STACK. I need more closet place (and time, of course!). I’ve recently added to this stack my UK version of Black Heart by Holly Black, The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen, and Eat Your Peas by Cheryl Karpen. :)

You might smack me with all the redundant intro’s but—I’m still sorry for all the sparse updates! A flurry of (non-work and work-related) events are taking over my life lately and they are eager to pull me away from my online havens. Not from my books, though! To join my other babies (which I know were silently whimpering for the lengthy week of ‘abandonment’ I just did to them) are these:

• Rant: An Oral Biography of  Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk. I think I need a dose of Palahniuk’s trademark mind-squeeze-inducing stories, I terribly miss it. :) I think this one’s about a serial killer.

• Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. My first of Ellis, lots of people are shooing me away from this for some reason—and it’s not that it’s a badly written book. Anyhoo, I decided to try it. USA Today said it’s The Catcher in the Rye of the MTV generation—we’ll see about that. From Amazon: Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980’s, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope.

• Divergent by Veronica Roth. Finally.

• Numbers by Rachel Ward. I like the premise of this book, even if (or especially because?) it sounded a lot like Death Note. After her mom’s death, the girl protagonist can see the dates predicting deaths of people with brute accuracy—when she looks them in the eye.

•  Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver. Sequel to the dystopian love story Delirium. Hope it’s better than the first book!

• The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. This is going to be my first MJ novel. I bet it would be nothing like her awesome shorts! It’s a thriller set in London, full of humor, suspense…and ghosts. :)

• Cinder by Marissa Meyer. Everybody knows I love fairytale reimaginings. Meyer offers the world one of her own, with  a cyborg Cinderella in the forefront. How. Can. I. Say. No. To. This?! I hope Cinderella is not a damsel in distress in this one. :D

• The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. Ah, I love time-bending tales. Two youngsters could mysteriously see their future—spouses, careers, status updates—in Facebook, at a time when Facebook was not even invented yet. “As they grapple with the ups and downs of what their lives hold, they’re forced to confront what they’re doing right—and wrong—in the present.” Sounds promising. :)

• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Been hearing a lot of good things about this book! Chris Schluep’s blurb says, “Erin Morgenstern’s dark, enchanting debut takes us to the black and white tents of Le Cirque des Reves, a circus that arrives without warning, simply appearing when yesterday it was not there. Young Celia and Marco have been cast into a rivalry at The Night Circus, one arranged long ago by powers they do not fully understand. Over time, their lives become more intricately enmeshed in a dance of love, joy, deceit, heartbreak, and magic.”

Anyone who’ve read these? Thoughts?

GALA MAGAZINE: The Hunger Games

Our magazine’s maiden issue is finally out! Here’s an excerpt of my review for The Hunger Games movie:

“Much to the approval of many bookworms who loved the novel to bits, the film adhered closely to the source material’s storyline. Some of the changed scenes would induce little to no rants from the fans, because Ross’ paint-by-number approach was well-played and it just added more layers to the intricate world already present in Collins’ narrative…

Anyone who had encountered The Hunger Games in its printed form would know that even if the gladiatorial match was flaunted as the focal occurrence, the lynchpin of anything and everything is none other than the main protagonist, Katniss Everdeen. And truth be told, if there’s one thing in the movie that took the cake right off the bat, it was Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of our very own arrow-toting girl on fire.”

See the full story—grab your copy now! :)

FANDOM ON FIRE V.01: Hunger Games Goodies

I’m dying to post my thoughts on Gary Ross’ big screen translation of The Hunger Games right now, but the odds of me not getting fired when I do that are not in my favor. Haha! Can’t leak! I wrote a full-page review for it in our magazine GALA, which will be out in bookstores, coffee shops, convenience stores, etc. on April 1. (Please do grab a copy! It’s an events magazine and we cover everything from festivals and fun runs to album launches and movie openings.)

