long story short

My Books Read for 2025: A total of 24 books. A pat on the back, self.

I'm writing this a little late -- okay, very late. It's already February, and this was supposed to be a nice little reflection on last year's books sometime in early January, when people were still earnestly reflecting on the books they loved in the last twelve months and earnestly setting reading goals for the next twelve. The thing is, I'm already elbow-deep into this year's reading (I'm already on book number 10!), but I still want to post about some of the recent books I loved, and how much of them mirrored my state of mind at the time. And I suppose, this belated look back is also a "looking forward" of sorts, because the way I want to approach this year is through the books and topics I'm intent on diving into. Not in a rigid, "resolution" kind of way, but in a more hopeful sense that the good sentences I come across will rearrange my thinking, that I can let these stories widen the room a little and let me look beyond the obvious.

My absolute favorite book from last year was First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger. Four months later, I still cannot, cannot stop thinking about it. I didn't expect much from it; I don't even recall what prompted me to download the e-book. But it was a book that I finished in a day, and that's truly a feat for me these days. But wow this book was so raw, touching, gutting, and grounding. It was sad but in a good way. It made me feel unburdened. It's the kind of sadness that leads to clarity and hopefulness. As with most stories of grief and celebrations of life. The author wrote so lovingly about all her girl friends here; each chapter told a story about her girls, either a funny anecdote or a pivotal moment in their friendship. It made me think about my own girl friends and how the love I have for them mirrors the kind of affirmation I need in my life. This book was gut-wrenching because the author was very honest about grieving the friends she's lost, especially her cousin, the sister-slash-best friend she had growing up, and whose light appeared to be the central star around which all her other friendships revolved. Her cousin was robbed point-blank, raped, and murdered while she was going home from work in 2010. As she navigated her adolescence and adulthood and as she tried to make sense of this loss, she found comfort and healing with her girl friends. She was also confronted with more heartbreaks as some friends passed away or simply grew apart. But in all these essays, she managed to humanize and celebrate each friend, and acknowledge the impact they all had on her life. It was such a lovely book. 

I hold my friendships so close to my heart. Friendships are the tessellations of ourselves, so said Lilly Dancyger. They mirror who we are back to us; but it doesn't necessarily mean we are all identical or the same. They reflect who we are (or were) and how capable we are of loving. Of mothering. Of caring for another person so deeply, in a non-romantic, but equally adoring way. I love my friends. I love my friends. I have no sisters, but I think I consider them closer than siblings, because with them, I have a choice. I chose to have them in my life still, and vice versa. This decision to remain in each other's lives feels more real and proactive to me than siblinghood (which I'll never know about, but, ah, well.)

I cried at almost each chapter that Dancyger went through with her friends. The love she had for each of them. The highs and lows they went through. The stories she remembered about them. Would I ever get to write and honor my friends the same way? I hope I do. One by one, maybe, in this journal. I hope I can think of an anecdote to perfectly capture who they are, through my lens, of course, but also in a way that is quite objective. By writing about them, maybe I am hoping that I will never lose them.

I also thoroughly enjoyed reading I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron. It was a collection of essays about aging, her reflections about growing older finding small joys even as life throws you some disappointing curveballs. I'm a Nora Ephron fan, I love her movies, I love her humor. I didn't think I could relate to much of the stories here, especially since I'm still relatively quite young. But I'm also not young young anymore, and to be honest, I do worry about growing old and losing a part of myself along the way. The book approached growing old in a very honest way: a little anxious, but not terrifying. It encouraged me to stop being in denial about the reality of becoming old, but see it as gaining more experience, not caring so much about what other people say, and just enjoying the ride. It calmed my nerves and made me laugh so hard while doing so. Thanks, Nora. 

