Hesperus
March 29, 2008
Seeing that National Bookstore is selling Hesperus Press editions of lesser known works of renowned classic authors with a 75% discount, and thus transforming a P339 price tag into P84.50, and fearing that I may never have another chance to get myself books of this quality and quantity, I spent a fourth of my share of our Finance class project’s profit on purchasing the books.
Having liked another book from Hesperus Press, namely Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Fatal Eggs and having received good reviews from my girlfriend Beryl who bought herself a copy of Jules Vernes’ A Fantasy of Dr. Ox, also from Hesperus Press, I was convinced to buy myself eight other titles from the same publishing house:
Innovative Ways of Telling Stories
March 27, 2008
Came across an interesting new Penguin project…
According to the Guardian, “The We Tell Stories project has been created by Penguin in partnership with alternate reality games company SixtoStart. Other participating writers include Toby Litt, who was named as a Granta best young British novelist, Naomi Alderman, winner of the 2006 Orange prize for new writing, and Mohsin Hamid, whose The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize.”
The Joy of Reading
March 27, 2008
Reading books, be it a novel, a classic work of fiction, a biography, a political or philosophical treatise, a historical account, or what have you, has always been one of the most enduring joys in my life. Our family’s Holy Week excursion in Mantalongon, Dalaguete gave me another occasion to prove this.
The Perfect Gift
March 16, 2008
I always found books to be the perfect gift for any occasion. Books, a National Book Development Board survey finding reveals, are considered to be good gifts by Filipinos.
Keeping up with this tradition, I gave my favorite younger sister a book for her birthday yesterday. Alya Simone is now fifteen. I handed her The Fifth Mountain, which I bought from Beryl, since she always professed love for the writings of Paulo Coelho – one the most popular writers today.
Two Films for Last Potter Book
March 14, 2008
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be made into two movies, announces Warner Brothers, with part one arriving in cinemas in November 2010 and part two following in May 2011. The Guardian newspaper writes, “Saying goodbye to Harry Potter has been hard - for fans… and even more so the publishers and booksellers for whom he’s been such a spectacular earner - but the Hollywood studio in charge of the film adaptations has found a way to postpone the last goodbye…â€Read the rest of this entry »A Book a Day…
March 13, 2008
Once again, I broke my moratorium on the buying of books and am officially revoking it because of my inability to implement it.
I just received my part of the profit for Binibining UP Pageant, our advertising class project, and bought myself The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov. The Hesperus Press edition with a foreword by Doris Lessing is sold with a 75% discount in National Bookstore. I bought the book for P84 only instead of the original price of P339!
I consider it a reward for having presented what Prof. Teresita Rodriguez described as the best plan for our advertising class. For the said paper, my group was assigned to make a campaign plan for the Sangguniang Kabataan elections. My group mates conducted surveys in a certain barangay. We explored the community and interviewed officials and residents not a few times. The efforts paid off in the end.
Reader. Blogger. Winner!
March 12, 2008
Take the Blog Awards Challenge!
Happy World Book Day!
March 6, 2008
I never knew that such a commemoration ever existed at all in the first place. But yes, today, March 6, 2008, is World Book Day. It was started in the United Kingdom and Ireland two decades ago to promote the enjoyment of books and reading. I hope book lovers here in the Philippines would also begin organizing parallel activities here in the country in line with the celebration.
In the mean time, do check out the ten things you didn’t know about books from The Britannica blog. Just done reading Mikhail Lermontov’s only novel A Hero of Our Time and I must say that it is now in the list of my favorite books. Also, the first few parts of Beyond Good and Evil texts from Dailylit.com has finally arrived. Nietzsche riles against the futility of the philosopher’s search for truth and the pointlessness of the concept of the antitheses. Very convoluted writing, but the guy does have a knack for interesting soundbytes - and a fertile ground for varying interpretations.
No Time to Read?
February 28, 2008
I just subscribed to Dailylit.com, a website that promises to remedy the “I’ve no time to read†syndrome. Says Graeme Allister of the Guardian Book Blog of Dailylit.com: “the books come to you, as daily morsels in your inbox. Over 800 books have been divided into bite-size pieces to be emailed to you every day.â€
I’m now waiting for my first installment of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Also started reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn in .pdf format in an attempt to finish my first ebook. This was the first title sent to me by TOR publishing as part of its new free ebook service. But there’s more. Simon Owens of Bloggasm emailed me this tip: “I recently spoke to two sources on condition of anonymity who told me that this is just a small part of a much larger expansion for TOR that will include social networking and original online short fiction and nonfiction.â€
Eating Kafka
February 24, 2008
While the old The Economist article’s title is actually a play on Marie Antoinette’s famous saying “let them eat cake,†why can’t our own government here think of something like the following government literacy program in Chile?
Let them eat Kafka
The president enlists the literary criticsASK Chileans what they are reading and the answer will probably be Isabel Allende’s “La Suma de los DÃasâ€, a memoir by their country’s best-known living writer. If, that is, they read anything at all: in a recent survey, 45% said they never read books and 34% did so only occasionally.
Situations
February 22, 2008
If included in Bergan’s Guardian Film Blog’s entry, this post would belong to the obscure category along with the film titles One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Written on the Wind, Some Came Running, etc. And rightly so, my cerebral wanderings are now hovering in an assortment of events and discourses from the week – particularly on campus politics, postmodernism, Arroyo, God and wealth.
The Last Promise by Richard Paul Evans
February 16, 2008
I have just finished reading the book of Richard Paul Evans entitled The Last Promise. It actually took me a while to finish this particular book which is uncharacteristic of me because I usually take just a few days to finish a paperback or a few hours if I read uninterrupted.
The book to me was dragging in the early pages but I think that is because I have been used to the fast paced storytelling of crime and suspense authors. Towards the end however, I had a difficult time putting it down. Since I read just before I sleep, I stayed up late a lot just to get another page in.
The Rise of Free Online Books
February 13, 2008
Paulo Coelho gives us an innovative example on how to get rich as an author. He’s been “pirating his own work for years, spreading electronic versions of his novels over the BitTorrent filesharing network for potential readers to download.†He even established the blog The Pirate Coelho for this purpose, the Guardian Newspaper Book Blog reports:
…giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen. Whereas music downloads, free or paid-for, are conveniently portable and these days more and more preferred to traditional media.
Most publishers are lost on how to deal with the Internet, but some book publishers are already following Coelho’s example as they upload entire books online for free downloading. “HarperCollins is releasing complete texts from a small selection of authors for periods of a month to test how free access affects sales… with Neil Gaiman and Paolo Coelho lined up to be among the first clutch of six titlesâ€
Free Radiohead In Rainbows Download
February 11, 2008
Last December, I pointed out where we can download the bonus disc for Radiohead’s new In Rainbows album. Now I found one of those places in the Internet where Radiohead’s latest album can be freely downloaded. One only needs to sign up an account with Multiply to start downloading it here. Cheers!
In history, Simon Montefiore’s biography Young Stalin reveals a less known bit of information about the totalitarian dictator. Stalin was a passable romantic poet in his younger days! The Washington Post has a book review of Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy. It chronicles the “incredible double life†of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Correspondent… and Viet Cong Agent. And USAToday talks on how the Internet took over the World. From its birth by the National Science Foundation 25 years ago to the information boom of the present, the Internet has forever changed our lives in ways we can only begin to fathom.
Meanwhile, Manuel Quezon III continues his coverage of the Lozada testimony. Also, Mad Tomato invited me to the Big Bang World Record meme:
How Famous Writers Killed Themselves
February 8, 2008
In the newly published book, The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters (February 7, 2008), Gary Lachman writes about ten famous literary figures who have taken their own lives.
Anne Sexton gassed herself in her car, Ernest Hemmingway shot his own head with a pistol, Thomas Chatterton took arsenic, Heinrich von Kleist shot his cancer-ridden lover before putting the gun’s barrel in his own mouth, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself, and Jack London died of a morphine overdose.
The following were extracted by Times Online from the book (which I’m adding to my book wishlist). Of the ten literary suicides, I find these two the most heartwrenching:
Still Awestruck by Reportory Philippines’ Hamlet
February 6, 2008
Last Thursday, I saw Hamlet, my first Shakespeare stage play. Guess what? I didn’t fall asleep, YAY! Since it’s my first time to even hear Hamlet’s verses, I did not know what to expect off it. I did not even have the slightest clue that this was a tragedy. What I do know is I’m too old to still not know anything about it so one invite from Lorna Lopez of thebachelorgirl and I’m off to Onstage in Greenbelt 1 on a weeknight after work.
If you want to at least see a Shakespeare play in this lifetime and want something that won’t bore you out of your wits, then this show is for you. I’m not Shakespeare savvy but I totally dug this shiz.
Read more here.
The 100 Best Works of Fiction
February 4, 2008
Halfway through Cervantes’ Don Quixote - at last done with its voluminous first part - I’m now putting the book down to read the equally voluminous second part for a later time.
I’ve began reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment again, starting where I left it unfinished two years ago. And I also plan to try reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace again (in the not so near future that is!).
Interestingly, the three are part of the 100 best works of fiction as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries and listed in a Norwegian Book Club report.
A World Without Books?
February 3, 2008
A world without books is a world I just can’t live in. Hence, the discussion in the blog Torned and Frayed in Manila about the “Twilight of Books†makes me sad. It is in this context that the following must-see YouTube videos from The Penguin blog try to answer the questions, is there a better future for books or are we heading for a world without books.
Read the rest of this entry »
A Precious Gem of a Haul
January 25, 2008
I love used books shops. First and foremost, I like the cheap prices. Secondly, though it does take a longer time to look for what one wants to read, the act of literally scouring for the books of one’s liking makes them all the more valuable once found.
Unlike when shopping in the usual bookshop, like maybe National Bookstore, I do not target the exact titles of the books I want to buy, I rarely reserve what I want to buy and do not expect to request for the shipment of titles from customer service.
I simply get what I find and I love it that way. Here in Metro Cebu, I scour the book shelves and cases of Book Sale, RSO Trading, and the office supply sections of some malls and department stores.
Here are some of the used books I bought since the start of the semester, the prices of which ranged from P10 to P45 and because of which I have placed a moratorium on completing my book wishlist until I have finished reading 2/3rds of this precious gem of a haul:
Digital Photographer Magazine Issue # 18 - The Portrait
January 24, 2008
If you want to gain more insight into the most powerful of photography genres then look no further than to DPP Issue #18.
Featured in the cover is the rock legend Pepe Smith.
Digital Photographer Philippines Magazine Issue # 18 - The Portrait is expected to be delivered by the printers today and should be available in stores this weekend.
Stay tuned and visit Shutter Box Philippines in the next couple of days to find out how you could get a FREE Subscription to Digital Photographer Philippines Magazine.
New Page to House FREE Books from the Net
January 15, 2008
This is an announcement. I’ve added a new blog page housing a list of books (mostly classics) that can be read FREE on the Internet.
Read the rest of this entry »
Barack Obama’s Books Outsell Hillary Clinton’s
January 12, 2008
Here’s something for those of us avidly following the US elections.
“Hillary Clinton may have bested Barack Obama at the voting box in New Hampshire, but Obama remains a big winner at bookstores,†says The Millions blog:
According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 per cent of industry sales, [Clinton’s] Living History averaged around 1,000 sales a week in December and early January, compared with more than 7,000 a week for [Obama’s] Audacity of Hope and more than 2,000 for Dreams From My Father.
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