Bookish Tees from Booktique

If you're looking for great stuff for book lovers, check out these bookish shirts! Cool and comfortable, these new Booktees from Booktique are designed to delight any bibliophile!  Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird designs are part of the Iconic Book Covers Series.  

You can cut them up, fold them, or just have fun with them! They're made of high quality cotton with special plastisol printing for vibrant color that lasts for years and won't crack.


Also available are cool quotes, like this one which is my favorite, which reads "Heaven is curling up with a good book and a cup of coffee." 

and "So many books, so little time." Frank Zappa

Available in XS, S, M, L, XL for P350 only at Booktique.


Check out the size guide here.

Soledad's Sister - by Jose Dalisay

Upon the recommendation of a friend, I read Soledad's Sister by Butch Dalisay with great expectations of a page-turning mystery thriller but found myself extremely disappointed. It is not to say that the prose is not beautifully written, but I probably went into it with a different set of expectations altogether. Shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize, the book's murder mystery plot could have fit into 3 pages tops. Instead, the book is essentially a set of historical flashbacks of the stories behind the characters. Soledad, an OFW with a bitter past, mysteriously dies while she is out of the country and her body arrives at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in a casket.  Policeman Walter Zamora is assigned to drive her sister Aurora all the way from their hometown in Paez (6 hours from Manila) to the airport to pick up the body.  While in Manila the body is stolen.   The tour through the lives of a collage of people from PInoys to Chinese also include those of an airport security guard, a car thief known as "Boy Alambre", the teenage son of Soledad's employers in Hong Kong, and Soledad's companion maid in Jeddah.

The novel makes wide references to Pinoy pop culture, such as places, personalities, and music in the 80s and 90s, so much that it reminds me of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.    Ruffa Guitierez, Sharon Cuneta, Regine Velasquez, Megamall, Reader's Digest, Brother Mike, Whitney Houston, Olivia Newton-John, are just some of the people and places the novel refers to. 

However, when I saw it in National Bookstore I said, "No, this can't be it."  The look of the book was a disappointment to me. This Man Asian Literary Shortlister came in a very thin paperback format, in thin brown NEWSPRINT paper that didn't do justice to the cover artwork by Jason Moss, whose artwork also illustrates Nick Joaquin's books.    As I mentioned in one of my previous posts The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Pinoy Reader, Pinoy Literature is as good as international literature, and we should present it as such.  If we are not confident about our own literature how can we then expect other nationalities to take it seriously as well?

Booktique Fabric Bookovers



Go from plastic to chic with new Booktique Fabric Bookovers

Is that a purse?  No, it's a book!  If you're going out with one why put up with plastic when you can be chic!  New Booktique Bookovers - they're original handmade fabric book protectors designed to keep your book from wear and tear while dressing it up at the same time!   Completely washable, you can use them over and over, from book to book.

They're lined for extra durability and come in 3 sizes to fit almost any book - mass market paperback, trade paperback, and large hardcover. Absolutely no cutting, measuring, or taping needed.

Choose from a range of cool designs, match your outfit, and collect them all!

Booktique Bookovers are available at Booktique for only Php 250 each.  Visit the site for specific measurements or dimensions.  Booktique also accepts orders for special sizes upon request.

Go from geek to sleek with Booktique Bookovers and flash your book around with an attitude!

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F. H. Batacan

If you're looking for a great crime novel, try one about a serial killer roaming the streets of Manila itself.  Winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 2002, Smaller and Smaller circles is a forensic novel that was so engrossing I finished it in one afternoon flat.  Published in 2002, Batacan wrote about psychological profiling and forensic evidence around the time that the famous CSI TV Series first aired in the Philippines (or maybe even before, can’t find the exact year.) The book has all the elements of a gripping forensic mystery, including a perpetrator with a brilliant but deranged criminal mind, two investigators from the National Bureau of Investigators who happened to be priests, their difficult boss, a dogheaded media reporter, and all the exciting forensic techniques that include lifting fingerprints from paper, tool mark matching, using dental records to identify victims, as well as analyzing footprints and matching them to the shoes that left them.  It was nice to imagine NBI investigators doing forensic work to catch a killer!

What made it real, and thus more thrilling, was that the story is set close to home, the Philippines, particularly in the depressed area of Payatas. The investigators also visited places familiar to us local Pinoys, such as Katipunan, Makati, and even Cebu in the course of their investigation. The only discomfort I had was the numerous short scenes that seemed to keep the story from building up especially in the beginning. Just when it seemed to be picking up the scene would end abruptly followed by the next scene introducing yet another character.   But when I got to the middle it seemed to flow more smoothly from there until the end.  This Philippine crime novel is now one of my favorite books!  F.H. Batacan is like the Philippines’ Patricia Cornwell. Hoping for more to come from Ms. Batacan!

I met Ms. Batacan at the 2nd Manila Int'l Literary Festival last November 16-17 and was privileged to have her sign my book! Here it is!