One of my managers at work knows that I love maps (she actually gave me four NAMRIA topomaps for Christmas) and so she told me a few months ago about this thousand-plus-peso atlas of Metro Manila that she saw at Fully Booked. Being the map geek that I am, I was of course quite curious. I was finally able to locate this atlas last month at Fully Booked Bonifacio High Street and discovered that it’s the first edition of the Manila Street Atlas by Periplus (see the Amazon listing).

Read this entry »

My fellow Wikipedian TheCoffee has spotted in a locally-produced coffee table book what appears to be plagiarism of text from Wikipedia. The book, titled Central Philippines, seems to be a tourism-oriented book containing pictures taken in and around the Visayas with brief introductory prose of the constituent provinces. It is these introductions that manifest the plagiarism. TheCoffee gave an example of Negros Oriental from the book:

Read this entry »

Free as in beer, not free as in speech, that is. In his blog, Neil Gaiman is asking his readers which among eight of his books they want to be offered for free online for at least a month. Neil states that the winning book is not necessarily the one they like most but would be the one which they would want a friend to read in order to be introduced to Neil’s writing. The online poll is only up for a week (presumably ending this Saturday, February 16th).

Read this entry »

Read this entry »

If you are a serious Harry Potter reader who will be unable to read the last Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) within the first two days of its release and you don’t want to be spoiled, then don’t meet fellow Harry Potter fanatics, don’t watch TV, don’t listen to the radio, don’t read the newspapers, and don’t surf the web until you get to read the last book.

Read this entry »

I already finished reading this New York Times bestseller by author Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point. It’s a very educational and informative book, a hodgepodge of psychology and sociology topics useful for marketing people. But even if you’re not a marketing person, I’m sure you’ll learn quite a bit from this often talked about book.

Read this entry »

Finally finished reading the Updated and Expanded edition of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century this week. (It helped that I got sick and had nothing better to do.) I don’t read much books lately, but The World Is Flat is the best non-fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Read this entry »

I just finished a short, but thought-provoking, piece of fiction God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, which was written by Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, way back in 2001. The novel is a Socratic method discussion on who is God and why we are here. The first link above points to a page where you can download a free PDF format of the book.

Read this entry »

Finally, Knife of Dreams, Book 11 of The Wheel of Time, is out! Unfortunately, this means that it will take about a year before it will become available in the Philippines in paperback format. Boo!

Read this entry »

I finally finished reading the sixth Harry Potter book last weekend, after waiting for my two sisters to finish reading it. And now I know why Harry Potter fanatics felt sad and disappointed with the book’s ending. You only need to read the various blog posts around the world.

Read this entry »

I’ve almost finished reading the second book of the Left Behind series, Tribulation Force. And it’s as fascinating as the first book. Nothing much actually happens in the sequel; the heart of the plot basically feels like one big prologue to the succeeding books. Only towards the end of the novel did the major event, the signing of a treaty between the Antichrist (through the Global Community, formerly the United Nations) and Israel, occur. This treaty formally started the seven-year period of Tribulation.

Read this entry »

I read this really interesting novel titled Left Behind written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind is actually the first of a series of twelve books giving a fictionalized account of the rapture and the Tribulation that follows after .

Read this entry »