Anyway, I think I can find a way around this little dilemma. I can post things that I didn’t include in the review, like book vs. film nitpicks, favorite moments, and things I’m looking forward to in Catching Fire. You know, the usual things regular Tumblristas know. *wiggles eyebrows*

In a non-review related HG news in Airizverse…I got new goodies! 

1. The Hunger Games Companion. Here’s a book to stand cheek by jowl my other favorite The Hunger Games meta-essay compilation of some sort, Lea Wilson’s The Girl Who Was on Fire. While I  fangirl THG like it’s my day job, I still love in-depth discussions that go beyond the usual “shipping” stuff. I love metas. I’m about 90% sure I’m going to like this.
2. The Hunger Games Tribute Guide. There’s nothing particularly new in this book, but it’s a must-have for all THG fans. It includes colored photos and quotes from the movie and a few detailed information about all the districts. I would have appreciated this more if I bought this before I saw the film, I think. But as I said, it’s a treat for any THG fan who wanted to have anything and everything about the film and the book.
3. The Hunger Games soundtrack. It’s The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond, featuring tracks by Taylor Swift, The Decemberists, The Secret Sisters, Arcade Fire, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and many more. The songs were written and produced exclusively for the album.

   Any miser’s going to shake his head and say “You could have just downloaded the songs.”  Yes, I could have, but like the usual books/ebooks stuff, I think there’s nothing like a physical copy of it. It’s not solely mine, though; my friend paid half the price, even if she only wanted to rip the songs from it. :p

   More Hunger Games post in the future! Happy blogging and may the odds be ever in your favor! ;)

You know there’s still lots of awesome left in the world if people give you awards for being the nerdtastic bookworm that you are. I received P10,000.00 (cash and GCs) & a cellphone from National Book Store, The Philippine Star, and Globe telecom for my essay-review for Paolo Giodano’s book, The Solitude of Prime Numbers! :)

More of the My Favorite Book (Year 11) awards here.

My P6. So let’s take a look at my priority pile (come on, it’s about time I make one. Toss coin sometimes doesn’t work when it comes to choosing what to read next). As you can see, I also got a new Jerry Spinelli book, Stargirl. A friend was repeatedly recommending a Spinelli novel that has a yoyo string or something like that in the title, but I can’t find that anywhere. Since Stargirl is omnipresent in bookshops, I guess I should try it first. I found it the same day I purchased The Fault in Our Stars.

Next is George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, second book in A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series. I know I should have read it right after I finished book 1, but I kept on getting tempted by other novels. Season 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones is just around the corner, so I better get started on this one. I look forward to reacquainting myself with the people of Westeros. It’s ironic how summer is coming here irl, but I’m readying to see what will happen in a fictional, decades-long winter from Martin’s enchanting realms. :p

Then we have The Girl Who Played with Fire, second book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I heard Lisbeth Salander is going to be stripped open in this book like a dissected frog (umm, okay, it’s not the best of metaphors, but we’re talking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s got a lot of that stuff too—and they forever scarred my mind). I love enigma in characters, but not as much as I love watching how their secrets are scooped out of their secretive shell. That…and I can’t wait for more Salander badassery! :)

Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up. I know, I know, I’ve been blathering about this for weeks. I’ll start it soon. (Thanks for the correction, mssterbrightside!)

And Steampunk!: A Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, a collection of short fiction by some of favorite authors (Garth Nix, Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, etc). It’s the only copy in NBS Robinsons Manila. I’ve been eyeing this compendium for a while now, since I found someone on Good Reads saying it’s the best anthology she’d read since finishing Zombies vs. Unicorns. ZVU is amazing, so that’s saying something. I’m excited for some steampunk! It makes me miss Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series. :’)

So yeah, that’s my Priority Six.There’s still a lot to be read from bookstack 1 and bookstack 2, but I promise to get back to them after I finish the above books. Toodles!