This year, as of this writing, I've already managed to finish 10 books. Ten! I'm honestly quite impressed, although I'm really not surprised. A few weeks ago, as a New Year's gift to myself, I bought an iPad Mini. I know, I know, my Google Pixel(s) and the Microsoft Surface(s) were just as shocked. But the thing was, while I thoroughly enjoyed my attempt at fully transitioning to an ereader (I had a Kobo), as a huge graphic novel fan, I just couldn't enjoy them well enough in that medium. I also found ereaders too limiting? That is the point for most people, to have a dedicated gadget just for reading. But I found myself leaving it at home or not bothering to stash it in my bag most of the time. In the last few years, I got more reading time out of my Google Play Books app on my old phone or on my old tablet (which has become very slow, hence the need to replace it) because I could read while taking a break from doing some other task, while waiting in line, or while stuck in traffic (and I'm not driving, of course.) I'm so glad I bit the bullet. Best purchase of the year so far. 

Highlights of the last month: Orbital by Samantha Harvey. My expectations were a bit high because it won the 2024 Booker Prize. I'm so glad that this book did not let me down. I loved it so much. It was the kind of book that made you feel both in awe of the story it was telling and of the way it was written. Samantha Harvey's sentences felt grandiose and lyrical, poetic and straightforward at the same time. You felt the weight of the narrative with each passage, yes, but you also felt weightless. Like gravity both existed and did not exist in the space that was occupied by her words. It was a novel about six astronauts orbiting the Earth, but it somehow managed to make the entire planet feel intimate. Reading it felt like being reminded that all the things that consume our attention every day, our deadlines, our anxieties, our little victories and disappointments, are only a tiny part of a much larger story. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but there was something comforting about seeing the world from that distance. The book made me feel small, but not insignificant.

Maybe that's what I want from reading this year. Not necessarily more books, although I certainly wouldn't complain about that. Just more moments of perspective. More sentences that surprise me, unsettle me, make me laugh unexpectedly, or help me articulate something I didn't know I was feeling. More stories that rearrange the furniture in my head, even if only slightly.

So that's the reading year ahead: no ambitious numerical goals, no genre bingo cards, no pressure to read the books I'm "supposed" to read. Just curiosity. A willingness to follow interesting threads wherever they lead. If last year gave me a book about friendship that reminded me how lucky I am to be loved, and a book about aging that made me a little less afraid of the future, then I think I'm already on the right track.

Here's to more good sentences.

Ahead of the release of Netflix's "Trese" adaptation, I decided to pull these out of my bookshelf and re-read these graphic novels on Philippine mythology. Coming to terms with the myths in our culture is imperative. So many of these stories were passed on to us orally by the older generations, but to most, they remain just that: old tales. What some fail to grasp is that they are reflective of our ancestors' beliefs and identities. Our forefathers devised these as a result of their unique and collective experience as a people who traveled, migrated, and traded throughout the Austronesian archipelagos. What seems to be fantastical and unrealistic was, to them, logical and compelling. And while rediscovering our myths does not mean that we must believe in them the very same way our ancestors did, it should give us a better understanding of our history and make us appreciate how our pre-colonial forebears survived — and even thrived — because of these. 

(Say hello to my Kobo Glo HD, a New Year gift to myself)

“You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It's a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you're anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.”

I don't think I have highlighted and bookmarked a book as much as I did this one, at least in recent memory. So many passages I wish I could press onto my skin, words I truly wanted to physically carry with me every single moment if I could, like a neon sign that says, "Yes, this is how I feel."  Raphael Bob-Waksberg's short story collection is a brilliant, unique, weird, and absolutely enjoyable ride. I read it in two days. 

I loved BoJack Horseman. I loved it so much I don't think I can watch it again any time soon. The way the story unfolded was so painful, realistic, and dark. But it was the perfect encapsulation of human fragility. And human resilience. We all just want to keep trying to be better versions of ourselves. And that includes accepting the worst parts of us too.

This sentiment is carefully crafted into each of the stories. That feeling of hope: hope that the wounds of past loves heal, hope that we can learn from our mistakes, hope that we find meaning again, hope that love sustains. Even when it's heartbreaking, it's uplifting. 

So unlike the show, this is definitely something I want to go back to again and again, to read when I'm sad or happy or when I feel like I need to be reminded of how beautifully devastating and fleeting life is.

