Helter Swelter

The sweltering heat of the afternoon inspired nothing but boredom from me. It was a summer afternoon not unlike many that have gone past. It was hot. It was humid. Heat was radiating from everything that the sun caressed in the last 8 hours.

I settled on reading books I had long abandoned. Like a ritual, I took each one and wiped the dust off the covers. I flipped to marked pages. I tried to recall where I left off. I realized I had left my books too long that I could no longer recall. I had bits and pieces of the stories in them, nothing more. I settled on one of them, Connecting Flights. I resolved to read it cover-to-cover. As I went along, I discovered missing pieces of what I could not remember fully. I discover new  stories I had originally skipped. I consumed it within an hour.

I picked up another. Pete Lacaba's Edad Medya. I read a couple of poems. The mood was too somber, I could not go on. I might've triggered depression if I did. Most of my old friends would tell you that I suffer from these episodic bouts of depression, which confused many of them, so much so that I've only managed to keep a handful of them. I picked up The Kite of Stars. Memories began to flood my mind. I knew this book well. It imprinted on me so much that the mere suggestion of it's blue cover with gold lettering triggered memories of the stories the lay within it. I will read it again, when I lacked inspiration. There is no better epitome of so great a love than the kite of stars.

I picked up Dream Noises : A Generation Writes next. I read the first three stories and felt a sadness settle in me. I stopped reading and decided I really had to do something else. I have a writer's heart. My skills are not at par with many of the published kind. But I have the heart of one. I read and I understand. No, I feel the stories. They stir in me the emotions these authors felt when they created these works.

I guess this was one of the reasons I stopped blogging, or even writing in general. I did my best work in the most emotionally destitute times of my life. I wasn't the kind that could write the cheery side of everything. I was the kind that fed off my darker side. The sadder I was, the better the prose. I subconsciously begged myself to stop. And stop I did. But you cannot really deny what you are. I need to write again. If only for myself. If only for me to release my demons.

As I started typing this, it started to rain. A light drizzle that belied the true strength of an approaching typhoon. I guess we all need some rain in our life. Otherwise we would not wish for more sunshine, however hot it was..

My Worn Books and Reflections on Reflecting...

Recently an office-mate was rushed to the hospital. I showed up the next day in his hospital room, bringing with me the health insurance forms from the office, 3 books and a wall charger. He was quite amused with what I did. The books were, as I told him, to get his mind off his illness. The other two items were much more pragmatic, since the forms were a standard requirement for hospitals and the wall wart was for his (and the spouse') phones.

Anyway, the books I brought for him were Edad medya: mga tula sa katanghaliang gulang by Pete Lacaba, The Kite of stars and other stories by Dean Francis Alfar and Connecting Flights by Ruel S. De Vera. All three of these are what I would term are 'reflective' books. The stories can relate to anyone Filipino. Most of us will be able to see something of ourselves in them. Most the stories in these three books either fill us with remorse to rue for our past mistakes, make us want to fall in love again or fill us with empathy for things that happen to complete strangers that we share something in common with.

Sadly, days after, the books were returned to me unread. Well, I try. That's the important bit. Right now, though, I am revisiting Connecting Flights. What's the point of books that have pristine spines, flawless covers and smooth pages if they've never been read? So I always say, read a book. Lend it to someone. Share the joy of reading. Human experience isn't just about what you yourself have had the opportunity to have. It's also about pondering on what other people have experienced or thought of or have made theories about. So for now you could say I am 're-connecting' with Connecting Flights as my main medium.The venue isn't as important as the thoughts that go through my mind as I experience the mental missives of Filipinos missing home as they write from other places.

Genshiken: Return of the Otaku

I've been watching Genshiken on and off for the last 3 weeks and I've really been getting into the characters as they evolved through the series. It's common for anyone who watches the anime to want to read the manga. It's the same with the loyal manga fans of any series to inversely want to watch the anime when that eventually comes out after the manga itself.

On one of my visits to Book Sale, one of my favorite stores when it comes to cheap books, I stumbled on their manga section. Curious, I browsed around. I found a few titles that I was familiar with over on the anime side of things. Then I found Genshiken: Return of the Otaku. Flipping through the pages, I was surprised to find it was a novel I was leafing through. Curiosity got the better of my and I bought it for Php160.

