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See #2

1. Read a lot of books

Finished more than my one-a-week quota! Among this year’s favorites:

– Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, about an artistic, highly-strung family living in Italy under Mussolini.
– Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Enard imagines that Michelangelo lived in Istanbul for a year to build the bridge over the Bosphorus.
– Exhalation by Ted Chiang, science fiction stories with big brains and hearts.
– The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai opens in Chicago in 1985, when a mysterious disease stalks the gay community, then continues in Paris 2015, when a mother searches for the daughter who left her.
– Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, a fictionalized account of the author’s affair with the much older Philip Roth–her deft portrayal of the balance of power shows exactly why such relationships are problematic.

* For the books I am currently reading, follow us on Instagram.

2. Adopted Buffy the rodent slayer

Buffy, Jacob’s sister, is from the family of cats that has lived downstairs in my building for many years. Several times a week she would present the guards with a freshly-killed rat that was almost as big as she was. After she gave birth to four kittens she looked so scrawny and exhausted that after the kittens were weaned I decided to adopt her. Now the vicious killer is a sweetie.

3. Watched a lot of movies and TV series. Among this year’s favorite movies:

– Once Upon A Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino. Saw it five times at the cinema. The second time some schmuck in the front row was on his iPad the whole movie and I would’ve strangled him but that would require taking my eyes off the screen.
– Avengers Endgame by the Russo Brothers. Okay, more of a theme park, but loved it—never has the lifting of a hammer been so exciting.
– Uncut Gems by the Safdie Brothers. Everyone go home, that Oscar is Adam Sandler’s.
– The Irishman by Martin Scorsese. Requires multiple viewings to appreciate every part of its greatness, so there are advantages to having it on Netflix.
– Marriage Story by Noah Baumbach. His parents’ divorce was the subject of The Squid and The Whale. This is about his own divorce, and though it is comparatively civilized it still turns the couple inside-out.
– Pain and Glory by Pedro Almodovar. The quietest Almodovar, and the most moving. Hollywood has never figured out what to do with Antonio Banderas (and Penelope Cruz), but in his own idiom he is a master.

4. The Sanity Maintenance Program on Studio B.

Writers, filmmakers, artists, actors, therapists talk about how they keep their balance in a world that grows bonkers by the day. Watch the episodes here.

5. Published The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra

Got the book?

6. Did book events (See previous posts)

7. Literary residency in Spain

Read my Spain diary.

Read Last Tour with Carlos Celdran in BusinessWorld.

8. Walked a lot, got more health-conscious.
9. Got used to having white hair.

Anti-anti-aging

10. Fed a lot of cats.

Francois Truffaut said, “Three films a day, three books a week, and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.” A good plan for spending your life, but for that annoying concept: bills. So I make do with three films and one book a week minimum, which is doable if you don’t fritter your life away on social media, having arguments that will never be resolved. At least books and movies end, though we wish the great ones would not.

Must read

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

So wonderful and gripping, I read it in one sitting. Told in the form of a memoir by a writer whose close friend has died. She takes in his dog, a huge Great Dane that is even more grief-stricken than she is. It’s about friendships between people and animals, how writers turn their own lives into fiction, and the futility of describing suffering in words. I was so fascinated by the memoir that I wondered who the dead writer was. Then I remembered that The Friend is a novel—not factual, but true—that won the National Book Award for Fiction. So now my cats demand that I write a novel about them.

Must watch

Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski

By far the most romantic movie I’ve seen in years. In Communist-era Poland, a musician researching folk music meets a young woman (Joanna Kulig, remember the name) with moxie, and their affair spans the length of the Cold War. Based on the story of the filmmaker’s parents. Watching it is like having your heart broken repeatedly until it feels like happiness.

Read my list at the beginning of every month in Esquire (Thanks, PJ).

* A slightly different version of this piece appears in Esquire.

What I read

Transcription by Kate Atkinson. A new novel by Kate Atkinson is reason to cancel all appointments, turn off the phone and stay in bed reading the book in your pajamas. Coming after what may be her finest novels, Life After Life and A God In Ruins (Though you can make a case for her Jackson Brodie detective novels), Transcription has a high bar to clear, and it wisely does not attempt this. This spy novel set in World War II has a throwaway quality, almost as if the author were talking to herself. The naïve 18-year-old heroine Juliet is warned about trusting coincidences, which pile up as the story careens to an end. But it is wonderfully entertaining, even if it is now mixed up in my head with another novel with a female spy, Restless by William Boyd.

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. Yes, I’m still on my Central European reading list. For this I blame the New York Review of Books reissues of almost-forgotten works, which hypnotized me with their solid-colored spines and beautiful covers. Hrabal, Krudy, Szabo, Prus…So I went to Central Europe and wrote a travel book. Please buy it.

Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa. Odd fables the length of an elevator ride that will haunt you for days.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. I imagine the prompt was: If you could learn the exact date of your death, would you? The four Gold siblings of New York got the dates when they were kids. This is what happened next.

What I watched.

You must watch this.

BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee. I cannot believe that this is the first Oscar nomination for the man who made Do The Right Thing and 25th Hour.

Pose by Ryan Murphy (TV series, 8 episodes). Set in the New York ballroom culture of the 1980s (like the documentary Is Paris Burning), it’s really about people cast out by their blood families finding other outcasts and forming their own families. One minute you’re laughing at the shade, the next minute you’re tearing up at the way these fierce bitches support each other. It should be cheesy, miraculously it is not.
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Tin-Aw and Jessica Zafra invite you to the Bibliophibians Reading Group discussion of Daphne du Maurier’s DON’T LOOK NOW.

Saturday, 24 November, 4-6pm at Tin-Aw Art Gallery, G/F Somerset Olympia, Makati Avenue, Makati (beside the Peninsula).

Wine and popcorn will be served. The film adaptation by Nicolas Roeg will be screened. Everyone who has read Don’t Look Now is welcome.

Humans have to be over 18 to attend this event.

Noel went to see Bradley Cooper’s new movie A Star Is Born with high expectations because he has to defend the legacy of Barbra Streisand. I went to see it with low expectations because I am suspicious of movies that get rave reviews. What did we think?

This was supposed to be the third episode, but I decided to get it out while the movie is in theatres.

My guest Noel Orosa, one of my favorite humans, is a regional creative director at an ad agency in Singapore. We recorded this podcast at his hotel room in Manila while waiting for his room service order of pancit canton and adobo.

Thanks to Nexus Technologies for supporting our podcast! I’m getting the hang of recording anywhere, but this time I was too far from the microphone. That’ll be fixed next time.

You can get our podcast on Podbean
https://therealjessicarulestheuniverse.podbean.com/

Persona, one of the most influential films of all time, is widely regarded as Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece. It contains some of the most memorable images in cinema, notably the shot of a child touching a woman’s face projected onto a screen, and the shot of two women looking into a mirror then folding into each other and overlapping. It has inspired a host of parodies about depression and psychoanalysis, so to the first-time viewer it may seem oddly familiar. We tend to forget that when Persona premiered in 1966, it was so new and obscure that critics did not know what to make of it.
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