Hello all. I don’t know what it was that got me, but for two and a half days, everything I ate I just threw back up. Horrible. I hope I lost some weight from that ordeal because then what’s the point?
My thanks to J of course for buying me bananas and Gatorade and nursing me back to health.
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I was able to check my mail/Twitter/Facebook yesterday (and we were able to livestream the Obama-Romney debate), but not my blog, so I was pleasantly surprised to receive a message from blogger Nancy Cudis, who wrote a bit about A Bottle of Storm Clouds here.
Have you experienced buying a book for what you thought it is but it pleasantly turned into something else? A Bottle of Storm Clouds by Eliza Victoria is like that with me. I thought it is a short story collection about, given the cover, Philippine folklore flawlessly interspersed in a contemporary setting. It turns out to be what its title says—16 stories about individuals with bottled-up storms that change them in so many ways.
The storms come in different disturbing forms but oftentimes, the ending is the same: death. I have already read eight of these stories and so far, I have gotten the drift of Victoria’s admirable writing style—simple yet powerful words, short yet intense sentences, suspenseful flashbacks, and lots of dramatic dialogue. Each story evokes similar yet different emotions—do you understand? All stories I have encountered so far are sad ones subtly, others directly, covering a multitude of personal issues—abandonment, death of a loved one, fear of being left, fear of the future, and inability to move one. But the degree of sadness of the story can only be determined by how relevant it is in the life of the reader.
In my case, my heart was very heavy—still is—when I finished reading Earthset, the eighth story I have read (and mostly accounts for the reason that I could not move on to the ninth story yet).
Read more here. She says the collection is “highly recommended”. Thank you very much, Nancy!
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Cloud Atlas also accompanied me during my illness. And lookie, another book!
It’s a big-ass book.
