Reading is Fundamental

What Books Did You Read in 2022 and 2023?

by NikkaLeave a Comment on What Books Did You Read in 2022 and 2023?
What Books Did You Read in 2022 and 2023?

Good lord, is it the end of April already? Time does fly the older one gets. I’ve been meaning to post this reading list up for a good long while now and am finally doing it because if I don’t, I will blink and it’ll be next year. Anyway, better late than never is my ninja way, so here are my book reads of the past two years. It’s a paltry list for 24 months (grad school aside)… I’ve really got to get back on the book wagon. As usual, skip to the end for the standouts!

Disclaimer: you’ll notice a definite uptick in the romance genre, which was intentional. It really would’ve been more, if I hadn’t read a certain Booktok-favoured title that was SO bad, I gave up on my quest to read only romance for the rest of 2023. Booktok is a lie. It’s a lie. *cries*

Thrills and Chills
Six Four – Hideo Yokoyama
The Final Girl Support Group – Grady Hendrix
Notes on a Scandal – Zoë Heller

Sweet Sweet Fantasies Baby
My Name is Morgan – Sophie Keetch
Tress of the Emerald Sea – Brandon Sanderson
Uprooted / Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

Loveswept
The Prince of Broadway – Joanna Shupe
The Governess Affair / The Duchess War – Courtney Milan
You Had Me At Hola – Alexis Daria
A Worthy Opponent – Katee Robert
Enchanted – Elizabeth Lowell
Daring and the Duke – Sarah MacLean
For My Lady’s Heart / Shadowheart / Flowers From the Storm – Laura Kinsale
Icebreaker – Hannah Grace

History Re-imagined
The Forbidden Queen – Anne O’Brien
The Wedding Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell
The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon’s Bird of Paradise – Carolly Erickson

Memoirs, Memories and Me
I Feel Bad About My Neck – Nora Ephron
Paul at Home – Michel Rabagliati
Persepolis 1 / Persepolis 2- Marjane Satrapi
I’m Glad My Mother Died – Jennette McCurdy

Behind the Scenes
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: the History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra – Toby Wilkinson
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking – Susan Cain
Missing From the Village – Justin Ling
Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter – Randy L. Schmidt
All of the Marvels – Douglas Wolk
The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu – Joshua Hammer
The Madness of Queen Maria: The Remarkable Life of Maria I of Portugal – Jennifer Roberts
Young and Damned and Fair – Gareth Russell
Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon – James Hibberd
Pandora’s Jar – Natalie Haynes
The Last Mrs. Astor : A New York Story – Frances Kiernan

The 2022-2023 Standouts

2022
Brazen and the Beast – Sarah MacLean
He’s a Covent Garden gangster who rules the dockyards, speaks in grunts, and only gets verbose in the throes of passion. She’s an intelligent spinster whose elder brother is running the family’s shipping business into the ground, and can’t (or won’t) shut up until she’s physically teased to the point of incoherence. They’re made for each other! Barring a few, clunkily obvious signs that this regency romance was written in the age of must-have consent and equality, this is witty, fast-paced and ridiculously horny. Read if you like bodice-ripping, heavy-breathing, smutty romance.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books – Edward Wilson-Lee
Fernando Columbus is not the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of the Renaissance, and Wilson-Lee makes the argument that he really should be. This professional courtier and illegitimate second son of Christopher Columbus revolutionized indexing, cataloguing, arranging, mapping, research, and building libraries. If not for the circumstances of his birth, it is very likely that he would’ve been the heir to Columbus’ fortune instead of his useless excuse for a half-brother. This is one of the best biographies I’ve read in a long time, and touched many of the things I enjoy – biographies, relatively obscure Renaissance figures, obsessive-compulsive list making, and a love of books. I enjoyed it so much, I used it as the subject for a book talk assignment, which I like to think went over quite well – if not with the class, then at least with my instructor 🙂

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach
Do not read Stiff if you are eating. Do not read Stiff if you are squeamish. Do not read Stiff if you do not want to know how bodies decompose when they are left on their own without the benefit of embalming. Definitely read Stiff if you are interested in knowing how cadavers prove their usefulness: as crash test dummies, as anatomical models, and as guinea pigs for experiments. And definitely read Stiff if you would like to know how fearless Filipinos, probably hopped up on whatever goes into anting-antings, defied a hailstorm of bullets in the Spanish-American War and in doing so, became the impetus for ballistic research and the concept of “stopping power”.

2023
Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
No one in Yellowface is likeable. None of the characters are reliable narrators. When your main character is a caricature of an entitled white woman (terminally insecure, petty, selfish, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, delusional) jealous of a “perfect’ Asian author who turns out to be cold, fake, pretentious, and fond of mining the trauma of others for her art, reading becomes a challenge, because we are wired to like leading characters, even when they’re terrible people making terrible choices (plagiarism is never a good idea!). I’m not a fan of the sanctimoniousness that comes with race politics, so if the author’s intent is to make you feel something, she succeeds wonderfully. Yellowface is a good read, not only because it makes you feel, but also because this single-white-female x cancel culture x appropriation story has Twitter exchanges, references to real life personas, and a disdain for the behaviour of publicists, agents and suck ups that seem too sharp to be made up. The scenes so sharply specific, it made me wonder how much of a roman a clef this book really is (juicy!). Read if you like trainwrecks, good writing, and are prepared to feel uncomfortable.

All the Murmuring Bones – A.G. Slater
All the Murmuring Bones is an atmospheric, mesmerizing tale about one family’s ill-gotten gains. It’s a gothic fantasy that marries Hans Christian Andersen with Mermaid Forest. One thing about the heroine though: she doesn’t seem able to feel very much. Even when she says she’s scared or terrified, she keeps a level head at all times, outwitting murderous ghosts and menacing kelpies. Read if you like haunting fairy tales and don’t enjoy weeping, anxiety ridden heroines.

Jaded Hindsight Edition

It’s Saving for Botox’s Eighth Birthday!

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Happy 2024! WordPress has very kindly reminded me that Saving for Botox turned eight today. Although it features way less regular posts than it used to in the beginning and hardly has anything to show for the past two years, it – like its webmistress – is still very much alive.

I keep meaning to write and post, just like I keep meaning to lose weight, but have never really made good on those well-meant intentions. Will 2024 change all that? One can only hope. I no longer have graduate school to blame, and the pandemic is (hopefully) in our collective rear view. I wonder what I’ll write about this year. I know for sure I am combining my annual “What Did You Read in ####?” for 2022 and 2023, and that should come out any day now.

So, eight years from a semi-serious pledge to save for a thing that ostensibly helps stop aging in its tracks, have I finally gotten Botox? Negatory. Needles have yet to pierce me in the face. This is due in part to a fear of commitment (what if I I end up looking like Jacqueline Wildenstein?), FOMO (there’s always going to be a better doctor out there!), and because I do not like needles poking my face (there goes my social life?). These days, the bestie keeps extolling the joys of affordable South Korean facial rejuvenation, which is probably his way of telling me I look tired and need more than a facial. Ah well. Never say never, until you actually do mean never. But for now, I’ll wait.

Has it really been eight years? It doesn’t feel like it, and I have decided to apply a little something I call COVID math. COVID math states that 2020-2022 do not count. Which means in the general scheme of things, Saving for Botox is actually six. Happy birthday to my blog baby!

People are People

Gloriana

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Gloriana

The last time I had the energy to say write anything, Cherie Gil did a final drag on an omnipresent cigarette, raked us from the tips of our heads to the soles of our feet and back again with patented disdain, executed a final exquisite eyebrow raise, and left for St. Peter’s Gates. And now, #HerMaj. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, who made a point of never abdicating, has died at 96.

I am by no means a rabid royalist, but I’ve always liked QEII. Britain thinks of her as their national grandmother. In a way, I’ve co-opted her as mine as well. (I can hardly help it, the woman is on our money. ) Every time I see QE II in the news, I think of my real grandmother, whom I love and adore, and who I miss very much. I haven’t gotten to visit her since the pandemic hit, and she’s getting up there in age. I guess in a way, QEII is my stand-in grandma, because they share similarities. Both women are petite. Both insist on staying active even in their twilight years. Both women were strong leaders, in positions traditionally held by male counterparts. And both women are very much loved, not just by their families, but also by the people around them who they have touched.

