Book Finds and Good Reads

  With suspense novels, it is a stretch to expect the level of prose and narrative pull found in Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River , or, more precisely, in psychological suspense like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and a select few other masterful writers in the genre.

  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...

  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.

  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...

Finally, I received the books I ordered from Big Bad Wolf Books last March.  It's all Asian lit:  - Silence by Shūsaka Endō - Ticket to India by N.H. Senzai - The Windfall by Diksha Basu - Selection Day by Aravind Adiga - Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. ” - George Santayana  But sadly, these books are not easily accessible nor available to most Filipinos today.  What are easily available to them are TikTok and Facebook history revisionism content.  Plus, our education system has faltered in promoting reading literacy and comprehension that most people today are easily swayed by fake narratives flooding the most accessible medium -- social media.

 Booksale haul. All for only 125 pesos.  I swear, Booksale has gifted me with way better and interesting reads than NB and Fullybooked combined. - The Speech of Angels by Sharon Mass (and because I'm a sucker for stories set in India)

  It was a chance encounter with a long-coveted title—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—that led me to Fully Booked at Gateway Mall. There, among the fiction and nonfiction, was Capote’s so-called “nonfiction novel,” a genre-defining work that continues to cast a long, chilling shadow over American letters.

Haruki Murakami’s 1988 novel Dance Dance Dance, was my very first foray into his peculiar world (on the recommendation of my former and late officemate named Fae), turned out to be a strange, fascinating initiation.

  In Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis turns the scalpel inward, dissecting not only his persona but the legacy of his fiction. The novel opens with the style of an autobiography, recounting his meteoric rise to literary stardom at the age of 23, following the publication of Less Than Zero. Hollywood came calling (the novel was adapted into a film starring Robert Downey Jr.), and Ellis was soon anointed a literary figurehead of the so-called Brat Pack, chronicler of the hollow glamour and nihilistic indulgence that marked the Reagan era. With American Psycho and Glamorama, he established a signature style drenched in sex, drugs, and a nihilism sharpened into satire.

  If On the Road was Jack Kerouac’s ecstatic hymn to youth, movement, and rebellion, then The Dharma Bums is its quieter, more contemplative sibling. Published in 1958, just a year after On the Road transformed Kerouac into a reluctant icon, The Dharma Bums trades the open highway for the high trails, the jazz-inflected chaos of cities for the peace of mountaintops.

  A magical, wicked story about Richard Mayhew, whose life is forever changed after he helps a bleeding girl on a London sidewalk. That single act pulls him into a reality far different from the world he thought he knew. Once again, Neil Gaiman vividly conjures a “world within a world” setting—strange, shadowy, and brimming with imagination. “The Marquis scratched the side of his nose. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘understand this: there are two Londons. There’s London Above—that’s where you lived. And there’s London Below—the underside—inhabited by people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you’re one of them.’” —Neverwhere Leaving behind the familiar streets of London Above, Richard embarks on a strange journey through London Below, meeting a colorful and unforgettable cast: the mysterious girl named Door; the enigmatic Marquis de Carabas; Hunter, a fierce bodyguard with a legendary reputation; talking rats; and a hilariously unhinged yet bloodthirsty pair of villains—Mr. Crou...

My book haul in India. Got these at around 200-350 Rupees (150-260 PhP). Would have bought more if I got extra space on my backpack. (the two fictional Theroux books were set in India) and the one from Rabindranath Tagore (whose former house - now turned into a museum, we visited in Kolkata) is a collection of short stories.  The opening chapter of "The Granta Book of India" titled "Blood" is a gripping account of the infamous "Partition" event between Pakistan and India. I've a lot to learn still and I regret not buying more India-related literature. "The Postmaster" - Rabindranath Tagore "A story of Mughal India" - Timeri N. Murari "The Great Railway Bazaar" - Paul Theroux "A Dead Hand in Calcutta" - Paul Theroux "The Granta Book of India" - Ian Jack "The Elephanta Suite" - Jack Kerouac

My book haul at the National Bookstore warehouse sale. I got all for just under 750 pesos.

How vital it is, for some of us, to encounter On the Road not as the edited novel the world came to know, but in its raw, unbroken form, in its legendary scroll, typewritten by Jack Kerouac on a continuous, 120-foot roll of tracing paper, sheets cut and taped together by hand to form a literal and figurative road. Composed in a fevered, three-week burst of creative energy in April 1951, the scroll stands as a pure artifact of Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose,” a manifesto of movement and momentum, uninterrupted by paragraph breaks, unfiltered by convention, and brimming with the restless urgency that defined a generation.

Let me start this review by quoting Harlan Ellison “anyone who misses this milestone event in the genre of the fantastic is a myopic dope.” I’m glad that after reading Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” i am not a myopic dope anymore. For some they ask the question “Why comic books should grow this far?”

 They say this comic book was the driving force behind Heath Ledger’s brutal portrayal of Joker in the movie “The Dark Knight”. It might be the case, because Joker, in this book was at his most brutal ever. Alan Moore left no inhibitions at how violent and mad Joker can be.

Satori in Paris was a short autobiographical book (about a bit over 100 pages) by Jack Kerouac in which he describes as about: