Hesperus
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
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
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
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
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…
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.
Eating Kafka
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.
The Last Promise by Richard Paul Evans
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.
How Famous Writers Killed Themselves
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:
