Coffeespoons

I’ve always thought it was an injustice that writers’ retreats are a thing, but not reading retreats. At least, not as widely as writers’ retreats are. And so last year, I went on a personal reading retreat in Baguio, inspired by stuff I’d seen online about other reading retreats.  It was glorious. But I wondered what it would be like to actually have a reading retreat with a group. So I floated the idea to my book club, Flips Flipping Pages--described what it was, showed them a few sites that organized reading retreats, etc. And they ran with it.  So from Jan. 31-Feb. 2, around 18 FPP book club members and guests participated in Bookish Baguio, FFP’s first reading retreat. The whole thing was organized by the book club founder, Gege, with help from a couple of other members. And the venue was this lovely Airbnb called Baguio Mountain Retreat , suggested by another book club member who knew the owner. The agenda for the weekend was reading, eating, and sleeping. And maybe visi...

Nine ARCs from PRH Got me some ARCs from work, which I was planning to read before handing them out to the bookstores, but my time has run out, so am probably just posting them here for posterity (or however long the internet stays up). One thing I like keeping track of is Southeast Asian stories, being a Southeast Asian rep assigned to sell in Southeast Asia for a US publisher. Our team--the ones who sell to Asia--try our best (operative word: try) to keep an updated list of Asian creators and titles from our list. It's not as easy given the number of titles we deal with on a regular basis, especially as we do see more Asian representation from our lists. And this matters to us a lot, I think, to the booksellers we sell to, and to the readers. This batch has four SEA stories: 2 from the Philippines and 2 from Vietnam-- HOUSE OF MONSTROUS WOMEN by Daphne Fama - a gothic, haunted house horror story set in the aftermath of the People Power revolution in the Philippines, though not i...

Image c/o Fable I read 8 books last month! I’m quite impressed by myself, lol.  Frankly, my only real “resolution” for the year was to do my darndest to pick up a book and read, instead of doomscrolling through social media. Because last year, I realized that I—perhaps with 50% of humanity?—spent a lot of time doing that. Hours in a day. And apart from knowing most of the memes and references because I was terminally online, I don’t know what else that got me.  Well, unending sources of anger, too.  So anyway, because I was mostly offline over Christmas and New Year for a family vacation, I realized it’s not really impossible to spend less time on social media. Granted, I missed some viral stuff and also wasn’t aware of everything going on in my large and small worlds, but it didn’t feel crippling. And then Zuckerberg’s kissing the Trumpian ring sealed the deal for me.  I’d say I was both successful and not in replacing doomscrolling with reading my books. Successful...