Animal Antics (Picture Book Roundup)

I realize I haven’t done any picture book roundups this year, so here’s the first. I have to do these posts more frequently now, as about 60% of the books I acquire are picture books. My logic (whacked, I know, but it makes perfect sense to me) behind this is that because they’re picture books with not much text, I’m technically not adding to my astronomic TBR. Of course that kind of reasoning rebounds on me because at the rate I’m acquiring them, they take up a lot of space. I do like creating these kinds of problems for myself!

Anyway, in an attempt to get these books moving from my holding area (downstairs — to be read, to be weeded out, to be covered, etc) to my library shelves (upstairs) here’s today’s picture book roundup, mainly animal books. I’m very picky with animal stories, but the clever ones are usually in picture books, so I don’t mind getting a whole bunch of them.

Included in this roundup are Too Many Cooks; Sagwa the Siamese Cat; The Owl and the Pussycat; Stellaluna; The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes; Mind your Manners BB Wolf; Dooby Dooby Moo; and Click, Clack, Quackity Quack, books #25-32 for 2011.

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One of Our Thursdays is Missing

(book review first published in today’s Manila Bulletin, Students and Campuses Section)

The latest installment of British author Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, “One of Our Thursdays is Missing,” hit bookstore shelves this month, four years after the last novel in the series was released.

Preceded by “The Eyre Affair,” “Lost in a Good Book,” “The Well of Lost Plots,” “Something Rotten,” and “The First Among Sequels,” “One of Our Thursdays is Missing” is the much-awaited follow-up in the comic fantasy series starring Thursday Next, a literary detective who has the rare ability to “jump” into the BookWorld.

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Looking Back

I discovered historian Ambeth Ocampo’s essays back in high school: we were taking up the Noli and El Fili in Panitikan (Literature, in Filipino) class and our teacher wanted us to compile newspaper clippings about Jose Rizal. We didn’t have a newspaper subscription, but I lived a few blocks away from the Inquirer office so I went to their library to get some clippings. The library lady handed me a whole folder of articles (pre-digitization; this was the late 90’s) — most of them were from Ambeth Ocampo’s newspaper column, and I remember being so engrossed reading them that the librarian had to walk over and nudge me to let me know they were closing for the afternoon.

As soon as I enrolled in Ateneo for college, I had my heart set on taking Ambeth Ocampo’s History 165 (Rizal and the Emergence of the Philippine Nation) class, and fortuitously, I got a good random number during reg that sem I was scheduled to take that subject so I was able to enlist in his class.

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Letters and Secrets


I was wandering around the bookstore while my brother was loading up on school supplies (it was him, not me, I swear!) when I chanced upon the bargain bin and found two hardcover books that happened to be on my wishlist: The Love Letters of Great Men by Ursula Doyle, and PostSecret: The Secret Lives of Men and Women compiled by Frank Warren.

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The Lost Language

Back in December, the Filipino book bloggers met up with Marianne Villanueva, who is one of the most delightful authors I’ve ever had the chance to meet.

I got a signed copy of her book,  The Lost Language: Stories (and in nice paper, too!) and I finally got to read it earlier this year.

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