Alternative Canons
The dialectic relationships between
In 2013, the National Book Development Board, a sub-agency of the Department of Education in the Philippines geared towards supporting book culture and production, published its 2012 Readership Survey. The survey is a cross-sectional study that was conducted in 2003, 2007, and 2012 among Filipino adults from different walks of society from all over the country. It claims that 88% of Filipino adults, or a total of 49.2 million people, voluntarily read non-school books, that most of these readers took up reading between the ages of 7-12, and that readers ages 18-34 read the most. The survey also revealed that there is relatively equal preference for texts written in Filipino and English, and the most popular reading genres are religious texts, romance/love stories, graphic novels/comic books, cookbooks, and humour/joke books. Finally, the survey revealed that readers from the lower classes actually read more books than the upper or the middle class, an interesting fact given that these people live on or below the poverty line.
These numbers indicate that readership among Filipinos is going strong, and that national readership is informed by popular culture as much as (if not more than) high literature given the titles of texts in circulation. This highlights the reality that
