JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Koosi with her favorite book

Reader: Uro de la Cruz
Early reading: The Lord of the Rings.

The Name of the Bullfighter by Luis Sepulveda. A Ludlumesque Chilean political thriller.
Inferno by Patricia Melo. Like the Filipino movie Tribu set in Rio de Janeiro.
Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel. Essays on interpreting photographs and paintings.
Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez.
Show Me The Magic by Paul Mazursky. Funny stories on the making of his films Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Moscow on the Hudson, The Tempest, Harry and Tonto, Blume in Love.
Murder in the Marais by Cara Black.
Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman.
The Way of All Flesh by Midas Dekkers. Essays on the inevitability of death and decay.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell.

*****
Reader: Butch Perez
Early reading: Everything Arthurian, from Prince Valiant comics to The Once and Future King

This year’s reading, partial returns.

Non-fiction:
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882-1892 by Raquel A. G. Reyes
The Invisible Palace: The True Story of a Journalist’s Murder in Java by José Manuel Tesoro
The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty by Soetsu Yanagi
Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook

Fiction:
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Mystery novels with quirky detective heroes set in exotic places. My favorite series this year were the Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (a middle-aged philosopher-gourmet police inspector in small-town Sicily) by Andrea Camilleri and the Dr. Siri Paiboun series (the 73-year-old national coroner of Laos during the Pathet Lao regime) by Colin Cotteril.

Science fiction:
Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge
Beyond Infinity by Gregory Benford

The Patron Saint of Plagues by Barth Anderson

Reader: Tina Cuyugan
Early reading: My mother forgot she left me in the comic books section of the old Makati Supermart, and reclaimed me only days after. By then it was too late: I had become a Reader and she was no longer needed.

The Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge. As one who spent much of his life fomenting revolution in Europe, and who later irked Stalin enough to get himself targeted for assassination, Serge didn’t have to go far for material. This novel begins in pre-war Paris, with the spy D on the run from his own government, moves on to the battle of Leningrad, and then a German city being barraged by Allied bombs, before the final reckoning in a hyper-real Mexican landscape.

A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Vassily Grossman. Read it as a companion to his doorstop masterpiece Life and Fate. Grossman transformed himself from a plump, bespectacled intellectual into a great war correspondent, in the thick of action in Stalingrad, the Ukraine and Berlin. His dispatches heartened the Red Army, and the nation. That could happen only because Russians read.

Soul by Andrey Platonov. In the title novella of this astoundingly luminous collection, a Soviet bureaucrat is sent into Central Asia to round up the remnants of his nomadic tribe. When you depend on a flock of lost sheep to lead the way and on the blood of a dead buzzard to slake your thirst, you know you’re trapped in a Russian narrative. Platonov suffered greatly under Stalin (how not?), and was helped by his loyal friend Vassily Grossman.

One Soldier’s War by Arkady Babchenko. In 1995, when he was 18, Babchenko was drafted by the army to fight in Chechnya. Despite his later training as a lawyer, he writes with an honesty and simplicity one could almost call elegant, except that his subject matter is the extreme brutality, terror, and physical deprivation of his stint in the military—before he actually got around to fighting the Chechens. Ah, Russia.

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte. A charming and absolutely untrustworthy Italian fascist journalist, Malaparte intersperses hallucinogenic scenes of wartime depravity with accounts of dinner parties with Swedish royalty, Nazi high officials, and Spanish diplomats—in which he always gives himself the best lines. Hmmm. Still, you are not likely to forget soon the tale of the German general who battled a Finnish salmon.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. This Edwardian novel, set in glittering spas and wealthy estates, is as far away from a battlefield as one can get. But the savage sexual maneuverings and hypocrisy of its characters seem almost more barbarous than mere warfare. I raced through it slack-jawed, except when squealing “No way!” and “What the—?” at every other page.

Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald. Written by a little old lady, this novel is about the romance between a young girl from a noble family and an idealistic doctor set in 1950s Tuscany. Which should teach one not to judge a book by its blurbs. Cool formalists Julian Barnes and A.S. Byatt acclaim Fitzgerald as a 20th-century master gifted with precision, tart wit, humanity and the ability to conjure dizzying yet totally likely plot twists. And economy: she could pack numerous complex lives and entire cultures into just 180 pages of streamlined prose.

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee. Nicely textured biography for those who like grande dames, grand houses and grand literary salons.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski. Even if your policy is to avoid drunks at parties, bear with Bukowski, who is raw, funny and utterly clear-headed as a writer.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Other Pieces by James Thurber. Priceless for the bizarre tales (“The Night the Bed Fell”, “The Night the Ghost Got In”)of Thurber’s family. Their misadventures, despite his laconic Midwestern recounting, will be immediately understandable to any Pinoy who’s lived in a multi-generational household. “The Dog That Bit People” contains no life lessons whatsoever. Read it and weep for joy.