Staircase Wit

Ready Player Two, just like its predecessor Ready Player One, endlessly references 80s pop culture. It's very nostalgic, and acts as if no good film, video game, music or book was ever written or released after the 1990s. The plot was compelling enough that I forced myself to finish the novel, although some chapters dragged. Did those chapters drag because I did not know enough about the movies/musician/video game they were referencing? Probably. But a novel is not supposed to punish me for not knowing about names, events, and facts it has not even discussed. It's even supposed to make me care and want to learn more about them, which, sadly, Ready Player Two failed to do. If it's my fault that I didn't enjoy the novel fully because I am not familiar with 80s pop culture, then the novel gatekeeps more than it entertains. However, I think the ending saved the book, although it felt like a combination of several Black Mirror episodes. (Yes, I know I just complained about b...

Four siblings are promised a huge amount of money from a trust fund, which they will receive once the youngest of them celebrates her 40th birthday. They call this fund 'The Nest', and they have always been impatient to receive it. Then one day, the siblings are shocked to find out that most of the money is gone because of the eldest brother's scandal. This is an intelligent and witty story about a dysfunctional family, a reflection of how people can get lazy and unimaginative when they feel that huge amounts of money is their birthright. This is a story filled with selfish, greedy, but interesting characters. While the characters are not particularly likeable, the novel is a pleasure to read.  

Super happy with my new Onyx Boox Nova 3, which lets me do the following without the glare of normal cellphone, tablet, and computer screens: 1. Read ebooks; 2. Read the news; 3. Browse websites, especially those with lengthy text; 4. Access the content of my Scribd and Kindle Unlimited subscription; 5. Jot down notes; 6. Annotate on PDFs; and 7. Download Android apps. So yes, you can access your email, your files on Google Drive, etc. It's about the size of an iPad Mini. It does everything a tablet does, but it feels like you're reading on paper.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, and President Coriolanus Snow's origin story. While the Hunger Games trilogy showed us the life of a teenager from District 13, Ballad offers the perspective of an ambitious and self-entitled teenager who grew up in the Capitol, bitter and disgruntled because his family lost all their money after the districts' First Rebellion. Coriolanus Snow is a complicated and interesting antihero. He is calculating, but he somehow still has a moral compass. He always thinks ten steps ahead, but he can still fall in love. While there are so many other characters from the Hunger Games trilogy with more colorful back stories, The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes is still an entertaining read. Worth reading if you're a fan of the trilogy.

  The main protagonist in this Wong Kar-Wai film is a nihilistic fuccboi named York, who seduces beautiful women and coldly casts them aside. It makes you wonder why these women want to stay with him, or why they even all in love with him in the first place. The story may be simple, but the execution is perfect. This is an intense, beautifully shot film. The tone is pensive, brooding, and infinitely sad. The characters' long silences convey their despair, frustration, and nonchalance so vividly. As with all Wong Kar-Wai films, Days of Being Wild is spellbinding and mesmerizing. Everything about it is nostalgic and heartbreaking; there are layers upon layers of missed opportunities, unresolved conflicts, and unanswered questions.

At a time when travel for leisure is extremely difficult if not impossible, Kevin Kwan (writer of Crazy Rich Asians) releases the perfect escape from this seven-month long quarantine. Sex and Vanity is an over-the-top modern rendition of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View. So what if we haven't been to anywhere interesting since March? This novel can take us to a grand wedding in Capri, to lavish apartments with gondolas in New York, to country clubs and trendy bistros in the Upper East Side. To be honest, the characters seem to be a photocopy of the characters in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, and the love story is ridiculous and flat at the same time. Sex and Vanity may be the same circus with the same clowns, but just in a different venue, but who cares? It's the same exciting, ostentatious, and entertaining circus and clowns.

We have been planning our wedding since October last year. It was supposed to be a church wedding, and we wanted to celebrate it with 150 of our closest family and friends. Of course the pandemic made large gatherings impossible, so we decided to postpone our church wedding until next year, and just have a civil wedding ceremony close to our original wedding date. Planning a wedding in the midst of a pandemic is truly challenging: It was risky to get a professional to do your hair and makeup, so my mom and sister did my makeup. We couldn’t book hotel rooms to use as our wedding preparations venue, so we did our wedding preps photo shoot at my fiancé-now-husband’s house (which is now our family home). It was not safe to go out to buy wedding dress and shoes, so I shopped for mine online. Our first civil wedding date (August 5) was even cancelled because Metro Manila was suddenly put under the stricter Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ). The moment MECQ was lifted, we contacte...

1. "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product." 2. Tech giants forbid their own kids from using social media. 3. "Social media isn't a tool that's just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them." 4. The guy who invented Youtube's algorithm is now telling us to avoid watching the next video Youtube is urging you to watch. 5. Social media platforms are built to manipulate us into spending as much time in front of the screen as possible. 6. We are indeed living in a Black Mirror episode, and it's a lot scarier than most people think.

This is an intriguing and entertaining quick read, a guilty pleasure of a page-turner that is easy to finish in a few hours.  This book is about social climber Amber Patterson, who befriends the beautiful Daphne Parrish so she can steal the latter's obscenely rich husband. While this book has evil villains with no redeeming value, it is worth reading for the satisfying plot twist.

 

Rebecca Serle's In Five Years pretends at first to be a romance novel. The premise: Dani, a career-driven lawyer gets engaged to a guy who is the "right fit" for her. She falls asleep and wakes up five years later finding herself in bed with a totally gorgeous total stranger. Then she wakes up again, returning to the present. Eventually she meets again the stranger in her "dream". It sounds like a cute rom-com, but nope, it's far from one. In Five Years is actually a story about friendship, and about finding and loving yourself. The bittersweet twist at the end is sad but realistic and satisfying. This is a heartwarming and beautiful read.

The story is so beautiful and it made me cry buckets, yes yes okay. But what I loved the most is how this film transported me back to Tokyo! The locations just feel so familiar, and this film makes me ache to go back there. This film shows Tokyo so vividly! The busy train stations, the coffee vending machines, the city skyline, the architecture, the restaurants and cafés where you can just sit by yourself and enjoy your meal alone. This film even captures the eerily quiet and peaceful experience of riding a crowded Japanese train. I miss Tokyo so badly it's almost heartbreaking.