After reading through the initial chapters, I found what I was looking for. Madarame and Sasahara were in the club room discussing how 'commercial' the whole manga publishing industry had gotten. Madarame was assailing the novel type manga as just another way for the large publishers to squeeze more money out of a series. Sasahara disagreed and to my estimation he thought of novel type manga as an extension of comic-book style manga, just like anime is an extension through a different medium of the original manga series. Well after reading through Genshiken: Return of the Otaku, I tend to agree with Sasahara.

Well, what is it about? Genshiken: Return of the Otaku when compared to the timeline of the anime is somewhere between the season ender for Season 1 and the Season 1 OVA. The members of the Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture disappear one by one, coinciding with a purge being perpetrated by a new student leader that has hidden motives for trying to control the clubs in the school. His secret mission is to find a demon statue that's supposed to give him supernatural powers should he be able to unite it with it's twin statue. Creepy, huh?

Anyway, the story ends with Madarame being the surprise hero. All  is well after another well-timed surprise appearance by the First President of Genshiken. As always, he doesn't get involved but gives the Genshiken a helpful nudge towards the solution to the mystery.

All in all, I enjoyed the Genshiken: Return of the Otaku, even if it was a novel. There were pages though where there were full page illustrations to help tie over the reader deprived of the visuals of the full comic book manga.

The Crooked Man

It was one of those spur of the moment purchases. It's quite obvious by now that where there are book bargains I go to them. I was browsing the buy-1-take-1 aisle as Expressions and bought 2 books that caught my attention. The Crooked Man by Philip Davison and Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, And The Revolution It Created by Jeffrey Zygmont. Both are quite dated, but they seemed interesting. I took on The Crooked Man 1st.

The story revolves around Harry Fielding, an understrapper. He does jobs for the spooks at the MI5, stuff they wouldn't want to be traced back to them. Anything from assassinations to snooping on their own people. The story starts with Fielding's confession. He witnessed a murder committed by hist next door neighbor. It was his testimony that got her convicted. Though the only witness, he was supposed to be implicated in the murder. However, he was extricated from jail by his handler.  He was needed on a job and the timing of his jail time couldn't have been worse. So they pulled strings to get him sprung.

He was paid to spy on a mistress. He followed the young lady for a day and while spying on her home he finds out her lover is a minister of parliament. He then witnesses a heated argument, one where she ends up dead. He's able to capture it all on his old camera. He then recovers from his shock and manages to sneak the politician out of the house and calls his handler. Unwittingly, he had to go along and erase all evidence of the murder with his handler.

The story then takes a few twists when he is tasked to kill the reporter ex-lover of the now 'missing' woman who's snooping around and getting dangerously close to exposing his ex's love affair with the politician. After 2 murders, Fielding suddenly develops a conscience and doesn't kill the man. He entraps him, takes the evidence and warns him to get out of the country. Fielding decides to quit his job.

Well, it turned out it he couldn't simply leave his handler. His handler needs someone like him. And he was determined to get Fielding back. Fielding had no choice but to go back after he finds out his young niece went missing one school day. The day he gets back to London to console his brother who was desperately attempting to find the missing girl, he gets news that his friend's hotel that he hid out in was burned to the ground. All the while, he was trying to desperately contact his handler. When his handler knew his message was understood, Fielding's niece turns up in a random police station.

Having been broken, his handler gives him his next job. One drunken night though, he killed a foreigner. That lands him in jail. This time though, he is sprung by his handler's boss. A surprising turn of events, he is contracted by this higher level spook to be his man.

The story ends with Fielding finally extracting his revenge on his handler, managing to make an unwilling accomplice out of the politician whose hide he saved previously.

The twists in this story are quite interesting. It's not your usual spook novel. It's a lot more darker and moody than anything I've read so far. I guess that why I liked it. And I guess the only logical thing to do now is to buy another Philip Davison book. 

Free eBooks -- Manybooks and Feedbooks

For several years now, I have been going to ManyBooks.net for free ebooks. They were one of a very short list of sites that provide free ebooks compatible with .pdb (eReader) which was the compatible format for Palm OS app I used. I've found it convenient to go to them because of that. Add to that the fact that they have a very wide selection of stuff. They have around 28,000 books available in 23 different ebook formats. This was where I discovered some interesting titles like Blind Shrike, Halo and Graveyard of Dreams. I also found classics like The Art of War, The Cathedral and The Bazaar, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Jude the Obscure and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet.

