The Infinite Book Wishlist

   

A stack of books that I bought all of August last year

   Anyone who adores books will most probably love every aspect of it, from actually reading them, then writing about them, and eventually collecting stacks of them. If I made the right assumption about you then can I also extend the assumption that you have an ever growing wishlist of books that you want to read and buy next? My list isn’t in just one form, it’s on my phone notes app, the continuation is scribbled on some journal entry, and the rest can be found (when they are found, because they’re mostly just lost now) on bits of paper slipped into random notebooks that were meant to act as bookmarks.

   While I welcome chaos under the misguided notion that it helps me to be creative, I feel like there should be an attempt to tidy this little corner of my mind. Here is my attempt to re-home those said lists into one master wishlist: 

1. Passing by Nella Larsen - I love the NYRB editions of books and I saw that this has one

2. Transfiguring Mindanao: A Mindanao Reader by Jose Canuday - I would love to learn more about the history of and culture of Mindanao. I’ve always found it to be unique compared to the rest of the Philippines.

(These two are recent additions to my list because I saw them in a bookstore last month, now we move on to books I’ve noted down in the last few years.)

3. The Patterns of Ordinary Existence - Virginia Woolf

4. Terror of the Unforseen

5. Phantestes

6. The Blackwater Lightship

7. All About Love by Bell Hooks

8. The White Album by Joan Didion

9. Only Dull People are Brilliant at Breakfast by Oscar Wilde

10. A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers

11. People Are Crazy Here by Rex Reed

12. In the Name of Civil Society: From Free Election Movements to People Power in the Philippines

13. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen

14. Alive Together by Liesl Mueller

15. The Little Vineyard in Provence

16. Slaughterhouse Five

17. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

18. Art by Clive Bell

19. Ways of Seeing

20. Freakonomics

21. Far From the Madding Crowd

22. The Godfather

23. Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

24. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

25. Life is Elsewhere

26. Groupies by Sarah Priscus

27. Valley of the Dolls

28. Giovanni’s Room

29. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

30. Life Swap by Jane Green

31. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

32. Sanditon by Jane Austen

33. Summer by Edith Wharton

34. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

35. Ghost Rider by Neil Peart

36. Otherlands by Thomas Halliday

37. Doveglion by Jose Garcia Villa

38. *look for a book by W.B. Yeats

39. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

40. Black Swan by Eve Babitz

41. Slow Days, Fast Company

42. A Question of Heroes by Nick Joaquin

43. But for The Lovers by Wilfredo Nolledo

44. Pagsibol by Onofre Pagsanghan

45. Ariel by Sylvia Plath

46. Violet Bent Over Backwards (the physical book is a feast for the eyes)

47. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

48. Lord Byron Selected Poems by Penguin

49. Madonna in a Fur Coat

50. The Book of Disquiet

51. Alice Munro - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship and Marriage

52. The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

53. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet

54. Hotbed by Joanna Scutts

55. Black Tulip - Alexandre Dumas

I will continue to edit this post whenever I have something new to add or on a happier note, whenever I have read something from this list. I would be more than happy to receive any comments about the books on this list, whether they excited you or wanted to tear your hair out. Happy reading!

Book Review: Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay

    I decided to read more Filipino literature this year, and this was the first novel I read that wasn’t because of a requirement for school. I chose this since I’m already a fan of Jose Dalisay’s Facebook posts (I highly suggest you give him a follow if you want a reprieve amidst the endless video ads.) I find them to be endearing snapshots into his everyday life, and I’m enamored by his prose. It’s fluid but has a sense of rigid structure at the same time.

    This novel centers around three characters. Aurora is a bar singer in a small town called Paez and she’s joined by Walter, a world-weary cop who treats this far-flung place as his personal limbo. However, the story starts off with neither of them. We begin with the third character, a dead body arriving in NAIA’s cargo bay. The corpse is tagged as Aurora but we quickly find out that this is Soledad, her sister who left home to work as an OFW in Saudi.

    One might think that this would turn into a mystery novel, but it is nothing of the sort and I don’t think it pretends to be that. It’s not an action-packed story and Walter’s gun remains holstered the entire time. We are treated to a road trip instead as Aurora and Walter leave their sleepy seaside town and descend into the madness of Manila to pick up her sister’s body. Dalisay’s writing style has a hint of nostalgia, and as their van moves forward we inversely work backwards and catch glimpses of their past lives that tie the story together. The real mystery is not a whodunnit for the characters to solve, but a puzzle for the readers to put together.

    Another thing I liked about this book was how familiar it was for me. I finally got to read a story where the setting and nuances were things I’ve encountered in real life. At the same time, his writing is slightly reminiscent of Western authors that I admit I’ve spent more time reading. You would be surprised to find that joining two familiar elements together does not immediately make for a boring story. The novel is still very much a stranger that you can get acquainted with as you go along reading.

    Overall I felt like the novel was able to get its message across despite being quite a short story. In many ways, we are all a faceless speck in a sea of so many. We can be nothing more than a statistic in the grand scheme of things, but to our loved ones we are their whole lives. This novel takes these two sisters from being just a number and brings them up close, right under our noses, and asks us to take a good look. It demands that we don’t shy away from the harshness and vagueness of a reality that might not be ours but is very close to home.