The Automaton

Photo

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:10:37 +0800

The Descendants

Hugo

Ides of March

Moneyball

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Midnight in Paris

A Separation

Margin Call

Bridesmaids

The Artist

“The Picador 40th design started before all the titles...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:14:04 +0800

“The Picador 40th design started before all the titles were confirmed, which, while not an ideal way of working, enabled me to concentrate on creating a series style.

I tried many different approaches, using typography only to convey the subject, a template into which different illustrations could fit, very simple shapes and flat colours, all of which evolved into the more detailed black and white series. Some titles would obviously benefit from being less graphic and so I commissioned Rob Hunter to work alongside me on those.

Originally the series started with a more rigid feel, using the same typography and positioning on all, but by using the black and white to unite them it meant that a typeface could be chosen to suit each title. And of course, I couldn’t resist a nod to the classic white spine, which always looked great on a bookshelf.

Every cover is different and I think works individually, capturing something unique in the book, but when seen together they work as a set, although I’m sure everyone will have a favourite, myself included!”

—Neil Lang, Senior Designer for Picador

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:41:00 +0800

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, 2011)

My Wand is Better Than Yours

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:14:28 +0800

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
D: David Yates
S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman

There’s something not quite right in saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the popular film series based on J. K. Rowling’s ridiculously successful collection of seven children’s books about a mostly hapless boy wizard, is the worst among all eight entries in the Warner Bros.-powered franchise. To say so is to assert that the film is, actually, bad. It is not. A more accurate manner of describing the film relative to its cinematic siblings is to say that it’s the least good of the bunch. If anything, this belief, held both by most viewers and by most critics, betokens the singular richness of the film series’ source material as well as the skill with which the filmmakers, within the span of a decade, adapted it—all six and two halves of it.

Order of the Phoenix was the series directorial debut of the then virtually unknown David Yates. The film was a modest success (which is still saying something, considering that what is being spoken of is a goddamn Harry Potter film), fraught as it was from the start with the hazards of condensing the longest and arguably least good (not worst) Harry Potter book into two hours, more or less, of celluloid. The result was at best pleasant, a corrugated affair having many a montage sequence, more than what a typical inspirational sports movie holds. Nevertheless, it was indicative of Yates’s nascent flair for character- and plot-driven fantasy, away from his usual forays into social realism. Yates went on to direct the remaining installments, thereby displaying his developing authorial confidence: from his mind’s eye emerged the deliciously somber Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the affectingly wistful Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and, finally, the frantically fleet-footed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But montage sequences are, three films and four years since the release of Order of the Phoenix, still among the things up Yates’s sleeve. To his credit, though, in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 their use is more compulsory than convenient.

Several montages in the final Harry Potter film are instances of fast cutting, signifying the increasingly tenuous mental link between Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe, troubled and stubbled) and his lifelong enemy, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, bald and appalled). These occur every time a Horcrux is found and destroyed by Harry and his constant companions, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). A Horcrux, in Rowling’s imagined parlance, is an object in which a fragment of a person’s soul is stored in his intention to achieve immortality. In accordance with plot logic, that person remains unbeatable until all his Horcruxes are vanquished. But the film, although it sneaks a short reintroduction of the Deathly Hallows themselves (a different set of articles of magic purported to make the person who possesses them a master of death) before a wizened character’s brief but ultimately important speech about wand lore, spends no precious time in briefing the uninitiated about Horcruxes. Nor should it. Plenty of expository dialogues have been devoted to them in Half-Blood Prince, and there are enough manifestations anyway of Voldemort’s affinity with the dark objects to aid the novice viewer.

Since the onset of Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Harry, Ron, and Hermione have been on the lookout for the Horcruxes Voldemort made before he met his downfall the night he tried to kill the then infant Harry, and at the close of Deathly Hallows: Part 1 three of the presumed six (plus Voldemort’s own body makes a total of seven, a magically potent number) have already been done away with. Deathly Hallows: Part 2 consequently sees the trio hunting for the other three. The remainder of their quest is made even more pressing by Voldemort’s not unexpected attack on the Hogwarts castle, their magical boarding school, where they abscond in hopes of being reunited with their friends and family as well as finding therein a Horcrux or two. The ensuing battle naturally compounds the urgency of the Horcrux hunt, and hence the film appears to derive satisfaction from its newfound briskness, even giving a few secondary characters their best and most fist-pumping scenes in the entire series amid its blistering pace. (Ron’s mother’s famous pre-duel line to Helena Bonham Carter’s vicious Bellatrix Lestrange, rendered in all caps in the book, is uttered otherwise: it is now a calmer yet resolute, “Not my daughter, you bitch!” which should please fans nonetheless.) In this respect, as far as tone and pace are concerned, Part 2 is almost diametrically opposite to the decidedly atmospheric Part 1.

Whereas each of the previous films depicted events that mostly happened throughout a period of months, if not a full year, the closing film of the franchise, bar its saccharine epilogue, has a unique time frame of only around 24 hours, picking up right where Deathly Hallows: Part 1 left off (Voldemort stealing the notorious Elder Wand, one of the three Deathly Hallows, from the tomb of Dumbledore, its former owner and Harry’s mentor) and ending with the inevitable final face-off between Harry and Voldemort. In the interim a significant sort-of montage sequence is presented. Immediately following a standout display of talent from actor Alan Rickman and itself containing more demonstrations of the same, it’s a jumble of strands of memories from the mind of Severus Snape (Rickman), Harry’s least favorite (perhaps worst) teacher and Dumbledore’s murderer. Dubbed “The Prince’s Tale,” it is to Part 2 as the handsomely animated “Tale of the Three Brothers,” which tells the origin story of the Deathly Hallows, is to Part 1. It reveals through a succession of beautifully framed flashbacks a couple of plot twists confirming what most viewers, including non-readers, have suspected long ago (in the case of the readers, before the release of the final book). One revelation concerns a Horcrux and an act of self-sacrifice, while the other concerns a Horcrux and an act of self-sacrifice.

Death, given the film’s intimations of a main character’s vain attempts of evading it contrary to another’s and his allies’ heroic acts towards confronting it, looms large throughout Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But, of course, underneath all the surface tension lies the all too imminent triumph of love, doubtless the overarching theme of the series and, as Rowling and company have made crystal clear, the greatest magic there is. This much is evident especially during the aforementioned montage of memories and in the scene marking the film’s halfway point, which shows the trio, not unaided by friends, bravely crossing the school courtyard war-torn and inundated with Voldemort’s army.

It’s a tad easy to extol—or, indeed, dismiss—Deathly Hallows: Part 2 as a contemporary war movie, albeit rendered bloodless and PG-13 by its diegetic contrivance of people pointing glorified pieces of wood at one another hardly resulting in laceration and hemorrhage. It unfetteredly makes a case for the persistence of good against evil, laudable but played to a fault in the way the good guy appears to do things that are beyond what he’s actually capable of, what with his somewhat unimpressive, luck-laden seven-year history with teenage wizardry, and in the way the bad guy struggles, by dint of poor, blindsided planning and the deus ex machina-esque importance of the allegiance of said glorified pieces of wood. But no matter: Harry and Voldemort’s prolonged match, as well as the other events in the legendary Battle of Hogwarts, is as exhilarating as any climactic exchange of salvos in a bona fide war movie, its aftermath no less bittersweet for its having been fought in a world where healing and repair are seemingly achieved with just a wave of a wand.

Deathly Hallows: Part 2 can also be seen as the culmination of a series of films about a war more personal, one that is fought with angst and acne, with hormones and rebellion. Harry Potter, it must be acknowledged, is an extended allegory of the perks and pains of growing up and approaching the threshold between adolescence and maturity. One of the memorable scenes in Order of the Phoenix—memorable not because it’s well-staged but because it sticks out like a zit ripe for the pricking—is an awkward kissing scene between Harry and his first girlfriend under—what else?—a sprig of mistletoe, although one that’s filled with Nargles, probably. In Deathly Hallows: Part 2, too, osculatory interludes take place, reminders and celebratory acts of affection and connection amid the attendant disorder of earthly existence, common, as it happens, to wizards and Muggles both.

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3) “The El Bimbo...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:32:00 +0800

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3)

“The El Bimbo Variations” by Adam David (2010). Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” has been translated to numerous languages, not including, not surprisingly, Filipino. But not to worry: Adam David proudly presents “The El Bimbo Variations,” the closest thing—probably the only thing—Philippine literature has to a local version of Queneau’s masterpiece of verbal smithing. In it David subjects the famous first line of the Eraserheads song “Ang Huling El Bimbo” (“Kamukha mo si Paraluman nung tayo ay bata pa.”) to different sorts of formal treatments. Often he takes his cue from the work his literary forebear put in “Exercises in Style,” but he also includes new forms and techniques of playful textual manipulation interspersed with ingenious graphic material made in collaboration with illustrator Josel Nicolas and inspired by Matt Madden’s own tribute to Queneau, the graphic novel “99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.” Finding a more entertaining collection of renditions of a single line from a song will likely be an exercise in futility.

“Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo” by Will Self (2005). J. G. Ballard’s disturbing novel of automotive paraphilia, “Crash,” is recalled in “Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual,” a fantastical yet sometimes all-too-real tale of a family man gone astray. It is the first of two short stories by English enfant terrible Will Self collected by Penguin UK as part of its series of 70 super-slim editions published in celebration of its 70th anniversary. The other is “A Story of Europe,” the tale of a toddler in London and a German businessman. It’s laden with wordplay, but it’s unnerving enough to warrant a comparison with any piece of New Yorker short fiction by Shirley Jackson. (Reviewed here.)

“Mr. Thundermug” by Cornelius Medvei (2007). Fables, by conventional definition, is chock-full of animal characters. More often than not these animals talk, but they do only on their own plane of understanding and interaction, divorced from human comprehension and interference. Cornelius Medvei’s debut novella has for its main character a talking animal, a baboon inexplicably gifted with language—that most human of human abilities—and burdened with the reality of a mostly shortsighted society. But “Mr. Thundermug” is less a fable than an allegory, touching upon the elusiveness of intelligent conversation and emphasizing the importance of standing up for oneself even if one can hardly stand erect. (Reviewed here.)

“Icarus at the Edge of Time” by Brian Greene (2008). This boardbook with words by popular astrophysicist Brian Greene and pictures by the Hubble Space Telescope reworks the Greek myth of Daedalus’s disobedient son into a futuristic tale that substitutes Icarus’s wax-bonded wings with a snazzy micro-warp-drive engine and couples its source’s lesson in overambition with an introduction to time-space dilation. Turns out rocket science makes much more sense when it’s outfitted with art direction by book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd. (Reviewed here.)

“Smaller and Smaller Circles” by F. H. Batacan (2002). The geometry implied in the title of this Palanca award winner hints at a case of asphyxiation waiting to happen. And it’s not a question of whodunit so much as an examination of a system oblivious of its own disease that this crime novel chooses to tackle. Shut the windows; this book is so invested with a perpetually gloomy atmosphere that reading it might bring about a thunderstorm.

Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2) “Anthropology and...

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:46:00 +0800

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

“Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories” by Dan Rhodes (2000). Dan Rhodes puts his mastery of the literary double take on display in this collection of a hundred and one funny and sad short short love and unlove stories each told in a hundred and one words. (Reviewed here.)

“Reportage on Lovers” by Quijano de Manila (1977). Nick Joaquin assumes the identity of his journalistic alter-ego in telling a quick succession of tales of, among many others, stolen kisses, inter-municipal liaisons, and love not at first sight but on second thought. There are only so many permutations of true love stories, whether ending in joy or tragedy, one can report before one shades into tedium, but Quijano de Manila seems equipped with a limitless writerly faculty that makes an otherwise dull and repetitive collection even more interesting than fiction.

“From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E. L. Konigsburg (1967). The Newbery honors committee seldom, if at all, rewards a mediocre book, and one of the best of the best books to receive the award-giving body’s highest mark of recognition for a work of children’s literature is this novel about two siblings who run away from home to hide in a museum. But perhaps a greater honor is having joined J. D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” in inspiring key scenes in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” (Reviewed here.)

“03” by Jean-Christophe Valtat (2010). Devoid of paragraph breaks, “03” can surface and gasp for air only within the spaces, short as they are, intrinsic to periods and within the pauses, shorter still, afforded by commas, semicolons, and parenthetical marks. Jean-Christophe Valtat’s English language debut, smoothly translated from the French by Mitzi Angel, is the continuous monologue of a boy waiting at a school bus stop and admiring the “retarded” girl of his Joy Division-soundtracked dreams standing with her mother right across the asphalt-covered street. Its brevity and formal daring suggest a mode of unfoldment along the lines of Roth and Hrabal, but in its fixation with time, memory, and such precisely remembered acts as turning around inside acrylic curtains until one is wrapped tightly and out of breath, “03” is more Proustian than meets the eye. (Reviewed here.)

