Best + Worst 2014

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Last Saturday, we Flippers found ourselves in Angono, the art capital of the Philippines, for our book club’s annual Best and Worst discussion, a tradition we uphold every January in place of our monthly book discussion.

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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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Bookish Stamps

A couple of weeks ago, I went on an Old Manila Heritage Tour sponsored by the Pilipinas Stamp Collectors’ Club, a tour that covered the Metropolitan Theatre, the Arroceros Forest Park, Liwasang Bonifacio, and the Manila Post Office. It was not as organized as I would have liked, but then again it was a free tour, so I shouldn’t be complaining.

At the end of the tour, there was a stamp collecting seminar and by then my book club friends had decided they’d had enough geekiness for one day. I was tired, too, but I couldn’t resist staying. I’ve never had any formal instruction in collecting stamps and I’ve got two albums bursting full of them, some from my childhood collection and some accumulated after two years of BookMooching.

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The Girl from the Chartreuse

I was poking around at an 80% off sale at one of my favorite book stores when I came across a book that caught my eye: The Girl from the Chartreuse by Pierre Peju. I’d never heard of it before, but I thought it would look pretty on my bookshelf (yes, I judge a book by its cover!)  so I decided to add it to my purchases.

The Girl from the Chartreuse (Fr. “La Petite Chartreuse,” translated into English by Ina Rilke) is a French novella that won the prestigious Prix du Livre Inter in 2003, and was made into a French film in 2005.

It starts off ominously: “Five in the afternoon. It will be exactly five in the afternoon under the bitter cold November rain when the van of the bookseller Vollard (Etienne) spurting down the avenue collides head-on with a little girl who runs smack into his path.”

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