Coffeespoons

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...