JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The Greenapple notebook looks like a Moleskine pocket carnet—from a distance. Instead of smooth black oilcloth its cover is a thicker leatherette. (Moleskine is on the left, Greenapple on the right.)

The ribbon bookmark is almost the same but the elastic that keeps the notebook shut is thinner, like a rubber band.

Inside the paper is slightly thicker, coarser, and whiter. Unlike most Moleskine facsimiles, the pages are plain, unlined. They soak up ink very well.

There is also an expandable pocket in the back cover. I’ll have to use it for a few months to see if the binding holds. (Almost forgot, thanks for asking: No, the Greenapple does not open flat. It has to be held down. Moleskine binding rules.)

Greenapple retails for P169, less than a quarter of the cost of a Moleskine. I am devoted to my Moleskines but in a pinch I guess I could live with a Greenapple. The Greenapples are available at National Bookstores.

I’d gone to the bookstore to pick up Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open, and am happy to report that it lives up to the hype. All the reviews and talk show interviews (You must check out Andre’s appearance on Letterman) have mentioned the paternal bullying, the Lord of the Flies years at Bolletieri Academy, the fake hair and crystal meth use. But Andre’s accounts of what was going on in his head during his big matches are riveting, and tennis fans will enjoy his descriptions of his rivals.

Pete Sampras was the archenemy, but it’s hard to hate someone whose only interest is tennis. I did like the part where Andre drags Pete to see Grease on Broadway because Brooke Shields is playing Rizzo. Pete does not have a good time. The player Andre hates with a passion is Boris Becker, and he doesn’t love Jimmy Connors, either. He has a lot of admiration for Patrick Rafter and Roger Federer.

Open by Andre Agassi, P1,215 at National Bookstores.

My friend Reret and I share the view that Andre Agassi became an awesome human being when he won the French Open in 1999, then dated and married Steffi Graf (Before that we capital L Loathed him). Andre’s courtship of Stefanie (she prefers to be called Stefanie) is covered in detail in the book. He’d had a crush on her since the early 90s (“She looked, somehow, as if she smelled good. Also, as if she was good, fundamentally, essentially, inherently good, brimming with moral rectitude and a kind of dignity that doesn’t exist anymore.”) and was crushed when he discovered after winning Wimbledon in ’92 that the traditional dance with the women’s singles champion had been canceled. Then they both won the singles crowns at the French Open in ’99, and he decided she was his destiny. Awww.

Open: An Autobiography was written by Agassi with J.R. Moehringer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tender Bar. “I was late in discovering the magic of books,” Andre says in the acknowledgments. “Of all my many mistakes that I want my children to avoid, I put that one near the top of the list.”

The Graf-Agassis do not have a tennis court in their house.