Read, Write, and Travel with Moleskine®!


The new Moleskine collections are here. Stop me from going on a rampage!

After being unveiled at Salon Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in April, Moleskine’s new Writing, Travelling, and Reading collections are finally coming to the Philippines, via National Book Store.

The new collections are designed by Italian designer Giulio Iacchetti, and are specially created to be perfectly compatible with each other, and with the Moleskine notebooks and planners through special clips and holders. All the new items bear Moleskine’s signature aesthetic: mostly black, elastic band, smoothly rounded corners, and the “in case of loss” label.

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The Mighty Bright book light

People on my Facebook may have seen this on my status last night — I learned a new word, librocubicularist, which means “someone who reads in bed.”

Because I am an unabashed librocubicularist, I often read in the dark, because I like drifting off to sleep in the middle of a book. In the latter half of 2010, though, my nocturnal reading was severely curtailed (maybe this explains the drop in last year’s reading figures) because I was without a book light for some period of time: my Lumos lightwedge went out of commission (batteries leaked and stuck in the narrow terminals, and their customer service could not give me any advice on how to get them out!); the Really Tiny Book Light turned out to be the Ridiculously (Expensive but) Flimsy Book Light that conked out after a less than a dozen uses; and the lightwedge clone turned out to be, well, a dud.

My book club friends and I were making our rounds of the bargain bookstores one day when I spotted a row of little rectangular boxes on a shelf full of toys and school supplies. It was labeled: Mighty Bright Flex II and when I saw it was a book light at an amazingly low price, I quickly called everyone over and we happily trooped to the counter with at least one box each.

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The Week in Loot

In case you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in the past few days, it’s because I’m trapped in the holiday frenzy — Christmas shopping to complete, presents to wrap, parties to attend and the horrible city traffic. Plus the dawn masses have started and I wake up at 4am to go, so I’m running on very little energy at the moment. Hopefully normal blogging resumes after Christmas, but I’ll try and post more before then.

Anyway, I was supposed to be shopping for books on other people’s wishlists, but they’ve been elusive so far, and I’ve illicitly gone a-looting for myself (I promised not to buy any more books for myself until Christmas, but I’ve given up on that) because well, the holiday stress was getting to me and book shopping is therapeutic (and yes, I have no self-control)!

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The Clone (or what I brought home from MIBF Day Two)


As my longtime readers would probably know, I’ve been looking for new lighting gadgets for my bedtime reading, as my Harry Potter Lumos Lightwedge is hopelessly out of commission (battery leaked and stuck to the very narrow terminal and won’t budge!) and I managed to disembowel my Really Tiny Book Light after just a couple of months (the flimsy light is now in two broken pieces; what a rip-off).

I didn’t get to spend much time at the Book Fair today (mostly busy working at the co-located events and running after people to interview), so I only got a couple of books (will tell you about them in another post) but I managed to spot a  “Light Panel” (read: Lightwedge clone) in one of the booths.  I was pretty desperate because I have been living without a reading light for some months now and it’s been driving me crazy, and the thing was only P100 so I decided to get it.

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Bookish Blackout!

 

 

On Tuesday night, I was pounding out a blog entry when my mom told me to go to bed because there was a storm brewing (typhoon Basyang). I was actually packing up my stuff already; the chilly wind was blowing into the living room and I was getting goosebumps. Of course, because I’m now paranoid, I had to check that I had no books at flood level before heading upstairs.

I’d no sooner climbed into bed when the power went out, and the wind started howling something awful, rattling the window panes and galvanized iron roofs from nearby. Our dog Macky started whimpering from the stairs so I grabbed my flashlight to take him up to the room. Our cat Missy was already burrowing into my mom’s blankets for warmth (she hates being cold).

I fell into a fitful sleep, worrying about falling trees and flying rooftops, and woke up to the sound of my brother telling my mom the upstairs bathroom was a mess — the window was open and the ceiling was detached, hanging by the wiring of the lamp in the center. I got out of bed and there was sludge all over the toiletries!

Still no power by then so I marched off to the bathroom downstairs to get ready for work. There were a few inches of floodwater in the street so I had to tiptoe across the sidewalk!

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