbanity as well. Get yourself a copy; it’s a world you’ll never know.

In contrast in style and even point of view is another book on the experience of WW II in the borough next door to Ermita, the town of Malate developed by the American, Henry Jones. You have to understand that the south of the Pasig got the brunt of the savagery of the Japanese and it was here that massacres occurred – the unconscionable horrors at the German Club in San Marcelino, the atrocities at De la Salle in Taft Avenue and the carnage at Rizal Memorial complex on Vito Cruz. (This is another reason why congressmen and councilors have no business changing street names; these are historical if they even know what the word means.). Lourdes Reyes Montinola’s "Breaking the Silence" although printed in 1996 it is a must-read for those interested in the history of the Philippines and the war that destroyed a country. The title says it all; it took Ms. Montinola half a century to be able to speak about the slaughter of almost her entire family. Two brothers survived because they were elsewhere. What comes through in her story is pain: "Words fail me again, as I conjure what happened next. Once more, I want to skirt the issue. Five decades have not erased the horror and the hurt." As with Ms. Montinola, I think we owe it to ourselves and read their stories to "honor" those that time and memory and expediency have cast into oblivion.

Finally, a compelling young writer, Lisa Ottiger, has written a book "In My Absence" about a search for a grandfather she’s never known who was killed during the war She, of course, never suffered that war personally but only vicariously through her mother and grandmother’s loss. However, this is a writer and a poet with tremendous talent with words, and at her startling best her images are stunningly lyrical, describing a light as "knife-edged," of herself as "… the child I was, pained, awkward, hoping someone would speak to me, hoping someone would see me for the first time." Of alienation: "I learned to read a room’s silence…" It’s true you can be taught to write adequately but you don’t acquire that particular spark – you’ve either got it or you don’t.

In the same manner that Lourdes Montinola coped with pain and loss by not speaking about it, Lisa’s grandmother never talked to her daughter about events that had happened more than fifty years and the father she had never known "until she began to die."

The slim volume includes her poems, letters written between 1942 and 1945 by her grandfather as a POW in Bacolod that bring him back, and vignettes on her grandmother’s life with observations that make the characters vividly alive: "And then Grandma had to wait for four more years because William Harrington reasoned that he couldn’t afford both a wife and a polo pony, and in four years the pony would be old but my grandmother wouldn’t."