Tortured in Santo Domingo

This should have been titled Oscar's Tragic Quest for Pussy. In expletive-laden fragments, Junot Diaz equates love with lust.

Another thing that I don't find endearing is Diaz's portrayal of Dominican Republic. He sets the country's political turmoil as the background of his story. Abuse of power, oppression, and torture come aplenty in the lives of the characters. However, instead of making a point against those ills, Diaz glamorizes them. The book lacks compassion.

American critics, though, couldn't rave enough about Oscar. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, a b--tch in her own right, says "[Diaz has] written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." Distinctive? I see the poetic arrangement of words less as a skill than as a handicap common to non-native English writers. As a reader who is non-English, I appreciate more a prose that glides smoothly in the tongue.

Brainless

The intellectual's Slumdog Millionaire

Morbid week

Book I've read: The Murderer Next Door. It says everyone of us is capable of killing. We evolved that way. Humans kill in order to survive. Everyone of us have homicidal thoughts; some are just pushed to the edge that's why they acted on their instinct. But the most interesting information the psychologist author says is that most murderers are actually ordinary people, not psychopaths you see in slasher movies. You are safer with Hannibal than with the person beside you right now.

You might misinterpret me. I might not able to capture in the words above the essence of the book. But I tell you, it's good. The writing isn't brilliant or gripping, but reading the grim facts of life in plain and simple--albeit bland--English is worth your while. The case the author makes is so simple it makes sense. Some people though would disagree with him--especially those who believe that man is created in the image and likeness of some supreme being.

Book I'm editing: Technician's Guide to Posmortem Examination. Do I have to explain why?

Book I'm about to read: The Mammoth Book of Crime Scene Investigation. It features over thirty real-life crime scene investigations solved by forensics.

Got to go and start eating this book. It's weekend! Got no work! I can read what I want, not what I'm assigned to read. Yahoo! I've never appreciated weekends this much.

Holier than man

I've just finished Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, and my nose is still clogged up. The book is supposed to be bloodcurling, rugged, and hence masculine, but tears would just well up in my eyes every thirty pages or so.

This book is ultra special. This is the first book I bought here in Cebu, and I bought it with the check PDI sent me for "Worth a million." But Totem occupies my current most-favorite list not because of those awful high school-y reasons, but because of the author's sheer masterful storytelling. It's a novel that reads more like an action-packed socio-politico-cultural documentary. I can only agree with San Francisco Chronicle, which describes it as "an intellectual adventure story . . . Five hundred bloody and instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl!"

Wolves now are the holiest creatures for me, even holier than human beings. Like the nomadic Mongols in China (or, at least when modernity has not yet destroyed their practices), I want a sky-burial when I die. I'd like my corpse to be taken to the woods, where wolves will eat my flesh and bring my soul to the grassland god, Tengger.

Midnight all throughout

Twilight

Stephenie Meyer

Borrowed from someone

The premise is interesting enough: vegetarian (sort of) vampire boy falls deadly in love with sweet-smelling warm-blooded girl. The fascinating element, however, ends there. The book has its charms, but it simply pales in comparison to Harry Potter when it comes to wit and to Interview with the Vampire when it comes to depth. As to the kilig factor, well, a bookworm like me is not qualified to judge. But I guess Helen Meriz, the dead Filipino romance writer, could do it better than Stephenie Meyer.

The novel that should never end

The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett
National Bookstore-Ayala Mall
P335

The joy of reading this book is in being with the characters in every twist and turn of their tangled fates. Every single page is enthralling. Every twenty pages or so has a climax. Follett describes action in a clear and taut language that you feel caught in the middle of it and whatever peril there is on the character's life is also a peril on yours.

There is really no need for this story to have a major finale. So it is sad that Follett packs the final part with resolutions. The conventional manner of ending a novel doesn't work so well with Pillars because its plot is not built up like a conventional novel's. It is more like a soap opera composed of breathtaking, semi-independent episodes.

Reading a conventional novel is like treading a gigantic inclined plane; you rise higher and higher until you reach the end of the plane--the climax. But that's not the end of the journey yet. In the trip to the last page, you take a steady slide on a steep slope. Reading Pillars, meanwhile, is like having a trip over a long straight queue of hills. (It's 900-plus pages.) The construction of the cathedral, where the story revolves,should naturally come to an end; but the struggles of the characters should not.

Selfish love justified

Drowning Ruth
Christina Schwartz
Bought for P49 at Book Sale-SM

This book is a heart-tugging justification of selfish love. It contradicts my personal views on family and relationships, but Christina Schwartz weaves the story deftly that it only seems fitting for the novel to end the way it does.

Reading this made me appreciate more the beauty of nonlinear narration, which Donna Tartt employs more effectively in The Secret History.