Coffeespoons

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...

I read 88 books this year. That's 38 more than my personal target for Goodreads' 2014 Reading Challenge. I wanted to under-promise so I could over-deliver. Thankfully, I did. I usually sneak in one more book around Dec. 30 or 31st, but I'm not going for it this year. It's been a year full of pressure, so I'm not inclined to add a contrived pressure on the last day of 2014. Above is the screencap of all the books I read this year, care of my Goodreads Reading Challenge . A pretty nifty feature, if you ask me, especially for the data conscious types. If you'd like to see what I've read this year, head on over to the page . Speaking of data-conscious types, I am, just a little bit. When I discovered the Ultimate Reading Spreadsheet , I promptly downloaded it. It was a bit of a chore, though, to type in all the data for every book I read, which leads me to the other nifty thing about Goodreads: you can export all your bookshelf data as a csv file, which...

Below is a Facebook conversation I had with a few friends about the #weneeddiversebooks hashtag last May 2. Yesterday, the topic was brought up again on Twitter with a different set of people. A friend mentioned this conversation, and someone who wasn't in it originally asked what we talked about. Now since I really hate that discussions like these get buried on Facebook, I'm posting it here so that it's easy for me (or anyone who's interested) to find it. To minimally protect the privacy of the people originally in the discussion, I've only left their initials. --------- Posted by Honey de Peralta, May 2, 2014 I have what might seem like a really stupid question, seeing as how I've also been promoting the hashtag, but who exactly is the "We" in the "WeNeedDiverseBooks" hashtag? Because it originated as a reaction to the BookCon all-male, all-white panel for kidlit writers. So I get it why US and Western readers and writers s...