JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

On Monday we published our Basic Questions for Presidential Candidates, and on Wednesday we got invited to merienda with Mar Roxas at Bahay na Puti, the Araneta compound in Cubao. The occasion was a meet-and-greet with bloggers which naturally turned into a Q&A. We got to ask many of our questions and Carlos Celdran, Cecile Van Straten, Ramon Bautista and other prominent personalities in the social media asked a lot more.

The candidate fielded questions and gave well thought-out replies which recognized the complexities of the issues. No easy answers and glib sound bites—as a nerd we appreciate the thoroughness, but this could be a disadvantage in campaigning. How to boil down the issues into digestible tweetables in our short attention span age: there’s a job.

Our column on the meeting with Mar is out on Monday. If the other candidates would like to invite us to coffee and answer our questions, we would be happy to accept. Before the merienda, we got to stake out Mar Roxas’s library and judge his taste in reading matter.

This is a serious library, all books bound or covered and organized according to the Dewey decimal system, a rebuke to those of us who use the psychic library system (“I know where the book is. I feel it is somewhere in this direction…”).

There were all the requisite history, biography, sociology, philosophy and economics titles. It is comforting to know that someone aspiring to the presidency has access to the “classics” of contemporary intellectual thought.

However, we were more interested in the candidate’s fiction choices. We believe that the novels and stories one has read speak of his humanity. (That’s why it’s called “humanities”, duh.)

It’s like going through someone’s iTunes playlist to find out if you want to be associated with them. (“You have Air Supply. Goodbye.”) Except that given how easy it is to download songs, movies, and books today, digital files are a less reliable gauge. Books, the tree products kind, you have to seek out. Dostoevsky in hardcover: we can talk.

Someone in this house has read the Arthurian myths, as evidenced by the well-thumbed copies of T.H. White, Malory, Mary Stewart. Did we say T.H. White?

When we commended Mar Roxas on the contents of his library, he explained that it used to be his father’s office and many of the books had been acquired by his father. There are fewer books after 2007, he added, because that’s when he started reading on an iPad.

We approve of Mar Roxas’s library. If the other candidates would like to invite us to check out their personal libraries, email us or leave a comment.

P.S. During the Q&A we remembered that during a recent viewing of our favorite Ishmael Bernal movie Salawahan (1979), we suddenly realized that the main characters are called Gerardo and Manuel Roxas. Mar’s full name is Manuel and his brother Dinggoy’s was Gerardo.