"Every other night will have been rehearsal for Friday 18 July - we had to be ready. Everything was pushing us imperceptibly toward this moment - if I hadn't missed that train, if you hadn't moved for the job, just imagine." 

The best stories in the collection were those that leaned toward the more absurd, almost science fiction. Bob-Waksberg has a very careful hand when it comes to ludicrous premises. He's done it successfully in BoJack Horseman, and he's an even better architect of it in fiction. The surreality of these stories is heightened by the fact that they're being told with a straight face: here's an AntiDoor to a different universe which you can step into during your lunch break. Oh, just another day of planning a wedding with twenty-eight sacrificial goats. A band with a slightly modest following is forced to choose between touring Portland or staying in San Francisco, and oh, by the way, they have superpowers. Two people who found each other on a train but never spoke to each other for six decades. It's all so crazy, and yet, it's precisely the right amount of crazy that amplifies just how vulnerable and foolish we are as humans. It won't change. Put someone in an otherworldly dimension, a world so completely different from their own, and you can expect them to be themselves. 

No circumstance is so bizarre that it will force you to become someone you aren't - in fact, you will turn out to be exactly who you are.

"And I think about how loving someone is kind of like being president, in that it doesn't change you, not really. But it brings out more of the you that you already are."

Thirty-one pages in and I was already crying my eyes out. A little spoiler alert: the fourth story, about a missed connection on a train, really hit home. I've never personally experienced that, but I think the many heartbreaks in our family certainly revolve around those feelings. Of missed chances, of having spent a lifetime with a person and still not knowing them. Another story, about jumping into an alternate universe and meeting a different version of your beloved, was quite compelling too. It was an exercise in futility, an abstraction of curiosity and guilt. It's about pushing the limits of what a transgression can be, using regret (or the lack thereof) as the compass. It's fascinating and heartbreaking. You know where it's going, but just like the character, you still have to go through with it.

"But no, you were gone. And I realized most likely I would never see you again. And I thought about how amazing it is that you can know somebody for sixty years and yet still not really know that person at all."

A lot of the other stories in the anthology contain that same eagerness to just live through it. Pain and misery are just around the corner, but who's to say that's the only thing waiting for you? The first story is actually a great metaphor for this entire premise. A man gives a woman a can of cashews. She knows from her past experiences that it can be a practical joke: open it and a spring-loaded snake will jump at her. And yet, and yet. He promises that it will be different. The canister says it will be cashews. Her heart wants to trust the moment but her memories say otherwise. It's a tug-of-war between going for it and walking away. But one thing that is absolutely clear however - she wants to. 

This book is mostly about the wanting. Some characters follow through with it, most of them don't. In the end, they are defined by the choices they made when the universe - bizarre, and absurd as it was - led them to a fork in the road. And while it can be terrifying to look at life this way (Will I forever be haunted by the weight of every decision??), there is also a kind of liberation that comes with it. That there are so many opportunities to be brave, to take a U-turn, to change course. There's always room to move forward.

"But if there’s a silver lining here (and you’re not sure there is one), it’s the assurance that what you had, whatever it was, had weight. It made an impact. You can put to rest the fear that you were a blip in this other person’s life, a footnote. What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you."

But it's not so bad to look back, fondly embrace the past, and burrow in the weird, dull, aching satisfaction of remembering. 

"And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live.

So you might as well be brave."

(P.S. This is actually already my fifth book for the year! Yay, resolutions, progress, yadda yadda.) 

First Women by Kate Andersen Brower; Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson;  Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

These are the last few books I've just finished, and it only took me about a week and a half to go through all three. Maybe it was because of my eagerness to reward myself after two consecutive hearings, or maybe it was my bias towards books that concern strong women. The running theme seemed to be women orbiting close to power, but also, to painful realities. Riveting.

1 | "First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies" by Kate Andersen Brower

The first lady has no place in the Constitution; she has no official duties other than to be the President's wife. But it's certainly interesting how they carved their own paths separate from, although entwined with, their husband's and how differently they used the platform the presidency gave them. This book is one of the three nonfiction books by Brower detailing some of the most interesting aspects of the US Presidency aside from the Presidents themselves: the first wives, the vice presidents, and the White House. This book focused on the presidential wives starting from Mamie Eisenhower until Michelle.

