It has been three weeks since the nationwide community quarantine was enforced in the Philippines. It would have been an opportune time to get back to blogging. But I was just so out of the loop that the prospect of blogging again paralyzed me. A year ago, I imagined that moving my blog over here…
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100 Favorite Books, 2018
My list of 100 favorite books isn’t even 100. I just managed 80. I could push the digits to a hundred if I add works from the same author. But I don’t like that. I like the challenge of choosing just that one work from my favorite authors. Maybe I’d change my mind and make…
Writing about My Book of the Year – Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
The last time I posted a book review was in February 2016. That was 22 months ago! Just imagine the struggle I went through when I wrote one last week. Granted, it was for a different blog (not mine), but it took me three sessions to finish a 500-word post. I’m still rusty at this.…
Book Review – The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. Why? A harrowing subject. I believe this is a difficult novel to write for Flanagan considering that parts of it are borrowed from the experiences of his father as a POW in a Japanese labor camp. The middle of five parts details the harsh conditions that POWs had to…
Book Review – Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Why? The book is full of vitality. It appeals so much to the senses. You can see the graffiti in the ghettos, hear the noise of New York streets, smell the grease in Chinatowns, taste fast food burgers and pizza deliveries, and feel the sweat and sand and keloids and…
Book Club Book Review – The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Quiet American is a quintessential book of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. It is seen by some as Greene’s anti-American sentiments. Americans should have known better than to get mixed with the affairs of Vietnam, and now look at what happened. That’s what it seems to be telling me, at least on the…
Book Review – The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Bone Clocks tells the story of Holly Sykes and it covers six decades of her life. It begins with a teenage Holly running away from her family and ends with a granny Holly trying to survive in a dystopian future where the world’s oil resource has run out. The novel is divided into six novella-length…
