reading outside~

January 2024 Wrap-Up✨

This month has been loooong! I finished five books, and here they are, from my most to least favorite:

5⭐ Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (post-apocalyptic)

4.5⭐ Manansala by Enrique Villasis (poetry collection) Rilla of Ingleside by LM Montgomery (classics)

3⭐ A Man and His Cat, Vol. 1 by Umi Sakurai (manga)

2.75⭐ Goodnight Punpun, Vol. 1 by Inio Asano (manga)

One of my goals for this year is to limit the books I read to one per week. And I'm abandoning that goal this early. I just loooove the feeling of having lots of books on the go and not being conscious of how many books I finish in a week. This limiting of myself just made me a tad bit sad. So that goal has to go lol.

I share more of what I read on Instagram!

Penguins new ad campaign celebrates well-read books

This new ad campaign from Penguin appeals to those of us who think beat-up, torn, taped, scribbled-upon books are more appealing than pristine ones. I wondered if the books photographed here were found as is, or lovingly distressed by the art director, then I saw the small print in the lower right of each ad, which suggests they were found that way.

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/05/penguins-new-ad-campaign-celeb.html

“A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

The more you love something, the harder it is to talk about. And that's definitely the case with Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

I first fell in love with this story in 2015. In the years that have gone by, I've lost all the plot and details of this story. But I never forgot how it made me feel. That last scene is imprinted still, in my memory...

Station Eleven is set in a wasteland, some twenty years after a pandemic wiped out 99% of the population and subsequent societal collapse. Unlike most futuristic dystopian novels, Emily St John Mandel put humanity back into the past: without the Internet, without the capacity to travel great distances, without the safety of laws, without society as we know it. Told in fragments and shifting timelines, we mainly follow a theater group known as the Traveling Symphony as they go through towns and settlements near one of the Great Lakes, performing Shakespeare.

Revisiting this now, it felt like reading the story for the first time. And it pleases me that this old favorite stood the passage of time. It's still a beautiful and well-written story about the human condition.

It's a story about pandemics, about found families, about the importance of community, curiosity, and hope.

And above all, this is a story about the necessity of art. After all, survival is insufficient.

Follow me on Instagram!

i want to spend the rest of the cold season staying home & reading children's books

JOMP Book Photo Challenge || January || 4 || Warm Fuzzies

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

current reads + lavender tea 🪻

Here it is—my Top Reads of 2023! 🎉

This year, I managed to finish a total of 101 books, and this is the top 22%.

I can't quite bring myself to rate these books, so I just divided the list into categories and arranged them according to when I read them.

I hope you get wonderful recommendations from this post! (:

Felt like I needed a quiet time today. Glad I pushed myself to go out and read. Also, Merry Christmas from the Philippines! 🎄✨

📍Fully Booked x Kinokuniya, Pasay City, Philippines | I got two books from this bookshop trip + I finally bought a Kindle PPW!

My brain is too fried for book reviews, but I wanted to post something, so here's my latest #bookhaul instead 😅 I don't buy many physical books, but when I do, they're almost always Filipino-authored ones. May naligaw na Japanese-translated book, pero I have my eye on that title for a while and nagsale si Fully Booked kaya pinatos ko na. --- Musta naman kayo? ü What have you been reading lately?

Twenty-eight days to go before we say goodbye to 2023. What is time, really? Anyway, a month's ending means a wrap-up in this space. So here are eight books I managed to finish in November, with mini-reviews: 5⭐ 📖 Tagalog Bestsellers of the Twentieth Century: A History of the Book in the Philippines by Patricia May B. Jurilla—this is my favorite reading journey of the month for sure! 📖Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë—i love this book, but I hate everyone. well, everyone Hareton. i love him to death! 4⭐ 📱Garlic & the Vampire by Bree Paulsen—such a cute and wholesome graphic novel! I'm definitely picking up the sequel. 📱Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit by Jen Campbell—jen is my favorite book reviewer, but I think her poetry is not for me. still, I enjoyed this very personal collection of hers. 3⭐ 📱Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Kristen R. Ghodsee—very much a primer book. i recommend it to young people interested in the topic! 🎧Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino—this would have benefitted me more had I read this is 2019 when it was published. now it just tells me things I already know, and nothing in the writing particularly wowed me. 📱Braised Pork by An Yu—not bad. but i was hoping to like this more than i did. would recommend it to fans of weird books! 2.5⭐ 📖 Armor by John Bengan—ah, i love the idea behind this short story collection. unfortunately, the writing did not gel with me.

Armor by John Bengan is a collection of thirteen stories set in late 90s Davao City when the then mayor Rodrigo Duterte started his (in)famous "cleansing" of the crime-infested city, a purge we now know so well.

From a Death Squad recruit on his first day on the job to a drug user Miss Gay contestant, these stories give the reader a taste of Duterte's Davao before the War on Drugs became a national phenomenon.

The premise, setting, and subject matter appeal immensely to me; add to that the fact that this book is a National Book Awards finalist, so of course, I was excited to pick it up. It's an anticipated read.

Which is why I'm sad that this did not work for me. While I enjoyed the 90s feel of the whole collection, overall, I found the writing bland and clunky in places. The Filipino expressions, kasabihan, lost their power when translated into English. The second-person point of view is wasted on stories that elicit little emotion from the reader. Except for a few standouts, I did not jive very much with the telling of these important stories.