Someone’s on cloud nine! Guess who? ;) I’m late to the party, but who cares? I finally got John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars! All the local bookstores I’m contacting the past month kept on telling me this book’s out of stock. But a couple of weeks ago, while hunting  for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making in NBS Tutuban,  I chanced upon Green’s newest gem on the YA shelf. I wasn’t able to hold in the little giggle-squeal that bubbled up my throat (how little that squeal was, I’ll never know—I had my earphones on).

After reading and rereading Pamela Haag’s list of awesome words, I think someone needs to coin a term for that ineffable feeling you get when you find that special book you’ve always wanted to have. “Bookstore serendipity”, which I always use, sometimes seems a tad too broad a term to describe the feeling. I’ll still use it though.

{MY REACTION TO} DATE A GIRL WHO READS

Original article by Rosemarie Urquico 
(In response to Charles Warnke’s You Should Date an Illiterate Girl)

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

(Read more)

Okay, first things first—I don’t intend to offend anyone who loves the above piece by writing this response. The article’s been popping up more and more frequently on my dashboard and I just can’t help but notice how many people still ignore that Urquico is somewhat poking a hornet’s nest with a stick of her cloyingly sweet, irresistible interpretation of the female bookworm. I think it’s about time I un-zip my mouth about it now, eh? And here’s what I got to say:

1. There’s no wrong way to be a girl.
2. Date whoever the heck you want.

I’m a girl who reads. I can’t live without books—I read like I need to breathe! Anyone who’s following me must be aware of that by now. All the same, I value being a woman too; I value being outside any stereotypical cages some people forces us to be in. I value not being underrated because I don’t do this thing that makes others seem cooler or more “special.” While I can really relate to a lot of the descriptions Urquico provided (hello, second paragraph!), I believe she seemed to have painted girls-who-read in an idealized portrait that has, for the most part, misogynistic shades. Am I the only one who noticed it?

I’ve already given my not-so-subtle jab at Urquico’s piece the first time I posted it here: I attached the illustration above, featuring reader girls who are obviously also spending their money on beautiful clothes. See paragraph one (italicized line). There’s nothing wrong with you at all if you like clothes and books. Heck, there’s nothing wrong with you if you like clothes alone or something else instead of anything related to literature! Just because you don’t like books doesn’t mean you’re inferior to those who do. It doesn’t mean you’re not smart, deep, or interesting. It doesn’t mean no one deserves to love or date you. It just means that you have different interests! You are still you; you are still a woman, and there’s no wrong way to be one.

This is not the only article that seems to value a certain “type” of girl by depreciating the others. I remember stumbling upon other pieces like this, all with the formulaic title “Girls who (insert hobby here).” If you Venn-diagram them all, what you’d see in the center are their subverted competitive natures, their haughty ways of hoisting their own featured girl up on the rung higher than the others so they can be tagged as “better.” Look at it at the right angle, and it would look like a pointless battle between women with superiority complex, writing off other girls who are not as interesting as they are (in consonance with their essays).

Urquico’s is a dichotomy of an article—while it pushes bookworm girls up the pedestal (in a rather unhealthy way), there are also some passages that can be harrowingly patronizing. Not just that, it as well contains suggestions for the message’s recipient that are outright destructive when it comes to a relationship. According to the essay, if a bookworm girl says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses, she’s just saying that to sound intelligent (because apparently she really can’t understand it and she just needs to show off to you!). According to this, it’s completely acceptable to lie to her (because apparently she will understand why you need to do it, she knows how to figure out the mechanics of your psyche—oh, she learned it from books!). According to this, it’s okay to fail her (because apparently, like her favorite novel, there’s going to be a climax, a resolution, and a sequel that will weave happy-ever-after endings for your life stories!). SMH.

