Weekend Listening

I'm supposed to be working on something this weekend. So I sat in front of my computer, then I noticed that there's a huge pile of paper on my desk. Cleared the papers, moved the books to this stack near the window.

Before I knew it, I had grouped my books into fiction/nonfiction stacks. I moved the CDs and the DVDs to the shelf, everything alphabetized by title. Of course there has to be music.



John Legend somehow reminds me of Norah Jones: soft and easy, like a welcoming couch. You sit down and don't want to move. Also, the songs in Once Again, all kind of blend already into this amorphous mass after some time. The singles "Save Room" and "P.D.A" are already the distinctive ones in the bunch. It was actually because of the latter that I wanted to listen to the whole album. But that's largely because the music video of PDA features the guy from City of God, I think.



But if you play Justin Timberlake, his Future Sex/Love Sounds makes you want to dance. If you want to finish things, you turn up the volume on Justin.

The Good Provider

According to The New York Times, is one who leaves. That is now true for a lot of Filipinos. Jason De Parle has this very good report on the OFW phenomenon.

Feast and Famine

Book #9 is Rosario Cruz Lucero's Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros. It took me over a year to finish reading this: I savored the stories over many lunch hours and coffee breaks, and as always, I am usually out of breath when I finish a story.

The last story from the collection that I read is the Composo of Hacienda Bayug. I like how one incident prompts the townspeople to comment on the story with other little stories of their own, giving you the bigger picture of the town, its history, whether all these stories are real or gossip or mere fodder for corner store story-telling.

I've read a few more books that I haven't blogged yet but read them earlier in the year. Mostly nonfiction, there's some Nick Joaquin, Pico Iyer, Fast Food Nation, Alain de Botton. Hope I'll get around to blogging these soon.

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake is my Book #8. I started reading it last Friday afternoon while I was waiting in line at a government office to get some ID. By the time I was done (technically. But I need to wait for the darn ID in the mail.) I was also a third through the book. I read it through the weekend. But I think I like The Interpreter of Maladies better.