Category: books

I am very much guilty of abandoning books, and equally guilty of amassing them. Among the books I recently abandoned are Lord of the Rings (I TRIED I REALLY TRIED) and Let the Right One In. 

So there they continue to sit on my shelf the floor, looking at me with contempt as I order the following online:

From The Book Depository

Carol by Patricia Highsmith (Crime)

Slights by Kaaron Warren (Horror)

We Bury the Landscape by Kristine Ong Muslim (Surreal/Slipstream?)

I wanted to buy only ebooks because SPACE. (Have I told you that I do not have a bookshelf in my place in Makati? And that the shelves in Bulacan are overflowing with paperbacks?) Unfortunately I don’t own a credit card, so Amazon won’t let me buy shit.

It was only after I’ve ordered a paperback copy of Slights did I find out that Angry Robot (who brought us Lauren Beukes’s wonderful novels) has an ebook arm – The Robot Trading Company.

Well, dammit. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have ordered Slights off of that and be able to read it tonight instead of, you know, a month from now. (Thank you snail mail.)

But TRTC is awesome. They sell DRM-free ePubs that get dispatched instantly. How about that!

I already have:

Ghostwriting and A Writer’s Life by Eric Brown (both Horror)

The Accord by Keith Brooke (Science Fiction)

And I have Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World somewhere.

Now: where can I order time to read all this?

After every school shooting (and there have been many – and not just in the United States) the news reports become saturated with expert insights and armchair analyses of the shooter. Was he disturbed? Was he sad? Was he bullied? Classmates are interviewed, and a picture is painted of the teenage outcast turned murderer. Such an extensive coverage, but I have yet to read an in-depth interview with the shooter’s mother. How can we even begin to imagine the pain and guilt of a woman who gave birth to a boy and ended up with a monster?

Lionel Shriver imagined it in this powerful novel. In We Need To Talk About Kevin, Eva Katchadourian writes a series of letters to her husband, eighteen months after their 16-year-old son Kevin killed nine people in his own school. The book is not just about Kevin – it’s about motherhood, marriage, the nature of evil and violence, Middle America, traveling, women and their wants and their bodies, the United States and its shame. It is told through Eva’s eyes, so we as the reader have no choice but to see things as she sees them. Was Kevin truly born evil, or were Eva and her husband partly to blame? I don’t know. It is hard to tell. The novel is absorbing and beautifully written; as suspenseful as any horror story, as insightful as any work of art. Throughout the novel, Shriver manages to withhold an important piece of information from us, and when she reveals it, it feels like an arrow to the chest.

I was in a haze after I finished this book. Stunning.

This campy, terrifying, heartbreaking novel starts out like this:

CHAPTER ONE

IGNATIUS MARTIN PERRISH SPENT the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.

But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.

And these two tiny paragraphs grip you and draw you in, much like Ig Perrish’s horns, which, as he soon discovers, give him the power to compel people to confess their most depraved urges and act without inhibition.

I am a fan of Joe Hill (who, if you didn’t know, happens to be Stephen King’s son). I am particularly fond of his short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts and his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box. In an interview, Joe Hill said “you have to remember I’m a completely frustrated mainstream writer. I wound up writing horror and fantasy very naturally, because I love those things and ’cause I think I’m good at it, but I also like and read a lot of mainstream fiction, Tobias Wolfe and John Irving.” And you can clearly see the mainstream (realist? literary?) influences in his writing. There are numerous gleeful references to the Devil in Horns, both pop-cultural and biblical, which have also been pointed out in a New York Times review of the book  – pitchforks, snakes, the use of fire and red skin, how evil can be repelled by a crucifix (I know, it’s silly, but stay with me here), deviled eggs, the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”, Evil Knievel, a restaurant called The Pit, a TV show called Hothouse, a brother who drives a Viper, character names from The Exorcist, devil in a blue dress, etc etc – but despite all this, despite all the ribbing, tongue-in-cheek jokes about evil and blasphemy, Hill still manages to deliver an absorbing story about murder and how it affects people. It’s a story about faith –  losing it and finding it, at times in the most unlikely places.

I remember reading a beautiful poem in a UP Quill portfolio about the Devil ruminating at a funeral (or the cemetery? I have bad memory), saying that it wasn’t him who told people to put that crown of thorns on His head, to nail Him to the cross. That what the people did was worse than what he could ever have imagined.

Horns is about that, too.

I want to get my reading groove back, so right now I’m re-reading Donna Tartt’s sumptious The Secret History and reading Let the Right One In by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Here are some short thoughts on books I’ve finished. What are you reading?

Pretty Monsters

Kelly Link writes surreal stories. Reading one is like stepping into a dream. And like dreams, her narratives usually meander and don’t concern themselves with closures and resolutions. Not necessarily a bad thing. My favorites in this collection: “The Faery Handbag“, “Magic for Beginners”, and “The Specialist’s Hat”.

Dream Hunters

A Sandman-style retelling of a Japanese folk tale about a monk and a fox-spirit. Neil Gaiman writes in simple words that are amplified by Yoshitaka Amano’s beautiful illustrations.

Zsazsa Zaturnnah sa Kalakhang Maynila (Blg. 1)

Bonggang-bongga itey! I got this as a compli copy from Ms Nida of VISPRINT. If you enjoyed the first collection of Zsazsa’s adventures, you’ll enjoy this one.

American Short Story Masterpieces

I found this in a secondhand bookstore. Happy I picked this up. So many good stories! My favorites are “The Amish Farmer” by Vance Bourjaily, “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Ile Forest”, “The Story of A Scar” by James Alan Macpherson, Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of Jews”, John Updike’s “The Christian Roommates”, and Andre Dubus’s “The Fat Girl”.