Posted by bennardfajardo on January 3, 2017 · 2 Comments
After a few months of silence on the blogging front, the prodigal son has returned. My return to the Philippines, land of the unreliable internet connections and of things that are infinitely more interesting than blogging, is to be to blame for the lack of updates for this blog but. since I am now returned … Continue reading →
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 →
Filed under 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 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 →
Filed under 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 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 →
Filed under 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 June 9, 2015 · 6 Comments
For four months now, I have never updated the BOOKLOVE feature of my blog. There’s no reason for excuses because it was mostly laziness that held me off from writing regularly. However, I don’t just want to let this feature die so, in order to catch-up, I’m going to write an extended version of BOOKLOVE … Continue reading →
Filed under Book Love, Books · Tagged with A High Wind in Jamaica, A Tale of Love and Darkness, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Alejandro Zambra, All The President's Men, Amos Oz, Bob Silvers, Bob Woodward, Book Love, Books, Carl Bernstein, Criterion Collection, George V. Higgins, Heinrich Böll, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeffrey Toobin, John Barth, John Donne, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kelly Link, Machado de Assis, Magic for Beginners, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, May It Please The Court: The First Amendment, Nausea, On Death, Ory and Crake, Patrick Modiano, Paul Auster, Peter Irons, Phillip Gourevitch, Richard Hughes, Robert Musil, Susan Sontag, Suspended Sentences, The Alienist, The Art of Hunger, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Housekeeper and The Professor, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Man Without Qualities: Volume 1, The New York Review Abroad, The Nine, The Remains of the Day, The Sot-Weed Factor, The War Against Cliche, Thomas Pynchon, V., Ways of Going Home, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Yoko Ogawa
Posted by bennardfajardo on January 16, 2015 · 5 Comments
2015 has just passed its one-day mark and I already have a backlog. Three of them in fact because, for the last three months of 2014, I have failed to update my BOOKLOVE feature. Sure, there have been attempts to avoid the undesirable result of having a backlog but, alas, I have no excuse why … Continue reading →
Filed under Book Love, Books · Tagged with After Henry, Aharon Applefeld, Alice Munro, Augustus, Badenheim 1939, Barry Hannah, Book Love, Books, Complete Short Stories, Emily St. John Mandel, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014, Grace Paley, Graham Greene, Hawthorn & Child, Here, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, John King, John Reed, John Williams, Keith Ridgway, Long Last Happy: New and Selected Stories, Memed My Hawk, Muriel Spark, On Modern Latin American Fiction, Richard McGuire, Snowball's Chance, Station Eleven, The Collected Stories, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, True Confessions, Yashar Kemal
Posted by bennardfajardo on October 14, 2014 · 6 Comments
I’m feeling a little bit book giddy today, generally happy about the state of literature and about the large number of books that I have yet to read so I’ve decided to write, sooner that I would have, about the books that I got last month. September was a bit crazy overall because there was a … Continue reading →
Filed under Book Love, Books · Tagged with A Very Easy Death, Adrian Tomine, Anton Chekhov, Art and Litearture, Art Spiegelman, Bellefleur, Betrayal, Book Love, Books, Brian K. Vaughn, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, Christopher Hitchens, Dancing Bear, David Mitchell, Donald Antrim, Ezra Pound, Fiona Staples, Graham Greene, Harold Bloom, Harold Pinter, High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006, Ian McEwan, Italo Calvino, James Crumley, Jeanette Winterson, Joseph Brodsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Less Than One: Selected Essays, Living Thinking Looking, Marcel Proust, Marjane Satrapi, Maus, Mr. Palomar, No One Left to Lie To, Persepolis, Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, Saga: Volume 1, Saturday, Seven Short Novels, Simone de Beauvoir, Siri Hustvedt, Summer Blonde, The Bone Clocks, The Emerald Light in the Air, The Hundred Brothers, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, The Tenth Man, The Verificationist, Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, William H. Gass, Written on the Body
Posted by bennardfajardo on September 29, 2014 · 5 Comments
August has been a huge month for me particularly because the end of the month marked the day for the 2014 Library of Congress Book Festival where I got to meet one of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, and three other writers (well, two writers, Claire Messud and Siri Hustvedt, and one translator, Natasha Wimmer). … Continue reading →
Filed under Book Love, Books · Tagged with Book Love, Books, Colum McCann, Enduring Love, I Remember Nothing, Iain Banks, Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby, Nora Ephron, Songbook, The Wasp Factory, TransAtlantic, View With A Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska
Posted by bennardfajardo on September 2, 2014 · 6 Comments
My mother came into the house one day, a smile on her face and a newspaper in her hand, walked right up to me, opened the paper right in front of me, and shoved the paper into my face. “The 2014 Library of Congress Book Festival” it said and nothing else except the date and … Continue reading →
Filed under Book Love · Tagged with A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction, Billy Collins, Book Love, Books, Claire Messud, EL Doctorow, Library of Congress National Book Festival, Paul Auster, Ragtime, Roberto Bolaño, Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World, The Trouble with Poetry, The Woman Upstairs, Valerie Miles, Winter Journal
Posted by bennardfajardo on August 26, 2014 · 4 Comments
How does one start a post like BOOKLOVE when you’ve done it a dozen times? It’s quite hard to begin writing these posts but one must just trudge through it, I suppose. I’ve been hoarding books from New Directions Publishing lately because (1) they publish interesting books and (2) it is quite hard to get … Continue reading →
Filed under Book Love, Books · Tagged with A Streetcar Named Desire, Book Love, Books, Curzio Malaparte, Djuna Barnes, Exercises in Style, Felisberto Hernandez, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nightwood, Raymond Queneau, Sjon, Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, The Skin, The Whispering Muse, Two Crocodiles
The Book Hooligan 