Happy Tuesday everyone! It is the second day of the week already but I hope everyone is doing well and is safe. Tuesdays also mean one thing, a Top Ten Tuesday update! Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week’s given topic is Books I Read On Vacation

Oh. Vacations. As a working professional, I really do value vacations as they come far in between. A vacation provides a reprieve from the tediousness of corporate work. But being on vacation does not stop me from reading a book or two. Here are some of the books I read while I was on vacation. Happy reading everyone!

Kicking off the list are three books while I was on vacation abroad. Back in July 2018, my friends and I traveled to Thailand; I would also go on and continue the trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Hanoi, Vietnam. Two of the books I brought along with me are Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. I think both books were part of my 2018 Top 20 Reading List. Anyway, I started the former even before we boarded the plane and finished during my ten-day trip. It was a quick read and I did love it. I have also been meaning to read the succeeding books in the series but never got around to it for I got preoccupied with other books.

The New York Trilogy, on the other hand, was my first book by Paul Auster. I have been reading good things about the book. It was also a book I started during the Tri-City tour. I cannot recall if I completed it during the trip or once I returned to the Philippines. It was an interesting book, a step out of my comfort zone. Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, on the other hand, was a book I bought along with me during my 2017 autumn trip to South Korea. However, I had too much fun during the trip that I barely made progress with the book. Besides, it was quite thick.

During my trip to Cagayan de Oro and Camiguin in the southern part of the country back in June 2018, one of the books I brought along with me was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. It was my third book by the renowned American writer. Nobel Laureate in Literature Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera was also my third book by the Colombian writer and was part of my solo trip (first-ever) to Coron, Palawan back in 2016. It was also a meaningful book for it was the 500th novel I read.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the second Nobel Laureate on this list but when I read The Buried Giant back in November 2016, he wasn’t named the winner yet. He would be awarded by the Swedish Committee a year later. Anyway, I read The Buried Giant during my Ilo-ilo trip. While I loved Ishiguro’s other works, I was barely impressed with The Buried Giant. Another book I brought along with me during the said Ilo-ilo trip was Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker. It was my first novel by the Korean American writer and I must say I was impressed; I would end up reading two more of his works, the latest being the dull and unimpressionable My Year Abroad.

The last three books on this list were all part of my trip to Cebu back in November 2019. It was the last travel I had before the pandemic struck. Anyway, the first of these three books was Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. I read the book while waiting for my companions to arrive; my flight was nearly a day earlier than theirs. Before the arrival of their flight, I was already done with the book, something I did not expect. It was a work of historical fiction and I loved the historical context. The last part of the book was a bit of a downer though.

The second book I finished during the trip was Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women. While Shute’s book was part of my 2019 Top 20 Reading List, The Island of Sea Women was part of my 2019 Top 10 Books I Look Forward to List. I did not expect to find a copy of the book in Cebu for I was not able to find one while in Manila. I liked the book as it captured the portrait of the haenyo women of Jeju, South Korea while capturing the island’s tumultuous history. Lastly, I bought a copy of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic on the last day of the trip. I no longer had any books to read. Interestingly, this was the first short story collection that I completed. And I was glad for Joaquin provided me glimpses not only of his writing skills but also of the untapped potentials of Philippine literature.

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