Selfish Love Justified
Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwartz
This book is a heart-tugging justification of selfish love. It contradicts my personal views on family and relationships, but Christina Schwartz weaves the story deftly that it only seems fitting for the novel to end the way it does.
Reading this made me appreciate more the beauty of nonlinear narration, which Donna Tartt employs more effectively in The Secret History.
The Novel That Should Never End
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The joy of reading this book is in being with the characters in every twist and turn of their tangled fates. Every single page is enthralling. Every twenty pages or so has a climax. Follett describes action in a clear and taut language that you feel caught in the middle of it and whatever peril there is on the character's life is also a peril on yours.
There is really no need for this story to have a major finale. So it is sad that Follett packs the final part with resolutions. The conventional manner of ending a novel doesn't work so well with Pillars because its plot is not built up like a conventional novel's. It is more like a soap opera composed of breathtaking, semi-independent episodes.
Reading a conventional novel is like treading a gigantic inclined plane; you rise higher and higher until you reach the end of the plane—the climax. But that's not the end of the journey yet. In the trip to the last page, you take a steady slide on a steep slope. Reading Pillars, meanwhile, is like having a trip over a long straight queue of hills. (It's 900-plus pages.) The construction of the cathedral, where the story revolves, should naturally come to an end; but the struggles of the characters should not.
Midnight All Throughout
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
The premise is interesting enough: vegetarian (sort of) vampire boy falls deadly in love with sweet-smelling warm-blooded girl. The fascinating element, however, ends there. The book has its charms, but it simply pales in comparison to Harry Potter when it comes to wit and to Interview with the Vampire when it comes to depth. As to the kilig factor, well, a bookworm like me is not qualified to judge. But I guess Helen Meriz, the dead Filipino romance writer, could do it better than Stephenie Meyer.
Holier than Man
Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong
When I finished this book, my nose was clogged up. The book is supposed to be bloodcurdling, rugged, and hence masculine, but tears would just well up in my eyes every thirty pages or so.
This book is ultra special. This is the first book I bought here in Cebu, and I bought it with the check Philippine Daily Inquirer sent me for my Youngblood essay “Worth a Million.” But Totem occupies my current most-favorite list not because of those awful high school-y reasons, but because of the author's sheer masterful storytelling. It's a novel that reads more like an action-packed socio-politico-cultural documentary. I can only agree with San Francisco Chronicle, which describes it as “an intellectual adventure story . . . Five hundred bloody and instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl!”
Wolves now are the holiest creatures for me, even holier than human beings. Like the nomadic Mongols in China (or, at least when modernity has not yet destroyed their practices), I want a sky-burial when I die. I'd like my corpse to be taken to the woods, where wolves will eat my flesh and bring my soul to the grassland god, Tengger.