Instead of providing a separate chapter for each woman, Brower interlaces their stories under specific themes. What surprised me the most was how much the modern first ladies figured in their husbands' politics. Some of the first ladies actively participated in Cabinet meetings, foreign policy discussions, and even stood as diplomatic envoys on behalf of the US. I will admit that before reading this, I was only familiar with Hillary (with whom I share the same birthday) and Jackie Kennedy (whose grief and compelling private life had been closely scrutinized over the years). But this book made me the most intrigued about Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter (who founded the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity), and Betty Ford (who championed mental health and support for alcoholics and cancer survivors by establishing the Betty Ford Center.) Their contributions to society are considered seminal now, but what role would they have played if they were not given the platform of their husband's office?

Another interesting aspect of the book was how older first ladies belonging to a different generation viewed the relatively younger, more ambitious ones. In particular, Hillary Clinton, who, unlike her predecessors, had goals of her own — aspirations outside and beyond her husband's presidency. Some of the older First Ladies — and I suppose, America in general — found this off-putting at the time. But, as the author surmised, it was probably because they recognized the privilege afforded to the women of the succeeding generation. The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s certainly allowed and provided more options for women in their chosen careers. The older first ladies such as Barbara Bush didn't have the same opportunities as, say, Ivy League-educated Hillary, as a circumstance of being born during her time. Perhaps it's not so much disdain, as it is a repressed kind of resentment that they were limited to just being the President's wives as a consequence of living in a different era. 

2 | "Rodham" by Curtis Sittenfeld

Which gives us a perfect segue to Rodham. To borrow from Jane Eyre, in this book, reader, she did not marry him. This novel envisions what Hillary's life would have been had she followed her head instead of her heart and turned down Bill's proposal. 

Full disclosure that I do not claim to know the entirety of Hillary's politics, nor that of Bill's. I just know that we were both born on October 26, so that's worth mentioning. (Another person born on that date? SC Justice Antonio Carpio. I am in great, powerful company.)

This is actually the first book I've read about Hillary. I initially wanted to dive into "Living History" first, her 2003 memoir, after reading Michelle Obama's "Becoming." But I just didn't feel like reading about all the issues that plagued the Clinton presidency, so I skipped it. According to the reviews I found on this book, it was pretty accurate of her life as a young Yale law student and fresh graduate anyway, so I was really interested in reading about how she was before Bill Clinton — and the rewritten history had she let him go.

I've always wanted to believe in multiple universes, in the possibility that out there are a multitude of lives running simultaneously along with this one, with varying degrees of discongruity. And given the huge losses that Hillary had to take in this lifetime, I couldn't help wishing that the fictional tale in the novel was the real one instead.

The novel felt like a realistic portrayal of who she was: strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, driven. The book recounts the beginning of their romance but the story certainly takes off after their break-up. Walking away from an engagement with Bill Clinton saved her from a lot of bigger heartaches and moral pitfalls. But it was still rather sad to find out that even in that universe, some things would not have turned out that much differently. Her political life may have taken wilder, bigger turns, but people will still see her as cunning, evil, and aggressive — just because that's how society views women chasing dreams that do not solely prioritize motherhood or marriage. I liked how the novel creatively intersected events that actually happened in real life (in one part of the novel, the "Shut her up!" crowd still shows up, albeit from a different side, but pretty much for the same reasons), which kept the story grounded. It also helped that apparently a lot of scenes in the book mirrored things that Hillary herself wrote about in her previous memoirs or that official biographies narrated. It didn't really tackle her policies and politics though, which prevented the novel from being truly compelling.

In the end, despite it being a fictionalized version of Hillary's life, it gave a decent glimpse of who she is: detached but still sincere, honest about being ambitious but still someone worth empathizing with. In opening the door to an alternate universe, it allows us to envision a reality that does not judge her for her husband's actions. It simply allows us to view her as she could have been, on her own. She may have still made mistakes. But it still could have been different; and in this other reality, different was certainly, infinitely better. If only?

