Werewolves in Their Youth

My first book for 2006 is Werewolves in Their Youth. This volume collects nine stories by Michael Chabon, author of the novel Wonder Boys, which has been turned into a wonderful film by Curtis Hanson. Chabon is also credited for the story of Spider-Man 2, which I just watched on HBO a while ago. Both Wonder Boys and Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire, who makes geek boys seem really hot.

In “Green’s Book,” we follow Marty Green, a therapist who spends only 3 weeks a year with his daughter but has managed to come up with a book on how to raise children. At a graduation party for his mother’s friend’s son, he runs into and away from Ruby, the girl he used to babysit when he was thirteen. Green is finding it difficult to connect with his daughter, he can’t understand why he has remained distant. And it’s only by acknowledging the events of that night in Ruby’s bedroom that he will be able to finally connect with his little girl.

I also like “Son of the Wolfman,” where a woman who has been trying to have a child for years finally finds herself pregnant after getting raped. How she and her husband deal with this is just simply heartbreaking.

I found this book by accident last week: I was just on my way to Casaa to get myself some lunch when we came upon several orgs selling books along the AS Walk. I finished reading the book in 2-3 days--a record for me since it now takes me a while to finish anything at all. I read most of it during my commute to and from school and when I had some quiet time alone in a mall after I got lost during my attempt to use another route. But that’s another story.

Extra Challenges in 2006

Hey guys, are you up for bigger things in the coming year? I just wanna share because I just found this online: the 50 film challenge!

Yes, so I know I failed miserably in last year's 50 book challenge as I only chalked up 31 tomes finished in '05. And even my film averages are down, but what the hey, maybe this will motivate me to do more things in this coming year.

I already have 2 films chalked up: Fear (starring Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon caught this afternoon on HBO) and Blue Moon--which you all must watch before it disappears. And fie! fie! on Mulawin The Movie which wasted 2 hours and around 200 bucks of my life.

So what do you think?

P.S. Dear Dennis, I finally found a copy of the Graphic holiday issue. I haven't digested it yet so more about that tomorrow.

P.P.S. Which reminds me: You guys are showing up for the Diva's Dinner tomorrow right?

what xkg read in 2005

1. Puwede Na! The Complete PInoy Guide to Personal Finance
2. The Art of Travel
3. Filipina
4. Laundry: Hints and Tips
5. Hothouse: The Rolling Stone Collection
6. Dress Your Family in Corduroys and Denim
7. Smaller and Smaller Circles (19mar)
8. One Hot Second
9. The Best of American Erotica 2003
10. The Tipping Point
11. Parrot in the Oven
12. Tw7sted
13. Bee Season
14. Diary
15. Me Talk Pretty One Day
16. Queen Bees and Wannabes
17. Oldtimer and Other stories
18. Death of a Harvard Man
19. Manila my manila
20. Sunday Bloody Sunday
21. M Butterfly
22. Nine Supernatural Stories
23. This Boy’s Life
24. If the River Was Whiskey
25. Red Son
26. A Tropical Winter’s Tale
27. Underground
28. The Joy of Sex
29. The Sexual Life of Catherine M
30. Anthropology and 100 Other Stories
31. Cave and Shadows

I'm not really sure but I might have missed some other books I read. But anyhow, this list is shorter yata than the 2004 list. Oh well.

Last Order for Books 2005

Since summer ended and school started, and I had a lot of other things in my mind aside from reading books and watching movies. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that I wished that 2005 never happened. There were also some good things. But I think Tamadita and I would both agree that had someone told us that the last quarter of the past year was going to be a living hell, we might have opted to sit it out. Or sleep on it. But yeah, there were some good things. In the very least, I can now claim that all the useful information I had floating in my head about Kuya Germs, Billy Crawford and Kris Aquino had been put to good use.

So anyway, here’s the last of the books in my list for 2005, with slight annotations.

Book # 25 was Red Son, loaned to me by Dennis. I finished it in a single sitting. Mark Miller presented a very interesting what-if. think I’m the last person in the group to have read it, so I’ll spare you the details.

I got The Joy of Sex (#26) for like Php30 back in the good old days when Team Angas went to Morato and we stopped by Bound. Mine was a very old National Bookstore reprint done during the Martial Law. Which might explain why there were no photos/illustrations. Was extremely disappointed with this one, and the same thing goes for The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (#27). It’s some French woman who blabbed on and on about her intimacies, more than one person at a time.

A Tropical Winter’s Tale, or the Greatest Hits of Charlson Ong. Picked from the sale bins of UP Press around the same time I got Butch Dalisay’s Oldtimer. ATWT was my bedtime reading for quite a while.

Underground by Haruki Murakami. Lent to me by Sandra R. Murakami interviewed the people involved in the 1995 subway bombing in Tokyo. I read this while commuting on the LRT2, which somehow scared the shit out of me and I kept wondering what sarin smelled like. I just hope I’ll never see the day.

Cave and Shadows is Book # 30. I am mightily disappointed with this book, and I literally labored to finish it because it was required reading. By the time I got to the end, I was wishing that I should have stuck with Manila, My Manila and Culture and History. It started quite dreamily: a vision of a naked young girl walking a crab in some hotel room. Jack Henson, who has spent the last 20 or so years in an island in Davao goes back to Manila trying to discover why his ex-wife’s child was found dead in a cave believed to be inhabited by some river goddess. It was also about the downfall of the House of Manzano --and no, it didn’t have anything to do with Edu, Lucky and Ryan Christian—although by end of it I was hoping it had been about them. Henson meets up with all the people who mattered to him, they reminisce about the good old Manila days—the Manila that no one knows anymore, the Manila where people chat over champorado and merienda sena and drink brandy and dance in some bar and political conspiracy hid in back alleys. Nick Joaquin is National Artist and respected writer and all that, but either I wasn’t in the mood when I was reading it, or the language got me, or I felt like I’ve seen parts of this before in his other works and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. So while I loved his Manila, My Manila, Cave and Shadows was one of my letdowns for 2005.

Anthropology and 100 Other Stories by Dan Rhodes is Book # 31. I first encountered a hardbound copy of this book in a Booksale bin some years back. I read some of the stories, and I wasn’t exactly charmed the first time around, so I didn’t buy it. Some weeks back, I found myself in Powerbooks waiting for a friend and I saw a paperback copy on the shelves and I read it in one go. The book resonated deeply and I found it funny, very interesting in terms of form and experimentation. There were 101 stories all in all, which mostly had some guy whose girlfriend was either impossibly beautiful or really plain, with weird kickass names like Tadhana, or they were either really devoted or ignored him. But mostly, all the girls either cheated him, left him or died in a really absurd way. Now I regret not buying it. This is high up there in my favorite books from 2005. Check out the author’s website here. And just because I really, really liked it, here’s my favorite story in the collection called “Words.”

So there you go. 31 books for 2005. The list might have been longer. There were others that I started reading and then abandoned. Except for Cave and Shadows, I didn’t include all the books that I read for schoolwork and research. I must have left out some books from the list. I guess that only means that if I can’t remember them at this point, they must have been very forgettable.