catnap

i love taking naps. i always have. during the middle of the day, nothing refreshes me more than a few minutes shut-eye. and i'm not talking siesta because that's borne of a feeling of heaviness right after lunch but really just a catnap.

but no one loves taking naps more than our 2 cats. they can nap all day long, they wake up and react to something for a few seconds or play for a few minutes then they're back to napping. i stayed home one day and just witnessed them catnapping from afternoon to night. now, isn't that the life? we can learn a thing or two from our feline friends.

chocolate enchantment

I keep forgetting that Joanne Harris is one of my favorite authors. Her stories are, for me, so unassuming and the stories aren't as forceful as the works of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan or even Khaled Hosseini but it never fails to capture me. Chocolat is another one of these stories and I have to wonder what took me so long to read it.

Chocolat is an enchanting story. Like all her other works, it carries a hint of magic barely perceptible, but strangely felt. Vianne Rocher comes to the French town of Lansquenet with her daughter Anouk. Armed with only the best of intentions she is met with suspicion and wariness. She puts up a chocolatier in the middle of Lent much to the chagrin of the town's priest and several hard-core Catholics. In the season of fasting and abstinence, only a merry handful of people subscribe to the extravagance that is chocolate. Vianne brings passion, happiness, a bit of extravagance and wildness to this small town. But in her wake there is also trouble and dissent and most of all, change. Change that a close-knit community is unsure of. Are they ready for this? Is she more evil than good using the powers of chocolate sweetness to her advantage?

This is the backbone of the tale and I can't say anymore because once I start I won't be able to stop. Suffice it to say that Chocolat is a must-read. Definitely.

The Tesseract

Got hold of The Tesseract from M (finally). Read it with gusto and I was not disappointed.

The tesseract, the point where a cross is made. 3-dimensional. or 4-dimensional. unravelled. this is what the book is like. several lives without any means to intersect somehow do without any explanation. this book makes no excuses, it's simple, it's complicated, it's controlled yet all over the place. The grittiness of Manila provides the perfect backdrop for the intersecting stories, it takes me back to the sights, sounds and smells of Malate, the Manila of my earlier years. To have a writer write about the streets of a place you thought you knew so well makes it almost tangible. You forget what it's like to walk those streets and to be in that place and Alex Garland takes you right to the heart of it even to the places you made yourself believe didn't exist.

Master storyteller. Highly recommended.