Books to read on Halloween, Feast of All Saints and All Souls Day

So what are you reading this weekend?

Despite the advance celebration of the department stores of Christmas the Feast of All Saints and the Feast of All Souls is just around the corner. It is the time of remembrance, celebration and prayer. A lot of people will be trekking to the different cities of the dead to remember friends and families who have crossed to the undiscovered country.

The topic of ghosts, ghouls and goblins will surely fill the tv screens and the airwaves. So for us bookworms what are we to do when we go tired of the usual run of shows featuring ghosts in the attics and vampires in the bathroom?

One can always read a book.

I am sure you would have your favourite reads when it comes to horror and supernatural books. The list of authors is nearly endless - Anne Rice, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stroker, MR James, HP Lovecraft et al.

Me? I am kind of old fashion I like reading the old authors Bram Stoker's epistolary novel Dracula, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe's A Cask of Amontillado and the Black Cat, MR James' Casting on the Runes, and HP Lovecraft's Rats in the Wall. These are all my favourites but what is intriguing for me is a series of books written by Mr Maximo Ramos on the supernatural creatures and beings in Philippine folklore.

As far as I remember here are the titles:

• The Creatures of Midnight

• Aswang Complex in Philippine Folk Lore

• Legends of the Lower Gods

Mr Ramos compiled the different beliefs regarding supernatural creatures through-out the Philippines. It is an interesting read. You learn that the term Aswang is used to describe five different types of supernatural creatures - werebeasts, ghouls, blood suckers, internal organ eaters, viscera suckers and witches. You also get to learn of the different way to find out if the person is an aswang, how to deal with them and even how to cure one of the sickness. It also has a lot of stories taken from interviews with a wide array of people. You get to learn of an aswang bird caught near Subic, the delegation of mananangals teachers from another province, the danger of insulting an aswang, and the difference between two types of witches, a mangkukulam and a mambabarang.

His books are not limited to Aswang alone. Within the pages of the books you will get to encounter giants or cafres, headless creatures aptly called pugot, creatures like the bungisngis and other creatures.

For me it truly is an interesting read. So..what are you reading in the next few days?

Time Magazine's All-Time 100 best English Language Novels: 1923 - Present

I came across this list while reading the blog of the Sassy Lawyer. The list is billed as the all time novels or the one hundred best English-language novels from nineteen hundred and twenty three to the present, which was picked by Time Magazine's critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo.

Heres is the link to the list.
Whenever you come up with a list of best things you end up pleasing and displeasing people. Some would question the choice, criteria used and even the competence of the selectors and even when the selectors' reputation is impeccable it does not stop someone from commenting that perhaps there could have been a better choice - why was this thing selected over the other one? In academic circles they call this peer review, which is based on the principle that comments are made objectively by your comrades in the profession, we laymen call it for what it really is criticism.

The list is an interesting list and I am quite happy to find Animal Farm, The Lord of the Rings, Watchmen and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the illustrious roll of novels written in English. But what I find really interesting is the number of books that are familiar because I watched their movie adaptations. Movies like All the King's Men, Lolita, Catch 22, A Clockwork Orange, Ragtime, A Passage to India and French Lieutenant's Woman were examples of successful transition of the stories from the printed word to the moving images. I wonder how much of the original message was retained, lost and transformed in the process of adapting the story for the silver screen.

The list also seems to be a mirror of one's shortcoming as a reader; I have read only a handful books from that list. But then again it is a matter of preference you read what you like or believe you like. And in the end the books on list my be worth a perusal but in the end its one's list that counts; the list covers only novels written in English from the 1920s to the present.

Still I am happy to see the works of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Eric Blair aka George Orwell on the list.

Filipino Heritage Books

I was doing some research on the case of Governor General Bustamante and his assasination and I returned to one of my old sources for things Filipiniana, the Marcos-sponsored Filipino Heritage Books.

This was probably one of the Marcos-sponsored books that I enjoyed reading. Ten volumes in total the book gives information on the different aspects of the Philippines and Filipinos.