“Exercises in Style” by Raymond Queneau (1947). A man walks into a bus. Leave it to Raymond Queneau, a founding member of the Oulipo school of constrictive writing, to take care of the rest, by applying above-phrase-level elegant variations—no less than 99 figures of speech, narrative tropes, and shifts in perspective—to counterpoint the banality of an altercation in a communal vehicle followed by the provision of unsolicited sartorial advice in a train station. “Exercises in Style,” which has been translated and at points adapted from the original French to over two dozen languages, most famously in English by Barbara Wright, is a primer in the appreciation of the flexibility and malleability of words. (Reviewed here.)

Previous: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1)
Next: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 3)

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1) “Never Let Me Go”...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:40:00 +0800

2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 1)

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The first of quite a few books I read this year in tandem with watching their respective film adaptations, “Never Let Me Go” is a prime example of how and why science fiction and so-called literary fiction aren’t mutually exclusive. This novel by a perennial Booker favorite depicts a vaguely recognizable past retrofitted with advances in biogenetics as it deals with questions of identity and humanity and finding love in an emotionally cold climate.

“Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell (2006). Debra Granik may well have a nascent proclivity for film projects with the word “bone” in their titles, but it’s really no wonder why the “Down to the Bone” director dug up this “bone” from relative obscurity and made it into one of the best relatively obscure films of last year. This quiet story of a girl down on her luck in the wintry slopes of the Ozarks is an uncompromising look at the exigencies of finding (familial) love in a hopeless place.

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu (2010). With his nonexistent canine sidekick, his clinically depressed personal digital assistant, and his daddy issues constantly in tow, time machine repairman Charles Yu attempts to navigate the future meta-science-fictional Minor Universe 31 in this dizzyingly crafty novel written by present-day, happily-married-with-two-kids Charles Yu. Naturally, along the way the fictional Charles Yu stumbles upon a guide book titled “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.” Don’t panic: “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” the novel, is genuinely respectful of the legacy of the great Douglas Adams, even as its protagonist seems intent on seeking an answer other than 42 to life, the universe, and everything.

“Room” by Emma Donoghue (2010). The narrator is a boy named Jack. He’s only five years old, but he already has an idea of negative integers. There is, however, a lot of things he doesn’t yet understand as clearly as other kids of his age already do. Jack has seen nothing of the world beyond Room, where he and his beloved Ma are kept captive by a heartless man they call Old Nick. Inspired by the famous Fritzl abduction case, “Room” reverberates with alternating currents of domestic peril and universal concern.

“True Grit” by Charles Portis (1968). Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is the story of socialite Jay Gatsby eloquently told by his friend, Nick Carraway, “True Grit” is the story of marshal Rooster Cogburn told by the older and wiser voice of his teenage companion, Mattie Ross. True, but only partly; “True Grit” is as much Cogburn’s tale of heroism as it is Mattie’s bildungsroman. And like “The Great Gatsby,” “True Grit” is a Great American Novel. True, wholly.

Next: 2011 in Books Not Published in 2011 (Part 2)

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 22:46:23 +0800

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

I’m broke and the apartment needs space and I need to have...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 20:50:16 +0800

I’m broke and the apartment needs space and I need to have less load next time I move out (last time I did, I slipped on a curb and wounded my shin and lost a toenail while carrying Jonathan Safran Foer and company), so I’m selling some of my books here. (I shall update it sporadically with more photos of for-sale books on our wooden floor.) Help me (partially) live my dream of being a bookseller and fund the (immediate) rest of my life!

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of...

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:09:28 +0800

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well

Released just a day apart, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and...

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:08:00 +0800

Released just a day apart, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs have more things in common than their week of publication. There’s the quite obvious similarity of their being big, physically and commercially: At nearly a thousand pages, 1Q84 is now considered by many as the popular Japanese author’s magnum opus, while Steve Jobs’s 600-plus pages have made it the year’s best of the best-selling hardcovers. But familiarity with both books, it turns out, reveals a couple of more interesting manners of likeness.

