Coffeespoons

Today, I joined SBC-Manila’s  silent reading session at Podium’s The Book Nook . First time for me to attend, though I’d long been lurking on the Discord server and, like a shy teenager, have always wanted to join one of the silent reading events.  I tried signing up to one of them before, but apparently, slots go quickly, and I never made it to before sign-ups closed.  Was lucky enough to get a slot for this one, though! This particular session was hosted by kutingtin , who I don’t think I’ve ever met personally, but know through IG and Discord. (We’ve met now.)  Have to say, Tin was a consummate host, well-prepared with constant and complete updates before the event, and a clear program during.  There was an intro, then we dove right in to the 1hr silent reading portion. And yes, everyone silently read for one hour. I think there were 30 or so people who participated!  After 1 hr of silent reading, we broke up into groups for half an hour of talking about...

I have resurrected this blog in support of Aklatan: All Filipino Book Fair , which to me, is the little book fair that could. Aklatan started in 2019, organized by the Book Development Association of the Philippines . You can read a much better history and context than I can provide at Ruel de Vera's Inquirer piece for this year's Aklatan . What you'll also read in Ruey's piece is that Aklatan is going online, given the--you know--pandemic. This is wonderful and laudable, and it hopefully signals the beginning (for some) and the doubling down (for others) of what I think is a necessary transition to more online selling, coupled with strategic digital marketing. The event will be held on Shopee from Aug. 16-18, 2020. To help out, I'm summarizing below the list of participating publishers (got this from the list posted by Howie Severino , but alphabetized), and where I could find it , the links to the publishers' official Shopee stores. Would be happy to update th...

Earlier, I read a tweet that said something like a musician must perform. Because that's what musicians do. I suppose in the same vein, a writer must write, a dancer must dance, etc. I guess, at this point in the lockdown/quarantine, I like the romanticism, the sense of purpose. I've told many people I haven't really been able to read. It's been 51 days since our lockdown started, and I've only been able to finish two books: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Weather by Jenny Offill. The first took me three weeks to finish; the second, a day because I crammed it for book club (thank God for book club ). Like a few other people I know, I can't seem to concentrate on a book during this period. Any book. Many things have been written about our collective and personal anxieties during lockdown. I acknowledge all of this (likely, too, why I'm penning this at 1:41AM my time), More specifically, though, I feel I can't read because I find i...

Was it a good reading year? Yep. I read what I could, so I read enough. And I read what I felt would give me joy. And, I got in my goal of reading 60 books a year. Sure, a couple were short picture books, but they were lovely. A few more stats for this reading year: Total books read: 60 80% of the authors of the books I read, as far as I know, are women. 9 or 15% of the books I read were written by Filipino authors. 28 or roughly 47% of the books I read were published in 2017; 9 or 15% have yet to be published in 2018. 34 or roughly 57% of the books I read were published by Penguin Random House publishers or clients And here are my best reads for 2017, organized according to when they were/are to be published: Love Irresistibly by Julie James - I only started reading Julie James this year, because I heard she was popular in my region. I see why. I've read a couple, but this one about a prosecutor and a hotshot corporate counsel who unwittingly fall in love was ...

Some of the books from Filipino authors published by intl. publishers. Clockwise from top left: Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim; The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco; The Courageous Princess Vol. 1 by Rod Espinosa; Learning To Fall by Mina Esguerra, Smaller And Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan; The Last Time I'll Write About You by Dawn Lanuza. It seems an exciting time for Filipino authors. A Filipina YA author was at the Brooklyn Book Festival and other festivals, some Filipino authors just wrapped up panels during the Fil-Am International Book Festival in San Francisco , a few other Fil-Am authors are coming out with new books from a major publisher in the next few months ( literary fiction , young adult , and middle grade ), and another classic author was recently published by Penguin Classics. Not to mention that a few Filipino authors have been pitching at #dvpit and have already found agents . And I'm pretty sure I'm barely scratching the surface her...

Hello. Still around. Or maybe I should say, finally around. Presence is a tricky thing, isn't it? You're here, but not here. Even when you want to be here. Anyway, I am here now. Determined (or at least convinced) that I should carve out some time to go back to writing. And to me, writing means blogging. Because that was most of the writing that I did for me. The other writing that I did for me would be Facebook status updates, but let's be honest: those disappear into the ether. And though you might get hundreds of engagements because of them, they're always tenuous at best. Now blogging...is tenuous, too. But less so than Facebook status updates, so let's stick to this. I have so many things that I've wanted to write about, that I've wanted to say. And because they are legion, I'm not going to touch them lest I freeze up again. Instead, let us begin from zero... Imagine me as a new blogger. Eager to share books that I love with the world. Fois...