I recently got an Android device though, and that has had me working with .epub more. I'm certainly glad that new devices coming to market have been gravitating to .epub in that the trend will make it possible to cut down the competing formats into 2-3. I mean I had to live with ebook format hell, just like I had to endure codec hell with media players.The books that I wanted were sometimes not available in the format I needed. Conversion was usually a complicated affair, converting to one format before converting to the final format you'll be using. And even then conversions usually messed up the way text was displayed and didn't preserve chapter info. Having a limited list of popular formats makes publishers concentrate on those and that makes the need for conversions obsolete.

Moving on from that rant, .epub is quite popular these days. I've found it easy to convert old PDF and PDB format ebooks into EPUB using Calibre (more on that in another post). For new stuff, I also discovered a new site when I started using the Aldiko ebook reader on my HTC Tattoo. My new favorite goto site for free ebooks is Feedbooks. Feedbooks lists a wide variety of ebooks from public domain books. They also have a growing list of original books, creative works whose authors have chosen to release free of cost to readers as a form of promoting their lit. Different from ManyBooks.net that hosts every possible format you may ever want, Feedbooks concentrates on today's popular formats. You can download in only three formats -- .epub, .azw (Kindle) and .pdf. There's a fourth option for Custom PDF that's only available to registered users. Custom allows you to configure the size of each page (in mm) and the font (type and size) to use according to what will fit your device's screen. You wouldn't have to convert it any further after that. Feedbooks also has a mobile site to make it easier to scroll and pan while looking for books to download. I've tested downloading to my phone. It's really convenient when you see something interesting and want to download it immediately lest you forget when you get to your PC.

While both have their own pros and cons, I go to both sites primarily to discover something new. Oddly enough, you don't have to buy anything to discover works that interest you. I first discovered authors like Rick Dakan (Geek Mafia) and Benjamin Rosenbaum (True Names) browsing through both sites. I've also stumbled upon old titles that I've wanted to read in the past, but didn't have the inclination to buy.

Writer's Block

I haven't had any ideas to write about. And it seems every writer or blogger suffers from a lack of enthusiasm or interest every now and then. Then there are days when you're just gushing with ideas you can't stop typing.

By chance I had been reading Bag of Bones, which I bought a few months back at a second-hand bookstore together with Whiteout. Having bought and read other books after, I had forgotten about it and left it gathering dust in my book shelf. Over the weekend I was looking at my bookshelf to see what I could do away with. Mostly I had old computer magazines that I could donate somewhere. My wife had already taken a few of the magazines and donated them to one of my son's therapists. I noticed Bag of Bones, stared at it for a moment and took it off the shelf. I started reading and after a few pages came to a discovery of sorts.

The story starts off with the main character saying goodbye to his wife, tragically not knowing it would be for the last time. Mike Noonan, a novelist, had suffered loss that will impair his writing for years to come. His wife had died suddenly of an aneurysm. He found out later that his wife was pregnant when she died. It was a tragedy in itself, as they had been trying to conceive for years with no success. He had suffered a writer's block after turning in his last piece of work, a half-finished novel at the time of his wife's death. Still, he was able to turn in a novel for each of the next three years. He revealed a trick he had discovered during his writing career. He had created 3 extra novels in-between his other works. And since he only submitted one per year to his publisher, he had these works stored in a safety deposit box just in case. Well, it came to be that he did need it. For three years after his wife died, he had submitted a finished novel to appease his agent and his publisher. The fourth year was the killer, he longer had a reserve and he still couldn't find it in him to write again. So the story continues from there.

That got me thinking. I mean that sounds like a logical way to regularly have something to post on your blog. If you're aiming to have an article a day, you can actually set aside time during the weekend to write up stuff and publish one per day. If you have a feature on your blog to schedule when a post gets published, like Blogger does, then you can actually set it and forget. So I plan on doing it that way, since there are times I actually have lots of ideas to work on anyway. The only thing I'd have to review would be the links. By the time I publish anything, I may need to check if the links are still up-to-date. Eventually, I will want to publish one article a day. That's my goal anyway. Wish me luck :-)

Finished Cryptonomicon, Going Baroque Next

I finished reading Cryptonomicon a few days go and I finally came around to reading the preview of Quicksilver at the back of the book yesterday. It makes me want to buy the whole Baroque Cycle series. After finishing Cryptonomicon, having been a bit disappointed at how unspectacular the ending was, I was left wanting for a sequel. There isn't a sequel per se, but there's the Baroque Cycle series of 3 books which are prequels to Cryptonomicon story. All 3 books are 900+ pages each. Pretty hefty and in the same long-winded story kind of book as Cryptonomicon was. The preview I read has stirred my interest and I am planning to buy the three, but maybe do it one at a time. You can actually find the 3 books at Amazon for about US$10 each and on Barnes and Noble for US$11.50 each. If you find the right page though, you'll be able to get a great deal buying all three for just US$25 in Amazon (go to this page and scroll down a bit and you'll see a link to the $25 offer: The Confusion). That qualifies it for Amazon's free shipping. Barnes and Noble also offers the same free shipping when you spend $25. If only I lived in the continental US - LOL.

I did try and find out how much it would cost for Amazon to ship it to me here in the Philippines. That almost doubled the price, since the shipping charges were around US$20. I might find better prices if I scour around Fully Booked this weekend. Their store at Marquee Mall has a few copies of The Confusion the last time I was there. I could always ask them for all three and just wait for the books to arrive. They actually have great prices, considering they're bringing in these books from the US. So off to the mall I go.

Dive Into Cryptonomicon

I've been looking at local bookstores for a copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Last Saturday, I went to Marquee Mall with the wife and kids to meet up with old friends. We were there for a few hours and my baby girl was getting restless, enough so that I had to take outside to calm her down a bit. I wasn't aware that Fully Booked was 2 storefronts away from the coffee shop that we went to. I decided to take the little one with me and go look at what they had on their shelves.

The Fully Booked store at Marquee was definitely bigger than the one in SM Clark. And you know what that means. More shelves mean better variety. I asked one of the staff in passing if they had any Neal Stephenson books in stock. He excused himself, saying he would check their inventory. I walked around, baby in tow, around the shelves. My baby girl was touching the spines of books, face me and say "book" with a smile. That made my day. My baby girl, she liked being around books. And I, like a boy excited, browsed the shelves breathing in the atmosphere, wanting to grab and take home every little (and big) book that caught my eye.

It's been a ritual of sorts for me since high school, when I first discovered books weren't just for reading, as in as a skill, like in school. I discovered books were also for enjoyment. That opened the floodgates. Back then, the only large bookstore that carried novels was National Bookstore. Most of them were in Manila, very few were in the provinces. So it was during my freshman year that I got the chance to go to different National Bookstore branches. Buying textbooks was my flimsy excuse. But behind that was a motive. I had always loved browsing through the shelves. The school libraries I had gone to had always had textbooks and naught more. National Bookstore was way better stocked. And in those days, nobody bothered you if say you picked up a book and leafed through it some. Sampling a chapter or two was okay with the clerks. No one stared at you for guerilla reading back then. So each time I had a chance to get to a National Bookstore, I would wander wide-eyed amongst the shelves and not mind time. I still do that, actually. Every so often, I'd go into a bookstore and be lost in the shelves.

These days, I have money to spend, though most of the time I have to spend it on something more important. Once in a while I would indulge in a book or two. The clerk at Fully Booked returned with a paperback copy of Cryptonomicon. I was so glad that I unwittingly smiled and told him that I've been looking for a copy for a long time and all the bookstores I've been to didn't have it. He guided me to the section where he got it from and I found there was second much smaller copy. It had a font size that I preferred and it cost about half as much. I choose the 2nd copy of Cryptonomicon and took it home.

I haven't really had time to read it yet. I've gone through the 1st chapter and some of the 2nd. Hopefully by this weekend I can free up some time to do so. Wish me luck.

Derailed

So I started reading The Alchemist before last week ended. I was half-way through it in a matter of hours. However the convenience of the ebooks lined up and saved on my phone was just too hard to resist. I ended up reading a couple of pages on each of my breaks, then my pace gradually sped up again. I'm at least 80 pages into The Bourne Legacy. I've put The Alchemist on indefinite hold. Worst still is the fact that I've yet to start Cryptonomicon, just the kind of story a geek would naturally be drawn to.

Cryptonomicon had been on my line up of To Read's for a few weeks now along with Daemon. I just can't seem to pull away from the Bourne series. I'm just so into it right now that I've forgotten I was supposed to read the first three so I could compare notes when I watched the Bourne movies. But I'm stuck. I haven't read the other books I had lined up. I haven't watched the Bourne movies. I'm more or less increasing my pace into The Bourne Legacy and I'm blogging less (yes, I had posts I was planning to write up). Oh, well. It's best to go with the flow for a while. I'm still more or less a happy camper.