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.