What people do in a recession: Read.
This year, as Italians, French, and Spaniards drove to the mountains or to the Mediterranean; as Russians with rubles headed to Sochi and Cyprus; as Germans flocked to Baltic Sea cottages; as the Japanese jetted to America or Europe or trained to Tokyo’s Shonan beach; and as Britons went anywhere with a forecast for sun, they packed engrossing reads they hoped would plunge them into imagined worlds more satisfying than the reality outside the printed page.
Rarely has this kind of distraction been more needed than now, in the midst of an economic annus horribilis that has seen inflation, unemployment, and fiscal crisis rise and spread across the globe.
Summer Reading of Our Discontent by Liesl Schillinger in Foreign Policy.
According to the article, Italians are reading Tiziano Scarpa’s Stabat Mater and Cesarina Vighy’s L’Ultima Estate. Russians still read the classics, plus novels by contemporary authors Sergei Minaev and Andrei Astvatsaturov and historical detective fiction by Boris Akunin. The Japanese are reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, and the Brits, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
Going by the NBS bestseller list, Filipinos are reading The Host by Stephanie Meyer, David Baldacci’s Divine Justice, and Rogue by Danielle Steele.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 2nd, 2009 at 22:33
Is this a subtle jab at our reading preferences?
September 3rd, 2009 at 14:45
just in time.i’m starting to revamp my ‘monthly book escapades’ . Just check out if you have time
Generally Filipinos pick books that are easy to read…books that don’t require readers to pick thesaurus and dictionaries along. Also, we sometimes devour books that our friends have recomended…the “eto uso” syndrome, yet again…
as for me “reading a text that not just anybody would read makes my heart beat faster than reading an already familiar book which everybody could relate with.Ayaw ko makiuso…ayaw…hehe”