Coffeespoons

John Sayles, writer, indie director, editor, actor. I met John Sayles, indie writer, director, and editor, last Tuesday during an intimate presscon organized by Fully Booked . What struck me first about the author was his seeming shyness.He introduced himself readily to the members of the media there (all 7 of us), but sat quietly while his partner and producer, Maggie Renzi, chatted us up very warmly. Nevertheless, the author of A Moment in the Sun , a doorstopper of a book which is to be launched this Saturday also at Fully Booked , looked around with sharp eyes that seemed to take in everything. To be honest, this was my first presscon, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. My images of presscons are shaped by Hollywood movies and coverages of Philippine politics. But this presscon was just a small group of people seated around a table, eating and chatting. (In Philippine culture, it doesn’t seem right to chat without eating.:D) Aside from members of traditional media and writers...

I am a proud pimp of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy . To date, it is still the best YA series I have ever read. Beginning with the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go , the series just got better with each installment. Which is why it's a shame that there are only 3 books. Which is why I have begun to look out for anything Ness. Which is why, when news came out of A Monster Calls , a book Ness wrote based on an idea from Siobhan Dowd, I jumped up and down in glee. Though the word "monster" is used both in this new book and in the title of the third book in Chaos Walking ( Monsters of Men ), this new book is not cut out of the same cloth as the dystopian series. But it's still Ness's writing. And after reading this book, I think I've figured out why I love Ness's writing so much. To me, he speaks truth: quietly, simply, powerfully. A Monster Calls is a tale of a young boy, Conor, coping with the reality of his mother's illness. On...

It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2011 Pulitzer for fiction . And, Aldrin was raving about it .:) Which makes it a book that I could not pass up. In fact, I went all the way to Fully Booked , twice, just to get my reserved trade paperback copy of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad . I held off on the Kindle version because of some negative feedback about the powerpoint chapter (i.e., it was hard to read). Yes, there's a powerpoint chapter, which I found utterly brilliant and charming. Forgive me if I can't summarize A Visit from the Goon Squad . I will have to seek recourse through this Publishers Weekly review . We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's...

Pagpagayuk and Mariang Sinukuan on the iPad This is a post wherein many of my worlds collide--my work, my book blogging, and--only a tad bit--my family. Anyway, the educational publisher I work for, Vibal Publishing House, Inc. , has released its first set of interactive storybook apps for the iPad and for the Android! And they're the first storybook apps for the iPad developed entirely in the Philippines by a publishing house! And they're the first Filipino-English bilingual storybook apps in the world! Yes, those are exclamation points because I'm very proud of having been part of the process of their development. So, this is not a review because I can't review something that I helped make. This is, obviously, shameless plugging. There are five storybooks from Vibal's Chikiting books imprint developed into apps. These are: Amansinaya: Goddess of the Sea Story by Eugene Evasco Illustrated by Jomike Tejido Mariang Sinukuan: The Goddess and Ke...