April 19

Last month, National Bookstore had a sale and I got myself two new books – Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (at 40% off) and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (at 20% off). I started with McEwan’s and I reached chapter 3 before realizing that I’m not in the mood for a modern-day thriller. Atwood’s , I haven’t even taken out of the plastic yet. Instead, hoping to read something along the lines of the fantastic, I dug out my copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel – one that I’ve always enjoyed reading, and rereading the first chapters of, but couldn’t quite finish because I’m having a hard time with the (approximately) size 7 text font of my mass paperback copy. The book is filled with tons of multiparagraph footnotes, which you can imagine have a still smaller font.

I’m moving at a very slow pace, partly because I barely have time to do anything after I go home every night at past 11 pm, and partly because I’ve gotten so used to spending my pre-sleeping hours on attending to my blogs and hopping on to others’. But this time, I’m hoping to finally be able to get through this one and start a serious schedule to finish everything else I have on queue. Even if my main motivation right now is to get back the worth of the money I’ve spent on these volumes, I also want to try to bring back the reading habit I’ve lost since the Internet took my fancy.

I’m also sharing this to help control myself from being pulled into the direction of yet another book sale happening next week. The truth is, I almost got myself another title, Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows, one that I ordered online because the hardbound copy was offered at about P265 from the P1000+ regular price. The website said that the book will be delivered within 3 to 4 days, depending on the availability. I wasn’t too keen on having it ASAP anyway, so it was after 2 weeks since I placed my order that I inquired about the status. I was told the book was actually out of stock and if I’m willing to wait for new stocks, I’ll then have to pay the original price. Eh, I just cancelled it. And that became sort of a wake up call:

I promise myself not to buy a single book again until I’ve read every unread book I already have in my shelf. I repeat: Promises are meant to be broken.


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