Travel • Culture • Stories
“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. Croup and Mr. Vandemar.
Through secret passageways, nonexistent (in London Above) subway stations, a floating market, hidden doors, questionable angels, cloistered friars, foul sewer systems, monstrous beasts, and places governed by bizarre physics, Neverwhere takes readers on a wildly imaginative, uplifting, and thrill-packed ride.
Think Harry Potter meets Alice in Wonderland meets Peter Straub and Stephen King. That’s the strange alchemy of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.