Year: 2010

What I got myself for Christmas

Here’s a Christmas present I got myself, after being cooped up with this upper respiratory tract infection for most of my short vacation: The Millennium Trilogy Deluxe Edition Boxed Set.

I’ve been drooling over this ever since I saw it at the bookstore earlier this month, and I was trying to see how long I could hold out before breaking down , but National Book Store was on sale at Mall of Asia and 20% off (P2,395 from P2,995) was too good a deal to pass up!  I finally took home the set today! Squee!

I know, I know, you’re thinking, I’ve read the Millennium trilogy, I have three copies of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (trade paperback and hardcover AND a Swedish mass market paperback), and I have mass market paperbacks of The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. But you know I can never resist a pretty book (even one that I already have a copy — or multiple copies for that matter — of, erm, this is why I’ve come to amass over a hundred Harry Potter books in different languages), and well, check out how pretty this boxed set is:

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A bit of Asian flavor

With just a week to go in the year, I’m now working overtime on my A-Z Challenge, with four books to go and eight reviews to write. In an attempt to make it before the clock strikes twelve on the new year, I am trying to rad the remaining books and churn out their reviews as fast as I can, and I’ll deal with the backlog of my regular reading list in the first week of the new year.

Let me start with an Asian selection: Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto and A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong.

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Harry Holidays!

This is one of the reasons I’ve been so busy this season: the Harry Potter Christmas tree!

I wanted a bookish Christmas tree this year so I ended up putting it up myself. And then I had my heart set on a Harry Potter theme, so I drove myself crazy searching for ornaments and even making some of it myself!

It’s been a photo-finish job (I crammed most of it in the last couple of weeks, mostly when my mom was in Singapore, and to her credit, she did not bat an eyelash at my pagan tree!), but it was a lot of fun putting it together!

Here it is, in pictures:

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Christmas Reading

It’s almost Christmas!

Before I get even busier in the next couple of days, here’s this year’s roundup of Christmas reading: The Night Before Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Twelve Days of Christmas, and A Christmas Carol, books #171-175 for 2010.

And to all my readers, a very merry Christmas!!!

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10 interesting things about Marianne Villanueva

Last Saturday, I was holed up at Libreria again with fellow Flippers and book bloggers for a meetup with author Marianne Villanueva, arranged by Rocket Kapre. The Flippers were supposed to have a breakfast meeting, but I went home well past midnight from the previous night’s office party, got an hour’s sleep before dragging myself out of bed for the dawn mass, and then went back to sleep. I was alarmed when Gege’s text woke me up at 10am, when we were designated to meet! I threw on a shirt, shorts and flipflops (and I forgot my camera, too!) and hightailed it to Cubao, just in time for lunch at Ali Mall.

I was still bleary eyed by the time we went back to Libreria, but the discussion was well underway, and I think I was barely coherent while I was nursing a couple cups coffee. Unfortunately I had to hightail it again back home to Makati for a change of clothes for a girls’ night out with my high school friends, but I did get my copy of The Lost Language: Stories signed, and enough interesting factoids about the author to make me want to read the book!

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