JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You are living in a slum with your ailing parents. You work at a shop in a mall, and life is hard but you can support your family and you’re okay. You’ve just bought a smartphone and you can sneak a cigarette now and then. There is a terrorist attack on a train, and because you admire the people on Facebook who say what they want, you post a comment. “If the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?”

And so you descend into hell: arrest, interrogation, jail, the media circus, terrorism charges, people howling for your blood. Because you wanted likes. A journalist writes up your story of grinding poverty, hunger, squalor, and it’s used as evidence that you hated your country. Meanwhile the trans woman you were teaching to speak English, and your former PE teacher want to testify on your behalf, but find there are advantages to participating in your destruction.

Devastating, compelling (Dare you not to read it in a single day), bleakly funny. You know this happens. This is today’s world in 289 pages.

How many times have I thought, “I just want to lie in bed all day reading books”? I’ve been staying at home for five months, and I had not done so. Why? I have the time, I have the books, so yesterday I read all day and night, stopping only to feed cats and self.
(more…)

Heard about the Giordano Bruno series from S.J. Parris’s guest shot on the Art Detective podcast. Now reading the Elizabethan-era mystery thrillers. Knew very little about Giordano Bruno apart from the manner of his death (burned at the stake at Campo dei Fiori, as stated in the wonderful poem by Czeslaw Milosz). I did some reading, and learned that one of the Vatican inquisitors who condemned Bruno to his horrific death was St. Robert Bellarmine, the same Jesuit theologian for whom the Ateneo de Manila building which houses my publisher is named. Bellarmine was also involved in the trial of Galileo.
(more…)

It’s been four months since the virus upended our lives. As apocalypses go, it’s been quiet. Sometimes I don’t speak to another person for days. I force myself to walk 4,000 steps a day indoors. Most days I don’t venture past the parking area of my building. I go downstairs to feed the three garage cats and collect packages from motorcycle delivery men (Shopee is my retail therapy: cat food, envelopes, broom, coffee filters, bond paper, etc). Twice I went to the supermarket, and once to the print shop (and then my friend lent me a laser printer so I don’t have to go back). I’ve walked to the drugstore and the convenience store down the street six or seven times.

I would not survive this quarantine without my friends who, knowing my total lack of cooking skills (I gave my stove to my cleaning lady since I never used it anyway), include my grocery list when they shop, send wine and pastry, and let me judge their cooking experiments. I had one fabulous al fresco lunch on a friend’s birthday. The next one will have to wait—covid numbers have risen since the city reopened (and some testing became available), and hospital ICUs are at full capacity.
(more…)

It’s called Utopia Avenue and it’s set in the late 60s music scene.

Dr Marinus shows up again. Is he the Nick Fury of the Mitchellverse? And the guitarist’s name is Jasper de Zoet. While waiting for Utopia Avenue to arrive in local bookstores, review Mitchell’s earlier novels.
(more…)

I am in my library, the Klementinium in Prague. Virtually. Not in photo: Jean and Jay, who had to leave before the picture-taking.

We had our Bibliophibians Book Club discussion of The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Thanks again to Honey de Peralta who hounded me, very nicely, to read N.K. Jemisin.

The Fifth Season is the first book of The Broken Earth Trilogy, the first trilogy in history to win three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel.
(more…)