Manila International Book Fair Finds

I only managed to score two books at the Manila International Book Fair because of the thick crowd. Imagine last week’s Travel Fair, then multiply that by three or four.

That’s a great thing, though, since it shows that book reading is still very much alive, especially among Gen Zs.

Here's a bit about what I bought.

According to its introduction, "Luzon and Mindanao" was first published in 1870, and written by Duc d’Alençon, a French traveler who was commissioned as an artillery man in the Spanish army.

Translated by E. Aguilar Cruz, it offers a rare 19th-century account of the Philippines. Blending travel narrative with ethnographic observation, the book captures landscapes, cultures, and colonial encounters, illuminating a clear portrait of Luzon and Mindanao at that time.

In "Pigafetta’s Philippine Picnic", published in 2021, historian Felice Prudente Sta. Maria retells Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicles of the flavors, feasts and culinary culture of the pre-colonial Philippines as recorded by the Venetian explorer during the 1519–1522 Magellan-Elcano expedition.

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The Ten Year Affair – Erin Somers

Literature and cinema have long framed infidelity as the realm of complex people, those seduced by ambition, power, or erotic excess, fleeing from spouses appearing dull by comparison or committing abuse. Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair resists that over used theme. Its protagonists are noticeable for their ordinariness. Like the ordinary characters played by Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep in the classic film “Falling in Love”, a story of two random commuters who always meet on the train, the book’s leading characters Cora and Sam are neighbors who are as any other normal homeowners. Cora is a mother of two, stalled in a job beneath her capacities, married to Eliot, a man full of dreams and emotionally generous husband whose very chill demeanor invites room for deceit. Sam, married to the driven and career woman Jules, is similarly unremarkable. Their affair is not born of grand passion but of domestic fatigue: the dull ache of routines perfected inside the household and the s...

Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi)

Reading Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold reminded me of those early days of discovering Haruki Murakami when Japanese fiction first revealed its different style for building atmosphere rather than relying on surprising plot-twists. Like Murakami, Kawaguchi crafts a world where the characters exists alongside the mundane, where emotional truth matters more than logic, and where the real journey is found on each character's realization. Where Murakami leans toward surrealism, existential drift, and metaphysical loneliness, Kawaguchi threads the simpler ground. He creates a world that is smaller, almost domestic – in the case for this book. The café replaces the dreamscape; regret replaces alienation. Both writers, however, share a focus for mood, memory, and the unspoken weight of human relationships. Set in a small Tokyo café rumored to offer a chance to travel through time, Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores what happens when people are briefly allowed to re...

A Guardian and a Thief - Megha Majumdar

I have always gravitated toward Asian literature, drawn to its focus to interior lives and its ability to connect the personal with the political. That pull becomes even stronger when the setting is India, a place I’ve visited four times in the past and where history, inequality, and survival often appears more powerful on the page. Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief arrives squarely within that scope, offering a speculative yet unsettlingly portrait of a near-future Kolkata reshaped by climate catastrophe and moral compromise.

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