Posted by bennardfajardo on September 16, 2016 · 2 Comments
It has been a while since I wrote for this blog. You see, I have been very busy ever since I returned to the Philippines for a playwriting workshop that I attended at the CCP. Also because the place I’m staying in does not have an internet connection that would allow me to write for … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, Books, David Shields, Essential Reading, Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews Faux-Lectures Quasi-Letters "Found" Text and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, Gilgi, House of Leaves, Irmgard Keun, Isagani R. Cruz, Mark Z. Danielewski, Matthew Vollmer, The Best Philippine Short Stories of The Twentieth Century edited
Posted by bennardfajardo on June 5, 2016 · 1 Comment
Of course I had to bounce back from the dismal reading that I did last month (a measly three books when I’m trying to read at least five every month). The way I bounced back was by reading a bevy of shorter works, novellas and graphic novels (which are not lesser in stature just because … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with A Void, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Book Love, Books, Colm Toibin, Domestic Violence, Eavan Boland, Essential Reading, Georges Perec, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, On Elizabeth Bishop, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Colonel
Posted by bennardfajardo on May 20, 2016 · 1 Comment
This post is incredibly, stupendously late. Oh well. True to TS Eliot’s words, April has been a cruel month. Well, at least it has been cruel to my reading as I have finished less than the average number of books that I usually read on a monthly basis but that’s the cynical view. Of course … Continue reading →
Posted by bennardfajardo on April 12, 2016 · 3 Comments
The long cold nights of winter have now passed as we usher in April and spring. There is a revitalizing spirit in the air that makes me want to read more books than I could handle. I find myself every now and then looking at my library and dreaming of reading many of my books … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with Andre Aciman, Book Love, Books, Call Me By Your Name, Edna O'Brien, Essential Reading, H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Lovers on All Saint's Day, Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, The Little Red Chairs
Posted by bennardfajardo on March 11, 2016 · 2 Comments
Where I’m from, winter is finally on its last legs. Despite the romanticism that is often associated with winter, I have never been a fan of the season. Yes, the whiteness of snowfall can often captivate a man who thrives on cynicism but hours and hours of shoveling just to clear up a few square … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with Alice Munro, Because She Never Asked, Books, Enrique Villa-Matas, Essential Reading, Everything and Nothing, Jorge Luis Borges, Runaway, Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl
Posted by bennardfajardo on February 3, 2016 · 1 Comment
I didn’t expect January to turn out to be that rewarding in terms of reading because I was in a slump when the year started. It’s a good thing that two of the books that I read, Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things and Dorothy B. Hughes’ The Expendable man, were perfect in terms of their … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with Book Love, Books, Essential Reading, Giuseppe Tomas di Lampedusa, Haruki Murakami, Julio Cortazar, Martin Amis, Miami and The Siege of Chicago, Michael Punke, Norman Mailer, Norwegian Wood, On The Abolition of All Political Parties, Richard Flanagan, Simone Weil, Stephen Breyer, The Court and The World, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Observatory, The Professor and The Siren, The Revenant, Zone of Interest
Posted by bennardfajardo on December 11, 2015 · 3 Comments
It’s finally the last month of the year. I haven’t finished reading most of the books that I decided on reading last month because, as per usual, I was waylaid by not only other books but other hobbies. For instance, last month I was given two video games, Fallout 4 and Star Wars: Battlefront, that took the time that I … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Books, Contemporary Latin American Short Stories edited, Cronopios and Famas, Essential Reading, Hilda Hilst, John King, Julio Cortazar, On Modern Latin American Fiction, Pat McNees, Silvina Ocampo, The Invention of Morel, Thus Were Their Faces, With My Dog-Eyes
Posted by bennardfajardo on November 11, 2015 · Leave a Comment
I really don’t know why I still keep up this feature in my blog. I make a list of books to read for a certain month yet I always abandon some of the books in order to read something else entirely. For the month of October, I abandoned Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Alicia Borinsky, Anne Carson, Books, Essential Reading, Mean Woman, Patricia Highsmith, Peter Handke, The Autobiography of Red, The Housekeeper and The Professor, The Price of Salt, Yoko Ogawa
Posted by bennardfajardo on October 10, 2015 · 3 Comments
September means that, in my side of the globe, it is starting to get really cold which has the effect of making me want to just lie down in my bed and cover myself with blankets while getting nothing done. I haven’t written any reviews last month and I would wager that it would be the … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with A Game of Hide and Seek, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Anton Chekhov, Books, Elizabeth Taylor, Essential Reading, Flannery O'Connor, Georges Simenon, Ian McEwan, Red Lights, The Children Act, Three Years
Posted by bennardfajardo on September 5, 2015 · Leave a Comment
Well, there goes August. I’m not sure about the exact statistics and I’m too lazy to check but I think I might have read more books this month than any other month this year. Granted, all of the 7 books that I have read this month were short, none of them exceeding the 300 pages. … Continue reading →
Category Books, Reading List · Tagged with Books, Christopher Hitchens, Essential Reading, Joan Didion, Just Kids, No One Left to Lie To, Patti Smith, Pitch Dark, Renata Adler, Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, The Last Thing He Wanted
The Book Hooligan 