November 2009 – Page 4

Loot!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I hardly had time to sit down to blog over the weekend… or the past few days, as things are going crazy outside of my blogging life. But in the meantime, here’s a photo from our weekend raid at the Scholastic warehouse sale!

(Sorry, no warehouse photos, we just went ga-ga at the sight of the books… typical!!! Haha, when you’re with a pack of bargain book hunters, you have to move fast or miss out on the spoils! )

loot

The figures:

1 Sunday morning
1 warehouse sale
4 book addicts
2 hours of browsing
over 70 books
3 bags nearly splitting at the seams (at P795 each)

Totally exhausting, but so much worth it!

My loot:

Twelve books, coming down to a grand total of P360 (around US $7), petering out to P30 ($0.70) each. And four of them on my wishlist too!

Squee!

Am in the middle of composing a long-overdue review series, will have it up soon, I promise! :)

Salem ac Leporem (Naughty but Nice)

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Here’s another book you’re sure to get a laugh out of: How to Insult, Abuse and Insinuate in Classical Latin by Michelle Lovric and Nikiforos Doxiadis Mardas.

I found this book while randomly browsing on BookMooch and thought it might come in handy for those situations that just call for the choicest words.

For instance, when your credit card company calls you to follow up on your latest payment, instead of muttering “Monkey-faced money-lender!” you could exclaim its Latin equivalent and sound so much better “Cercopithece Faenerator!”

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Postmark Paris

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When I was young, it drove my parents crazy that all their letter envelopes had ragged rectangular tears around the top right corner. I was the likely culprit, as I was the only one in the house who collected stamps. I didn’t get a lot of mail as a kid so of course I was always into the family mail, tearing into my mom and dad’s letters, their business correspondence, and holiday greetings from relatives all over the world. I also enjoyed going to the bookstore during weekends to buy sets of stamps (I don’t think bookstores have them anymore today) with my weekly savings.

I forgot about stamps until recently, when I was reorganizing my displaced stuff that survived the flood and found my old stamp albums with my old collecting still safely intact. Best of all, I had a thick wad of stamps to add to my collection, as for the past year that I’ve been on BookMooch, I’d been mindlessly clipping out stamps from the inordinate amount of packages I’d been receiving and I now had a whole ziplock bag filled with stamps! Continue reading “Postmark Paris”

Trese

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I’m not really into action comics or graphic novels, but I have to admit I was really intrigued when I spotted these Trese comics at the Visprint booth at the Manila International Book Fair last September.

I’d already heard about it on some discussion threads over at FFP, so the first book was on my list for the book fair and I bought a copy on the first day. On the 4th day of the book fair, I dropped by the booth again and spotted the author Budgette Tan and artist Kajo Baldisimo signing autographs, so I couldn’t resist getting a signed copy of the second book.

I read both books during the read-a-thon (books 152-153 of 2009, but I’m backlogged with reviews for around 20 books — aieee!) just in time for Halloween, even if the review is a few days late.

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Sarah’s Key

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A few months back, I signed up for the War Across the Generations World War II Reading Challenge, because I’d read a lot of Holocaust-themed books this year, and had a bunch more waiting in mye in months, and after the flood TBR.

I realized I haven’t read anything for the challenge, and after the flood left my TBR (arranged in order of priority) in wild disarray, I spotted Sarah’s Key (#151 for 2009) in one of the stacks I was reshelving and I was reminded that I had two more books to read this year, so I decided to make some headway in completing the challenge.

Continue reading “Sarah’s Key”