Book Specs Author: Italo Calvino Translator: William Weaver Publisher: Hardcourt Inc. Publishing Date: March 2016 Number of Pages: 260 pages Genre: Postmodernist Fiction Synopsis If on a winter’s night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a […]
Tag: Book Blog

Book Review # 46: Sense and Sensibility
Book Specs Author: Jane Austen Publisher: Penguin Books Publishing Date: 1995 Number of Pages: 323 Genre: English Fiction, Romance, Bildungsroman Synopsis As the title of Jane Austen’s first published novel suggests, the difference between two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, lies not only in their appearance but also in their temperament. Yet Sense and Sensibility not only contrasts Elinor’s […]

Book Review # 45: Hallowe’en Party
Book Specs Author: Agatha Christie Publisher: Harper Publishing Date: 2001 Number of Pages: 336 Genre: Suspense, Mystery Synopsis At a Hallowe’en party, Joyce – a hostile thirteen-year-old – boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no one believes her, she storms off home. But within hours her body is found, still in the house, […]

Book Review # 44: Water for Elephants
Book Specs Author: Sara Gruen Publisher: Algonquin Paperbacks Publishing Date: 2006 Number of Pages: 335 pages Genre: Historical, Romance Synopsis When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands […]

Book Review # 43: Smaller and Smaller Circles
Book Specs Author: F.H. Batacan Publisher: Soho Press, Inc. Publishing Date: 2015 Number of Pages: 357 Genre: Mystery, Suspense, Philippine Literature, Crime Fiction Synopsis Payatas, a 50-acre dump in northeast Manila, is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement […]

2018 First Quarter Book Wrap-up
The first three months of 2018 has come and gone. Now it is time to look back to the first quarter of the year that was, in terms of books and reading. 2018 Reading Resolutions and Reading Achievements At the start of the year, I made a reading resolution. One of the things that I […]

2018 First Quarter Book Haul (Part II)
This is the second part of my 2018 first quarter book haul. To check the first part, click here. “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all […]

2018 First Quarter Book Haul (Part I)
At the start of the year, I made a reading resolution. At the top most of this list is the resolution to read more and buy less. I guess I was overestimating myself although I have already admitted at the start that it would be a moot mission as I began buying as much book […]

Book Review # 42: An American Marriage
Book Specs Author: Tayari Jones Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill Publishing Date: 2018 Number of Pages: 308 Genre: Romance, Contemporary Synopsis “Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young business executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting […]

Book Review # 41: Possession: A Romance
Book Specs Author: A.S. Byatt Publisher: Vintage Publishing Date: 1991 Number of Pages: 511 Genre: Romance, Poetry, Literary Fiction, English Literature Synopsis Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian […]