Bookworming

Books for me are like Café Bola’s Caramelized Spam, Pepsi, Holy Kettle Corn popcorn, and Chowking’s Chicharap – I can’t have enough of them. Whenever I chance upon a bookstore, I tend to get sucked into it and emerge a while after carrying a bag full of new books I know I will end up on my books-to-read pile. In the last five months, I’ve bought fifteen books that span different genres such as travel, non fiction, fiction, biography, children’s, and business. Given my lust for books, I have and will read just about anything, from the Classics, Oprah’s Book Club selections, bestsellers, to Pulitzers. Last weekend, I found myself in Rockwell and gravitated towards Fully Booked where I ended up buying 3 more books that will end up in that never dwindling pile. Ever since I read Da Vinci Code, I've had this preference for non-fiction books - if there's something factual and interesting about it, I'll buy it. Lately, I've been drawn to travel-themed books like those of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson. Reading them is like traveling for free and all you need is a good imagination to be able to enjoy the trip. That's why when I saw this book on the shelf, I immediately got it.

"This is the concept behind a recent BBC TV series hosted by architect Cruickshank, who is also the guide in this companion book. He visits, in rapid-fire fashion, fantastic, if not entirely unexpected, places (Egypt's pyramids, the ruins of Peru, the Parthenon), documenting each with sometimes transcendent pictures, but much of the narration is bogged down by Cruickshank's complaints about speeding through the ruins and getting up for early flights to dash from one continent to the next."

For the inner comic book geek in me, I got Xmen: Phoenix Warsong. It's the last book of the Dark Phoenix Saga. They didn't have the prequel, Endsong. It's a 5-part comic that is about the Phoenix force. Read more about it here. I don't want to get too geeky but it's a really interesting comic book and the artwork is impressive. I used to collect all sorts of Marvel comic books and trading cards when I was much younger until I realized it wasn't too practical. The other book was about "one grump's search for the happiest places in the world."

"Weiner set out on a yearlong quest to find the world's unheralded happy places. Having worked for years as an NPR foreign correspondent, he'd gone to many obscure spots, but usually to report bad news or terrible tragedies. Now he'd travel to countries like Iceland, Bhutan, Qatar, Holland, Switzerland, Thailand and India to try to figure out why residents tell positive psychology researchers that they're actually quite happy."