The standouts in this collection are the following:

"Slaughter Story" and "Manny Pacquiao Speaks to a Butterfly in California"—both of which I like because of their experimental nature; the title story "Armor" and my favorite, "Disguise."

Follow me on Instagram to know what I'm reading!

Some book and art photos from a recent trip to Baguio City🌲|

I brought The Kindness of Birds by Merlinda Bobis, but of course, I wasn't able to read it. Wishful thinking lang talaga magdala ng book on vacations eh lol. I managed to sneak-read some stories from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, though, because I have it on ebook. So far, I'm loving it. 🤍

Another highlight of the trip was BenCab museum. The man himself was there when we went, but because I'm shy, so I did not dare to take a photo with him. I just took a photo of the legend from where I was seated. Oh well.

I also finally saw Woman with Fan by BenCab. This painting is the cover art of Gina Apostol's Insurrecto. I had to take a pic.

Of course, I had to visit Mt. Cloud! Sadly, I missed both Ninotchka Rosca and Ambeth Ocampo's talks Sayang. Anyway, I bought five books from there plus a cute bag that I got from the Night Market.

So much walking in this city! (:

This has been sitting on my shelf for a while, but I finally read it for Nonfiction November this year. And I'm glad I did. I got so much out of this one.

I'm already bound to love the book because I'm endlessly interested in the topic. But the writing is also commendable: the presentation is clear, and the flow of topics is intuitive. It's an academic text, but it's not dense at all. Imo, it's a friendly read even for casual readers!

The anecdotes are interesting; the factual data humbling and somewhat depressing. But overall, I very much enjoyed my reading journey with this book! ü

If you're even remotely interested in the history of books and publishing in the Philippines, I highly recommend picking this book up.

I share more of what I read on Instagram!

I hesitate to call whatever this it is I’m writing here as book reviews, so I guess tawagin ko na lang silang #ReadingJourney. So ayun, here’s my reading journey with RM Topacio-Aplaon’s “Topograpiya ng Lumbay.”

Based on this book alone, I find a lot of similarities between RM Topacio-Aplaon’s writing and themes to Haruki Murakami. In my head, I see him as a “grounded Murakami.”

Topograpiya ng Lumbay follows three lonely people whose lives intersect because of a horrific event that coincided with Yolanda. In the span of a week or so, we follow their journey to unearth the past and, more importantly, find themselves. It’s one of those nothing-really-happens book. The reader just follows these lonely characters to places and listens to their pseudo-deep conversations. As I said, very Murakami-esque.

Another (unfortunate) similarity between RM and Haruki is how they write women. The fetishization of thin, lithe women is all over the novel. In more than one scene, Melody, who has a ‘maliit na suso’ at ‘mapupulang tuhod,’ masturbates for nothing but to cater to the male gaze. (I’m just tired of it. Having read a lot of women authors, I am highly sensitive to these things now. And I’m glad I am. I wouldn’t have noticed all of these bullshit when I was sixteen, and that’s sinister.)

That said, there were enough interesting elements in the novel to keep me going. It touched on topics that I thought were interesting. I can rally behind the body horror-ish vibes of the book. There are many scenes where the gross bodily fluids and functions were underscored. Clearly, may pinaglalaban din si RM pagdating sa depiction ng kadiring mga bagay na ginagawa ng mga katawan natin sa mga nobela. Merong mga pangugulangot, pagkamot ng bayag, pag-amoy ng hininga etc. At masasabi ko namang na-enjoy ko yung grossness.

There were moments when characters were used as mouthpieces. And I thought hindi ganon ka-elegant yung pagka-insert ng mga opinyon nya sa narrative. For one, RM has some strong opinions about Filipino readers who seem to prefer English novels, which I do not agree with. I tend to give Filipinos more grace just because our colonial past, our government, and the systems here are shit.

It’s the novel’s political dimension that I enjoyed the most. It felt to me like I was let in on a secret. I should say tho, that all the horrific scenes happen around this political dimension; there’s torture, mutilation, and bestiality (which thankfully was not depicted in a graphic way.) And I know that politics in rural areas of the country are violent—who can ever forget the Maguindanao Massacre?—but it’s important to be reminded.

Overall, this is not a favorite book, but I’m not giving up on RM Topacio Aplaon yet. (hello, cognitive dissonance!) I still have two of his books that I want to read before I can say for sure that he’s not the author for me.

May pakiramdam akong maiinis si RM Topacio Aplaon na Ingles ‘tong review ko ng libro nya, but whatever.

What a fucking book, honestly. I was angry the whole time!

Catherine (the older) is the most horrible person in Wuthering Heights, imo. She was totally like, I'd marry Edgar, but Heathcliff is my love, and we can be a throuple! She doesn't care about anyone but herself. She really was gaslight, gatekeep, make-yourself-sick-to-death girlboss in this novel.

I almost gave this book 3 stars because I was so tired of Heathcliff's bullshit. (I cannot possibly go lower because the language is just so beautiful! So many intense, beautiful lines!) But the saving grace of this novel are the last three chapters. I thought the ending was phenomenal. I love that Heathcliff got no satisfaction from making everyone miserable in the end. And I'm happy that the book left me hopeful for Catherine and Hareton. I love Hareton so much. He's the best character in the novel.

Five freaking stars. I wish we had more novels from Emily Brontë!