1Q84 and Steve Jobs both contain a considerable amount of musical references. As is customary for Murakami, 1Q84 is sprinkled with allusions and unmasked citations of pop, jazz, and classical pieces famous and obscure. It’s epigraph is a stanza of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and it’s opening scene has the unlikely instance of a Tokyo taxi driver listening to Leoš Janáček’s “Sinfonietta.” On the other hand, Steve Jobs, being a portrait of Steve Jobs, is only fair to mention the late Apple CEO’s musical preferences, most notably Bob Dylan. Jobs, the book recounts, wanted Dylan to perform at his thirtieth birthday celebration, but the musician declined. Jobs invited Ella Fitzgerald instead.

The more significant similarity, though, is already hinted at by the curious title of Murakami’s novel. 1Q84 is a pun on the year 1984, in which the book is set: the Japanese “9” is pronounced “Q.” It’s also a play on George Orwell’s 1984, whose iconic Big Brother inspired, albeit inversely, the mysterious Little People in 1Q84. 1984, Steve Jobs informs readers below 30, also inspired the famous 1984 Macintosh ad directed by Ridley Scott, no less, and premiered by Apple at Super Bowl XVIII. 1984 was a big year, apparently.

Another thing 1Q84 and Steve Jobs have in common: In a bout of biblio-bigamy, I’m reading both.

geeksturr: Re-arranged Aldrin’s bookshelf. Y’all should hire me...

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:30:13 +0800

geeksturr:

Re-arranged Aldrin’s bookshelf. Y’all should hire me to organize your books, DVDs, and magazines.

While listening to Ben Whishaw reciting poetry by John Keats at that. #cultured

Photo

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:45:41 +0800

Yesterday was the conclusion of the 32nd Manila International...

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:10:00 +0800

Yesterday was the conclusion of the 32nd Manila International Book Fair (or, as I like to call it, one-of-only-two-occasions-when-I-would-gladly-travel-south-toward-SM-Mall-of-Asia [the other one being a Harry Potter IMAX screening]). The fair commenced on Wednesday, September 14, and already thousands and thousands of books were already in place (or, in the case of most of the bargain bins, disarray). Part of the fair’s opening day was the holding of the first ever Filipino Reader Conference: Filipino Readers Make It Social!, organized by a group of book bloggers headed by Honey. It was quite a success, and I was honored to have played a part in making it happen: I was on the book blogging panel, alongside Tarie, Charles, Chachic, and Sasha. There was also a panel on book clubs, run by Tata of Ex Libris Philippines, Gege of Flips Flipping Pages, and Jzhun of Filipino Goodreads. The Kobayashi Maru of Love author, publisher, and blogger Carljoe Javier gave the keynote speech, “No Line on the Horizon: The Merging of Readers and Writers through Social Media.” You can listen to the recordings here, courtesy of Charles, and while you do you may skip the rasping parts that are my voice.

Now time for some bullet points: books salvaged from the fair.

Forbidden Fruit: From the Letters of Abelard and Heloise - Part of the Penguin Great Loves series. You’ll perhaps remember Abelard and Heloise from the scintillating street puppet show staged by John Cusack in Being John Malkovich.
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly - Matthew McConaughey looking all Matthew McConaughey-y on a Lincoln Town Car with a license plate that says, “NT GLTY.” Who says I read only Fiction with a capital F?
Human Happiness by Blaise Pascal - Part of the Penguin Great Ideas series. Friends, stop reading Paulo Coelho’s books and Twitter timeline. Read this instead.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - A modern classic inspired by an old classic, Jane Eyre.
Imagist Poetry by Peter Jones - An anthology of imagism (whatever that means lol).
How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays by Umberto Eco - Includes the essay, “How to Recognize a Porn Movie.”
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney - A token from Scholastic. I first read this a couple of years ago. It’s funny.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera - One of Los Angeles Times’s 61 essential postmodern reads, a list I’m trying to complete.
Kraken by China Miéville - Too cool for the Man Booker.
Wildwood by Colin Meloy - The first of a trilogy of children’s books written by the lead singer of The Decemberists and illustrated by his wife. Blurbs generously provided by Trenton Lee Stewart, Lemony Snicket, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Michael Chabon.
Shot by Both Sides by Meisei Goto - Another book to satisfy my appetite for Japanese literature in particular and books in translation in general.

Mr. Fox in the Fields Alexandre Desplat Fantastic Mr. Fox...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:41:00 +0800

Mr. Fox in the Fields
Alexandre Desplat
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Happy birthday, Mr. Dahl.

