Book sale alert! Book sale alert!
To all bookworms out there, a certain local bargain bookstore is on sale. For the month of June, certain branches of Books for Less are selling ALL their books for PHP 50.00 only. You heard that right, ALL books for just PHP 50.00. If you are on the look out for books to read, then head out to the nearest Books for Less bookstore that is on sale.
To reiterate, only certain branches are on sale. Below is the list of branches on sale:
1. Books for Less Shopwise, Commonwealth Avenue, Quezon City
2. Books for Less Centris, EDSA, Quezon City
3. Books for Less Sun Mall, Welcome Rotonda, Quezon City
4. Books for Less Jazz Mall, Makati City
5. Books for Less SM Pasig City
6. Books for Less Pioneer Center, Pioneer Street, Pasig City
7. Books for Less RCBC Plaza, Makati City
Even though I already have heaps of books on my bookshelf, I decided to give this sale a go and on a rainy Saturday evening, I was busy scavenging the bookshelves of the Pioneer Center branch because it is the branch closest to where I reside. For two hours, I was looking for titles that I deem should be part of my reading list. The book that greeted me upon my entrance is Nobel Peace Prize for Literature winner Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Without any second thoughts, I took it.
In the fiction section, I saw numerous literary heavy weights such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves. There were some works of Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman, Patricia Cornwell, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates as well. Unfortunately, I only concentrated on the hardbound and trade paperbacks. I don’t have any iota on the great reads in mass market paperback format. Aside from fiction books, there are also books on history, business and religion. There are some cookbooks as well.
The selections were a bit limited, to be honest. Nonetheless, I was able to cop four books which piqued my interest. Below are the books that I bought.
Title: Paradise
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1997
No. of Pages: 318
Synopsis: “Rumors has been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby foe VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed. . . The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women.”
Title: Suite Française
Author: Irène Némirovsky
Translator: Sandra Smith
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 338
Synopsis: “By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece
The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.“
Title: The Big Sleep
Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 263
Synopsis: “Raymond Chandler created the fast-talking, trouble-seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe’s entanglement with the Sternwood family – and an attendant cast of colourful figures – is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream.”
Title: The Bookseller of Kabul
Author: Åsne Seierstad
Translator: Ingrid Christophersen
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 288
Synopsis: “This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul has elicited extraordinary praise throughout the world and become a phenomenal international bestseller. The Bookseller of Kabul is startling in its intimacy and its details – a revelation of the plight of Afghan women and a window into the surprising realities of daily life in today’s Afghanistan.”
That’s it for now. Fellow bookworms, I do encourage you to go to the nearest Books for Less branch and buy books for PHP 50.00.
Happy reading!
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 