Elizabeth II did not have the glamour and mystique of Elizabeth I, nor was she fancifully indulgent like Victoria I. Both queens ruled with a sort of forceful charisma, while QE II did not. If anything, she was well known for being quite the opposite. Some called her “horsey,” not because she looked like a horse, but because she loved horses, and it was said that if she had not been made queen, she would have been very happy living the life of a country gentlewoman. QEII’s ethos seemed to spring as a reaction to (and, in a way, rebuke of) her self-indulgent uncle, who famously cavorted around with married women to the dismay of his father, then King George V, and who ultimately abdicated because he couldn’t have the woman he wanted. If Elizabeth I used the iconography of the virgin to portray herself as a monarch above her subjects, pure, clean and blessed, Elizabeth II used duty, self-sacrifice, and constancy, making herself the prime exemplar of British reserve. She was a walking, talking advertisement to Keep Calm and Carry On, and she did it for almost 71 years. That’s seven decades of “never complain, never explain” to her public. That is next-level consistency. Although her children and grand-children, and sometimes her husband, sometimes seemed caught in a never-ending round of public faux pas, the woman never faltered. If there’s anything I like most in a person, it’s being consistent.

I love reading stories of strong, capable Queens making their mark in a world traditionally ruled by men. QE II is arguably the last monarch to have that distinction. I admired her very much, and I am sorry she’s gone.

The Motherland

Effortless, First-Rate Original

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Effortless, First-Rate Original

Cherie Gil died.

I didn’t know her personally. I was more familiar with the persona she had built as an actress -the haughty, upper class, sharply dressed rich bitch, eyebrow perpetually arched, raking you with her gaze from head to foot and back again with searing dismissal, a Virginia Slim effortlessly balanced between two slender, tapered, perfectly manicured fingers. Filipino cinema has no shortage of unforgettable female villains. Along with Celia Rodriguez, Cherie Gil was arguably the most recognizable, the name and face that came to mind whenever the concept of the kontrabida was bandied about. She played women you loved to hate with elan, with class, and with flair. Those patrician features and take no prisoners attitude certainly contributed to the overall effect; Cherie Gil never needed to say it out loud in the movies, but her very aura told you in no uncertain terms that she was aware of your hatred, and didn’t give a damn about it.

I don’t think I ever saw any of the movies she was in, so my impressions of her are from movie clips and oft-bandied lines. With her passing, the most memorable has been shared and played all over local news and my feed. It’s just piling on at this point, but I can’t help sharing it anyway, because it is a line delivered with such delicious venom, and such precise diction, it’s more than earned its place in Philippine cinema as one of its most (fine, I’ll say it) iconic lines:

La Primera Contravida indeed.

I wonder if Cherie Gil was that way in real life. I like to think she was more than the two-dimensional villains she was most famous for playing onscreen, whose only existed to be hated. I also like to think the spicy forthrightness she brought to her villainess roles was intrinsic. Maybe it was, if the profile piece in Mega Magazine earlier this year can be believed. She confessed to struggling with fear, shaved her head (“What’s hair, di ba?”), sold all her things, and moved to New York for a fresh start and to be with her kids. In hindsight, she must’ve already known, she just wasn’t willing to share it. She hadn’t announced that she was ill (really, the hair should’ve been a clue). Maybe Cherie Gil didn’t want to be defined by her illness. Maybe all Cherie Gil wanted was to go out with a bang. And I think that makes me respect her more, even if I never knew her. I still want to be Cherie Gil some day. Alas, I don’t think I’ll ever have the features for it.

Internets

Freedom 90’s

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Yesterday’s biggest news story was supposed to be the assassination of the dapper Shinzo Abe, Japan’s former Prime Minister. That should’ve dominated the headlines but it didn’t, because Rogers decided to do the exact opposite of showing up and showing out, falling flat on its face. Thoughts and prayers go out to whoever is manning their customer service phones in the coming weeks. It is not going to be pretty. Yesterday, Rogers absolutely ate shit. Their cellular and internet services went down nationwide, and with it went e-transfers, cashless debit payments and 911 emergency services. Suddenly Canada had been plunged right back into the 90’s, when people paid in cash, there was no internet, and lord help you if you got rear-ended with no payphones in the near vicinity.