The shortlisted novels for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:24:43 +0800

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Snowdrops by AD Miller

The shortlisted novels for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 have been announced, and I’m glad to report that I haven’t read any of them. This means my reading list for the rest of September and the first half of next month—the winning book will be announced on October 18—is already taken care of.

Readers who are lamentably uninitiated in the seminal writings...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 21:05:00 +0800

Readers who are lamentably uninitiated in the seminal writings of Jorge Luis Borges and are looking for a propitious place to serve as their invitation to his world—universe, really—of possibilities and impossibilities could scarcely do better than to sample the great Argentine writer’s work by reading Everything and Nothing. One of several New Directions Pearl paperbacks, Everything and Nothing is a slim volume that presents a comprehensive view of Borges’s development as a man of letters through a series of eleven selections, arranged according to date of publication, from Borges’s extensive fiction, nonfiction, and in-between.

Some, if not all, Fully Booked branches redesigned their window...

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:41:00 +0800

Some, if not all, Fully Booked branches redesigned their window displays recently with massive collages made up of covers of a number of mostly popular books. Here’s the one in Shangri-La (my favorite branch, because the staff here is A+++ and the adjacent cafe’s Wi-Fi is super-fast). I’m tempted to identify each book in the assembly, but I’ll spare myself the tedium of enumeration and the vacuum of subsequent self-congratulation. But, briefly noted: To Kill a Mockingbird, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Never Let Me Go, The Virgin Suicides, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and its brother, A Spot of Brother), The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Looking for Alaska, at least three editions of Life of Pi, two editions of One Day, all three Twilight books, all three Stieg Larssons (plus “There are Things I Want You to Know” about Stieg Larsson and Me), and a scattered lot of Murakamis, Palahniuks, and Kinsellas. Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic heroine is clearly the girl in silhouette in the middle of the collage. Guess this particular window’s not big enough for two warring wizards.

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010) This Halloween I’m coming...

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 23:29:00 +0800

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Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

This Halloween I’m coming as Oliver Tate—except that I’m the last person you’ll see in a Halloween party. Or any costume party. Or any party, for that matter. I’m at times insouciant, but often I’m just unsociable. If I were in some sort of acquaintance party (Oh. Hi. I came here for the raffle.) and were asked to think of an adjective that begins with the first letter of my name to describe myself, I’d answer “awkward,” plain and simple—except that someone else before me would’ve already answered that and I’d be left thinking of something else and maybe I should just answer “adjectival” since I’m quite fond of adjectives anyway.

Like Oliver, I also had a Jordana Bevan. My very own. Once. But unlike Oliver and Jordana, we had pet names, held hands, and had emotions (gay). Perhaps that’s why it didn’t work out between us. Like Oliver, I made a mistake, what do you want me to say? Nothing, it turned out, because she had had the last word.

The last time I saw her was when I gave her a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, my favorite book then and now—along with several others, including, of course, The Catcher in the Rye. On their first movie date Oliver gives Jordana, along with King Lear (“probably Shakespeare’s most mature work”—Oliver) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (by “probably one of the most influential philosophers in modern time”—Oliver), a copy of The Catcher in the Rye (“a great example of a modern American novel”—Oliver and me).

Like a certain someone you might know, Oliver reads a lot. Besides the Bard, Nietzsche, and Salinger, he reads Gunter Grass and Jung. He also reads Judith R. Brown’s I Only Want What’s Best for You: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Emotionally Healthy Children in the hope of helping Jordana deal with her mother’s illness and Making Relationship Work in the hope of fixing a certain something of his that didn’t.

I’m thinking Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (Full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) would also be right up Oliver’s alley—and mine. It seems we’re both wrapped up in that sinking feeling, of diving into the deep end.

My lifelong love affair with reading sprang from my appreciation...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:07:41 +0800

My lifelong love affair with reading sprang from my appreciation of my first encounters with short stories, but in the nearly two decades that transpired since my first fictive excursion I managed to read more novels than short stories. By definition, short stories make for quicker reads than novels, yet they’re far less frequently consumed than their longer counterparts. It’s said that it’s perfectly normal for a short story collection by a popular author to sell a mere fraction of the sales of one of that author’s novels. And unless you’re as gifted (and sexy) as Jhumpa Lahiri or as famous (and sexy) as James Franco, trying to break into the literary scene with your debut short story collection is almost certain to be a nonevent. The short story, it seems, is unduly stigmatized for its apparent inadequacy. It’s short; therefore, it’s shit.

Wrong.