The last sentence says, “Better yet, date a girl who writes.” Oh, would the close-minded Our-Kind-of-Girls-is-More-Desirable stratification never cease? I’m sick of this special-snowflake mentality that seems to run rampantly here on Tumblr. :(

In its own way, the article seems to give permission to whoever its recipient is to do what he wants with the girl, because he deserves to. In effect, the girl becomes a guinea pig swaddled with the almost fantastical vision of an ideal partner. I consider literature as my favorite escapist plane, but I don’t let it become an excuse for other people to treat me like a saint-like, psychological punching bag that begs for their approval. If the bookworm girl you date gets mad if you lie to her or fail her, it doesn’t mean she’s a shallow reader or a poser—it means she’s  a human being. We all are!

The last paragraphs kill me every time I reread them. “Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable…if you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.”

Tsk. You know what kind of girl can give you “the most colorful life imaginable, the world and the worlds beyond it?” The girl you love. No matter how ordinary she is, no matter how little she knows about literature or photography or baking or sports, no matter how many combinations of Girl Types she may be—if you love her, she’s going to be more than enough. Trust me on this.

Date a girl not because some viral article tells you to. Date her because you want her, because you like her. Date her because you love her.

In a nutshell, I’m saying all of this because:

1. I’m a girl who reads.

2. I’m a girl who writes.

3. I’m a girl.

The third one is the most important.

Why We Broke Up. You know there’s something “wrong” with your friends if they got you a novel about breakup on Valentine’s Day. But for me, of course, it’s a good kind of wrong! :p I’ve been eyeing Daniel Sandler’s Why We Broke Up for a while now. The dudettes want to see a review from me soon, but I can’t read it yet; I still have to finish Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and a couple others I lined up after it (Steampunk,The Girl Who Played with Fire, and Underground). But then again, I’m a fickle little creature…I may hoist WWBU up my reading list if I feel like it. :)

The Little Endless | Jill Thompson

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
2. The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
3. The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
4. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
5. Paper Towns by John Green (technically a reread, but it’s more awesome the second time around)
6. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
7. The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy by Leah Wilson
8. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
9. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
11. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Runners up!

   11.1 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie            (review to follow! I just finished it)
   11.2 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
   11.3 Blood Red Road by Moira Young

And there you have it! It’s been a good year for books, and I’m looking forward to meeting new book-friends and bookworm-friends in the future. :) Happy new year, everyone! DFTBA!

I’ve gathered a multitude of new babies over the past few weeks, but of the newest bunch these are the triplets that are receiving all my love: 

1. I ❤ Geeks: The Official Handbook by Carrie Tucker. Status: read, but I go back to it just for kicks. It’s an impulse purchase—upon seeing the heart and the word “geeks,” I couldn’t control myself. I knew I have to buy it. Imagine my shock when I learned it’s actually an “understanding-your-guy” book! Fortunately, it’s not exactly similar to those run-of-the-mill self-help guides for dating and stuff…it’s more like a condensed encyclopedia of geekiness and nerderies (brief histories of videogames, graphic novels, anime, etc., excerpts from interviews and the like) with a little bit of relationship thingies thrown in. I guess that’s kind of expected, since it’s written by a “self-proclaimed nerd who has stared straight into the eyes of COOL and refuses to blink.” It’s a really fun book, I think nerdfighters here will like it. :)
2. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Status: read. It’s about a fourteen-year-old Indian who goes to an all-white high school; it’s about poverty, racism, love, and friendship. AND I TELL YOU, IT’S ALL KINDS OF AWESOME. The writing, the cartoons…everything! Why hasn’t anyone recommended this book to me before?! Review to follow. :p
3. Going Bovine by Libba Bray. Status: to read, next in queue (next to Farenheit 451, which I’m currently reading) because of my fangirlfriends’ ceaseless raving.They say it’s a quirky novel with bits of Norse mythology in it. *shrugs* I like that kind of stuff. :p

After these three, I promise to go back to my previous book hauls. I’ll finish A Song of Ice and Fire, and all that Murakami books. Yeah, I promise.