The book is divided into different time periods. Starting from the pre-Spanish Philippines up to the time before Martial Law. And the books are peppered with essays and photo/picture essays of Filipiniana topics related, somewhat, and remotely related to the time period.

In these books you will encounter facts about the barter trade, the national heroes and heels, characters from Rizal's novels and mythological beasts, feasts in Laguna and Manguindanao; and even an article about Ma Mon Luk and siopao, siomai and mami.

Unfortunately, my family does not have a copy of The Philippine Islands 1493-1898 by James A Robertson and Emma Helen Blair, one of definitive sources about the Philippines in English. Even back then these books were expensive and rare. So I had to be content with Filipino Heritage.

It is a nice set of books to grow up with. I only see a few copies of the ten volume set sold now. Maybe they stopped printing these books. It is a shame.

Perhaps they will be able scan the pages of the book and make it available to more people - similar to what they did with Filipiniana Book Guild Series 1 cdrom and the Blair & Robertson books. I was able to get the Filipiniana Book Guild Series 1 a few years ago for around Seven Hundred Pesos . It was worth since the CD-ROM contained a ton of books one in particular, the book titled Romance and Adventure in Old Manila and written by Percy Hill I only saw once in an old antique shop and it was selling for Seven Thousand pesos. I might buy the Blair & Roberton books one of these days at Libros Filipinos.

A mostly harmless book

There are times when you come across a good find. Something similar to finding a Leprechaun's pot of gold, minus the Leprechaun of course.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the science fiction novels of Douglas Adams, otherwise known collectively as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

A brief introduction to the story and the book.

The first incarnation of this story was Radio 4 comedy series. Since its cult success it has been remade as a play, an album a series of books, comic books, a computer game, a tv show, a tea- towel and among other things a big budgeted movie.

I first encountered the story as a comic book series. The first series was called "The Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy" and the second series was called "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". Then the comic series stopped. I am not sure why it did or if it ever did stop. Perhaps, the distributor did not see much profits in it. I guess you cannot make a killing if only people who genuinely read it will actually buy it. But again it could be just me, I lost track of it.

The comic books were funny.

Later however, I have since learned that the books were definetly more funnier. And a few months ago I learned that the first incarnation of the story, the radio plays, were funnier than all the rest. The plethora forms that Adams' tale underwent seemed that it too went into the proverbial improbability drive found in the tale.

Unfortunately, to obtain the radio-plays can be quite costly and it would seem more practical to obtain the book. The DVD/VCD version of the movie can wait. One can easily get that when the price drops.

But how to get the book? Was it worth it buying the whole set of paperbacks? The inner tightwad and spendtrift in me were on a collision course.

It was like a tug-of-war between buying the books and not buying books. Whenever, I passed a bookstore I would always debated with myself on the practicality or impracticality. More often the stingy-side of me would win. Until that fateful day.

On the way home I stopped by one of the small bookstores around Cubao. This particular bookstore was around a tenth of the size of National Book Store, which was a five story building, or that of Fullybooked, which occupied a commercial space for a small supermarket. This petite bookstore was not a thrift bookshop. It was quite elegant and professional in its appearance and ambience. The brown bookshelves and the sofa made it that I think. Anyway, the bookstore had a sale that lasted for the whole month. So I stepped in on more than one occassion to take a look-see at their collection.

What caught my eye was a compilation of Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide series in one hardbound book.

Six Stories by Douglas Adams: The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide - The Five Complete Novels and one

And there it was the whole gamut of novels:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe

Plus it was on discount, for the price of two paperbacks you can get the whole caboodle,in hardbound. All I had to do now was to wait for payday. My mind was still debating about it though, mentally twiddling the pros and cons of the purchase. The spendthrift in me was sort of humming a tum-tee-tum-tee-dum ditty, it knew it was winning. And the apologist in me was already forumalating justifications.

In the end I bought it and read the first book. As I perused the pages a smile formed in my mouth and small chuckles begin to come out like soap bubbles from an old 1950s waching machine. Here is what I read:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small
green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a
small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some
of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book. in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no Earthman had ever heard either. Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer EasternRim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.(The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams)

It truly is a funny book.