Book Finds and Good Reads

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.

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.