Tag: literature
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Human Nightmares, Capitalist Dreams
Amid the confusion of last year, with the pandemic taking hold of the world like a baby gender reveal-caused forest fire, and the sudden shift to work from home (for some of us, at least) amid quarantine measures being passed down by governments, I was actually able to write two stories of some publishable merit.…
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February 2021 in Reading: Going Back to Print
February did not open well for me. Late in January I was introduced, through a Youtube video by Wisecrack on the philosophy behind The Office probably the one TV show I can claim to absolutely love (other than Community, that is), to David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs. My interest piqued, I got a hold of the…
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January 2021 In Books: Women, Men, and Money Problems
As we were all expecting, 2021 is turning out to be the overhyped sequel to 2020. The virus is still a reality for most countries, and here in the Philippines the vaccines are finally available – but not quite yet, though at the very least they have distributed the forms. Indefinitely I am still stuck…
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My Favorite Books From 2020
It’s been a very non-eventful year, a reflection that I recognize is coming from a privileged position when I think back at the millions or so of people that contracted the virus, the significant portion of those that ultimately didn’t get out alive, and, speaking about local matters, all the people that lost their jobs…
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(Un-)Reading: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life
Reading this book was a very disappointing experience. Reviews of 12 Rules For Life parade Peterson as a kind of intellectual prophet, and the blurb itself claims its author to provide, in the four hundred pages or so that make up the book’s unnecessary long run, “nuanced messages about personal responsibility”. The review that follows…
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Reading All Of Faulkner: Soldiers’ Pay
I’ve had the idea for this challenge for a while now – have been, in fact, ready with most of the books purchased and shelved for the better part of a year – only I could never quite get started for two reasons: (1) I am lazy, and (2) I’ve read some Faulkner before and…
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READING: The Master and Margarita, A Ridiculously Funny Novel From A Ridiculously Unfunny Time
So far the moral of the story seems to be: stop taking things too seriously, and be wary of giant cats. But I’m getting ahead of myself. After the pleasant if short-lived experience with Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World, we fly out of Japan and come into Soviet Russia, coincidentally also involving…
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Quarantine Journals: Reading Albert Camus’s “The Plague”
With Manila entering a rather militaristic community quarantine, I find my Saturday morning suddenly freed up. Naturally my first instinct is to pick up a book from my personal library and while away the hours perched on the bed with a hot cup of coffee. And to think we’re supposed to be in a state…
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(Re-)Reading: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
(Featured image: Murakami collage via 99designs.) I call it the Murakami reset: everytime my reading habit starts to slip (which since I moved from being college boy to corporate slave has become quite frequent) I do a cold reboot by reading something by Murakami (Haruki – though, I’m also a big fan of the other…
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Reading on Planes, Confrontations with White Men
Lately I’ve come to appreciate the calm joy of reading aboard a flight. More-so when I realize that until July of last year I had hardly even stepped inside a plane in my life (technically a lie, as my mother has told me I’d flown before, though that was at an age early enough for…
Dominic Dayta 