It’s one thing to consciously unplug. It’s quite another to have no choice. Personally, I liked it. Can’t say the rest of Canada agreed with me. Judging by the number of mental breakdowns on Twitter, there is no rage quite like that of Canadians unable to pay at a Tim Horton’s. It is not a good idea to get between Canucks and their morning double double.

Then again, I could afford to be pretty blasè about the situation. Rogers is our ISP, but we’re with Freedom for our mobiles, so I still had cellular service, though weak at times. I didn’t feel totally cut off from the world. I am a veteran of blackouts. I am an old. The internet did not arrive in my corner of the Philippines until the late 90s. I still remember how to amuse myself without it. Also, I don’t really drink coffee on the regular. So all in all, it was a nice flashback to a less frenetic way of life. Unable to work, I spent it catching up on my reading and watching whatever was on TV. (White House Down. Channing Tatum in his prime.). Something about not being inundated by streaming choices was strangely relaxing.

So what are my takeaways from yesterday’s Flashback Friday?

  • Always have cash on hand.
  • It’s better to have no internet than have no power.
  • Monopolies are never a good idea.
  • Anything powered by digital tech can get snuffed out in a heartbeat. Ergo, I have decided I am entirely justified in thinking crypto and NFTs are dumb.
  • Monopolies are never a good idea.

Welp, at least the connectivity’s back on again. Rogers still hasn’t quite come out with what caused the blackout, so predictably all sorts of conspiracy theories are out there. Some blamed Russia for it. Please, like Russia has the time. That country is way too preoccupied with Ukraine. The bestie wondered if it was because Boris Johnson resigned. My money is on either sharks, solar storms, or some poor Rogers employee who fell asleep on the keyboard. You know what, scratch that. Here’s who I blame: William Shatner. I blame William Shatner for going to space. William Shatner broke space, made the sun spititng mad, and now satellites are falling out of their orbit. (That piece on solar storms is a fascinating read.) Throw Lance Bass in there too, for wanting to go to space. If I’m going to be irrational here, this is just as good a hill to die on as any.

Things I Get Myself Into

So this is how asynchronous Zoom classes go, or: How my notes on research and statistics reflect a descent into exhaustion and carpal tunnel

by NikkaLeave a Comment on So this is how asynchronous Zoom classes go, or: How my notes on research and statistics reflect a descent into exhaustion and carpal tunnel
Shameless screenshot from my instructor’s PPT. He is a meme-lord and the absolute best.

Week 9
See the rest of the PDF for stuff on T-tests! Sorry past self, can’t focus anymore.

Week 10
See Week 10’s PDF! Sorry past self, too tired to take notes right now. Suffice to say you read the PDF for this week. Revisit when writing the research proposal.

Week 11
Dear past self, you did read Week 11. It is full of info, especially for publishing research, and creating research posters for conferences and stuff. It is the second to the last week of Winter 2022 and although you have lost the ability to take detailed notes, you are very nearly at the finish line. Below are some links. For the rest, refer to the PDF.

Week 12 – Final Week!
Dear past self, yes you read this too. There’s not much to say. It’s all good points – colonization is bad, try not to be racist, be open-minded, visit this website with lots of links to potential reads. Essentially, don’t be a dick. You are reading this at 1:30 in the morning, and Regine Velasquez is wailing in your ears. Revisit for some really good, non-preachy points about how to be sensitive to what knowledge is, how we determine what counts as knowledge, and the different lenses that can be used to interpret knowledge. Read the PDF if you ever need ideas for an essay.

~

I know of one professor who got his Master’s and a PhD degrees while working. Those people are beasts. It’s been a hell of a fall/winter term and I end it with much relief, and a newfound respect for whoever has had a full academic course load and work at the same time!

Reading is Fundamental

What Books Did You Read in 2021?

by NikkaLeave a Comment on What Books Did You Read in 2021?
What Books Did You Read in 2021?

I finally decided to do something about the paralyzing ennui of lockdown, so I went back to school last September. I didn’t know it then, but that spelled the end of reading for fun. Reading for grad school requires a bit of a chopped and skrewed approach, as opposed to reading something cover to cover. It took a lot of  getting used to, and I got snowed under by the amount of reading required! By the end of Fall Term, I was pretty much tapped out, and spent the winter break in a heap on the couch, comfort-watching Mad Men in a bid to self-soothe. 

Needless to say, I didn’t quite hit my self-assigned annual reading quota (oh, to read 100 books a year like some people!). Oh well. Maybe in 2022? Ha! If only. Anyway, as usual there’s no rhyme or reason to my reading choices, and this time around I chose to simply divide the books by Fiction/Non-Fiction and my ever-present re-reads.  About 95% were all read and available from Overdrive, through the generous auspices of the Toronto Public Library, and hopefully they  give you ideas for what to read next. Scroll past the titles to my top picks of 2021, if you’re so inclined!

Fiction
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley
Shadow and Bone / Siege and Storm / Ruin and Rising – Leigh Bardugo
Red Queen / Glass Sword – Victoria Aveyard
Howl’s Moving Castle – Diana Wynne Jones
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne Collins
The Invisible Library – Genevieve Cogman
The Library of the Unwritten – A.J. Hackwith
The Woman Before Wallis – Bryn Turnbull
Fire From Heaven / The Persian Boy / Funeral Games – Mary Renault
Never Mind / Bad News / Some Hope / Mother’s Milk / At Last – Edward St Aubyn
The Knife of Never Letting Go / The Ask and the Answer / Monsters of Men – Patrick Ness

Non-Fiction
God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World – Cullen Murphy
The Billionaire Murders – Kevin Donovan
I’ll Be There for You: The One About Friends – Kelsey Miller
No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs – Lezlie Lowe
There Was a Little Girl – Brooke Shields

Re-reads Still Count
Champagne Supernovas – Maureen Callahan
The Silmarillion / The Children of Hurin – J.R.R. Tolkien

The 2021 Standouts

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Every so often I stumble across a book that sings, and wonder where I was when it hit shelves. At the apex of Belgium’s secession from the Congo, five young women struggle to understand their place in the world – a place their father, an American Baptist missionary, believes it is his calling to save. Stymied by cultural differences, the political climate, a misguided saviour complex and the untameable land itself, each woman responds to her situation in different ways – with grace, with belligerence, with defeat, with defiance, with unbridled curiousity. The Poisonwood Bible is an eloquent depiction of life in post-colonial Africa and what becomes of visitors who presume to take it for granted. Published in 1998, this is a beautifully complex novel: part love letter, part indictment, a chorus of five female voices rising from the heart of darkest Africa. This is great historical fiction.

The Centaur’s Wife – Amanda Leduc
Sometimes, good books require the reader to let the journey take precedence over the destination. The Centaur’s Wife is a labyrinth of a story, like stepping into a dark fairytale with a dash of post-apocalyptic nightmare. It never quite seems to make sense, but that’s part of its allure. “In the beginning,” it begins, “a horse fell in love with a woman.” It’s hypnotic, and enchanting, and very much worth your while.

Monstress – Lysley Tenorio
Nick Joaquin once opined that the Filipino has mastered the art of the short story, and Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress proves him right. Blending stories of the Beatles and Imelda Marcos, with scenes from bygone days when Filipino B-movies cast their long shadow, Tenorio has a special connection to his heritage, and it shows. The scenarios are familiar, the stories written in a familiar cadence, some rhythmic drumming you’ve heard once, a long time ago, but never quite forgot. Monstress is a collection of short stories that pack a punch, especially for a homesick Filipino expat like me. Read it, if only for the incandescent “The Brothers” alone.

The Witch’s Heart – Genevieve Gornichec
“They’re odd. We’re odd,” shrugs Angrboda, who has nothing but love for her three children. Her first is a girl born half rotted with decay, her second a wolf, and her last a serpent; still, she dismisses their strangeness with as much nonchalance as she dismisses having been burned thrice and speared through the heart. With the Witch’s Heart, Genevieve Gornichec accomplishes the impossible – she makes us root for the children of Loki, the three hellspawn of chaos who are destined to bring Ragnarok, and the woman who bore them. It’s like Circe, except with Vikings.