After I finished reading Before Ever After, I immediately requested an interview with author Samantha Sotto, because I enjoyed the novel so much.
I’m glad her crazy week had room for me, because it was such a pleasure to meet her!
Reading something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue
After I finished reading Before Ever After, I immediately requested an interview with author Samantha Sotto, because I enjoyed the novel so much.
I’m glad her crazy week had room for me, because it was such a pleasure to meet her!
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.