3 | "Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil" by Dorothy L. Nelson

This is the most insightful and my personal favorite among the three books. It is not a biography, rather a literary critique of the six women's works. 

These thinkers and artists had significant influence on their respective fields: philosophy, literature, photography. One major criticism when it comes to the scholarship on these fields is that there just aren't enough female voices, i.e. they lack emotion and depth. But interestingly enough, the impact of these women did not arise because of this. In fact, they were largely criticized for the absence of sentiment in their approach to their art. The six women discussed in Tough Enough have been, in varying severity, accused of the opposite: being too cold, too unfeeling. Too detached. In going through the trajectory of their careers and most seminal works, the book explores the ways in which a disavowal of sentimentality by female artists, who are most likely to be accused of it, translates to a powerful stance. Informally dubbed as the "school of the unsentimental," the book examines how human nature is better understood when pain and suffering are processed at an arm's length.

For a sentimental person like me, the impersonality espoused by the book is a kind of wish-fulfillment. I have long admired Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, and I understood the effortlessness of their works was what made them cool. I aspired to be like that. Because their voice seemed so uncaring and dismissive in their writing, they were able to crystallize the minutiae of life in more impressive detail. But I don't think I was fully able to grasp that until this book confirmed it for me.

I was most absorbed by Weil's philosophy of "attention" — attention that is stripped of sympathy and empathy. It is an absolute emptying of our selves, our egos, our feelings, our motivations. When one is "attentive," one renounces this active longing in order to receive what the world has to offer, without the interference of one's limited and biased perspective. For Weil, the problem of actively seeking is precisely that one is too eager to fill the void in our soul. As a result, one settles too hastily on something: a counterfeit, a falsity. It is thus crucial that attention be characterized by detachment. Also central to Weil’s ethics of attention is a certain level of disinterestedness, which is thus the only way we could act justly towards other people's suffering. When we are moved by sentiment, we keep putting ourselves in the narrative. This is not the way to act just; rather we must focus solely on the suffering — the affliction — of others objectively. Otherwise, we cannot truly know. And we cannot truly receive.

Nelson focuses on these women's works pertaining to tragedy and suffering: Arendt's use of irony and discussion of "the banality of evil" in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Susan Sontag's response to the September 11 attacks which did not call for unity but rather castigated the politics that led to the event, Mary McCarthy's rejection of empathy and solidarity in favor of confronting the pain of reality in The Company She Keeps, Diane Arbus's photographs of "the freaks" and the outcasts, Joan Didion's deep dive into grief after the deaths of her husband and daughter — these non-expressive, unemotional responses to reality all gave way to an aesthetic grounded in fact. To them, reality was the antiseptic to pain, and this antiseptic leads to true and actual catharsis. 

Tough Enough is an important book because it proposes that these six women's contributions to intellectual history challenges the modern insistence on empathy as a panacea to all our political and societal illnesses. Whether or not you agree with the case for "unsentimentality," these women's works were monumental in providing different considerations on how to face suffering. In dealing with suffering without trying to inhabit such a large emotional space, we are challenged to accept that empathy is not the only salve to our collective consciousness while still finding something meaningful in our objective collision with reality.

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Peculiar, though: none of these books made me cry.¹ And yet how fitting, especially considering the last book's appeal to pragmatism. While I wasn't consciously seeking for a theme when I picked up these books, one certainly emerged. To seek out the facts, to make an objective attempt at reality, and to desire the truth, is to create the potential for transformation and action. To be confined to the label of "woman" is certainly a societal flaw that all these women sought to correct. They are embodiments of the female desire to reassess how society views them. They can be many things — caring, detached, emotional, cold, ambitious, facile — all at the same time. It doesn't have to be either/or, and they do not have to be punished for it. 

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¹ That recognition belongs to "Promise Me, Dad" by Joe Biden, which I read during the height of typhoon Ulysses. By the time our power went back on, I was crying my eyes out on Beau Biden's passing.