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Showing posts from May, 2015

The Two Extremes and the Resulting Compromise

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I have no obvious vices like smoking or drinking but this year, there were two books so far which had compelled me to indulge in these things. Upon finishing  Patrick Suskind's  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer two months ago , I immediately went to the nearest convenience store and bought a single cigarette stick to corrupt my lungs with; even just for that night because the reading experience was quite exceptional and I needed the taste of nicotine in my mouth to preserve it somehow. Now, as I write this review, I suddenly had this overpowering craving to  drink booze, and vodka, I find, has always had a soothing effect on me which was exactly what I needed to suckle on once I did finish the end of this novel. I'm drinking it right now as I type. "The story is always about someone, a man or woman, who didn't seem to fit into the world and always shocked people by misbehaving. There is the rebel who tries to destroy the social order and the follower who tri

As the curtains fall on a stage where we're all performers

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"The truth was never just one person's story, or one version of what happened, never a shining absolute but an often filthy and ragged compromise that took not only godly patience to piece together, but also the devil's sureness of the worst of human nature." This was one of the few books that stayed on my shelves for a very long time and I was only able to pick it up now because I knew I had to include it on my Book Diet schedule for this year at long last. Now I've always considered it a great, humbling experience every time I would come across a novel to which I had no kind of expectations for or familiarity with whatsoever; and yet it'd ultimately fill me with clear-cut emotions that defied almost a logical explanation for their being. Jose Dalisay's 2008 fiction  Soledad's Sister  was exactly just that. It tackled really hard truths with an almost ethereal glow of optimism in its pages while still being able to leave readers an incompleteness

Journey Into Mystery: FEAR ITSELF

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In the beginning, many of the answers ended up being 'LOKI' . Kieron Gillen took on the task to write a rather young version of the trickster Norse god Loki for this quaint long-time series, Journey Into Mystery . His run lasted from issues #622-645 starting with the first arc entitled Fear Itself . I'll try to contextualize where this continuity falls in the Marvelverse but only very briefly since I've only researched about it and not actually read it myself. From what I understand, Gillen's series starts right after the events in the major crossover event SIEGE where Loki tricks Norman Osborn into doing something catastrophic which has resulted with the 'Void', and as that clusterfuck takes the toll, Loki suddenly grew a conscience midway through it, and needed to repent for what the Void had transpired (which I think wiped out realms across time and space or something). He tried to undo the damage but the Void 'sensed' it and attacks h

"If they were affected by war at all, they bore no scars"

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"I love our country. But what is our country? It is a land exploited by its own leaders, where the citizens are slaves of their own elite ." This is the third installment for F. Sionil Jose's Rosales saga after Po-On  and Tree , and being able to finish it last night left me rather cold and unsatisfied. Unlike the first two books, this one has a protagonist I could not form any attachment to, and I truly tried to make some sort of genuine connection with him and it doesn't make sense to me why I couldn't. All things considered, Luis Asperri--the lead POV character for this novel--is probably the closest archetype I should have some affinity for. He's a writer who lives with his ideals through pen and paper. He worked for print media. He was privileged, well-educated and eloquent. In other words, I should have related to him because we have those listed commonalities to contend with. But I simply did not like him at all; and perhaps that reveals someth

LOKI: Agent of Asgard [Trust Me; I Cannot Tell a Lie]

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Back in the day, comics-Loki is an ugly piece of shit villain who is also an eternal prankster and an exponentially talented liar whom you will damn well assume never gets invited to family reunions (but is probably there for the really dangerous parties). Thanks to the lovely British actor Tom Hiddleston making his mark with the cinematic role version, I could never look at this comic book character in any way, shape or form that doesn't portray him anything less than hunky and a tad bit emo-tastic. Like a good quarter of the Tumblr population, I may or may not have fantasized Hiddleston as the Norse trickster god Loki every time I take hot showers. I also may or may not have gotten so fed up one day that I was forced to get myself acquainted with him in comics just so he'll appear less in my dreams at night. I needed to read Loki in the medium he came from because I'm steadily losing grip of my mental faculties the more I delay this. But I want to read him not as the s

THOR: God of Thunder [The God Butcher and Godbomb]

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I honestly only watched the first  Thor movie last year, four years after its release in 2010. Like I said, not a Marvel fan in general, but I got to admit that of all the movies Marvel Studios have released so far, the first Thor  film is my most favorite next to the first  Iron Man . Admittedly, I love mythology stories which was why I stumbled upon this 2013 title,  God of Thunder  rather easily (also, it's written by Jason  Aaron  who is writing Wolverine and the X-Men  which is a part of my comic diet this year). Much like with Ms. Marvel , I went into reading this unaware of the content I was being served with and it was only when I finished the two volumes, The God Butcher and Godbomb , that I've done some research just to see how my experience is comparable to that of other people; and I was pleased to see that a lot of them were just as positive as mine had been.  The truth of the matter is that I immensely enjoyed God of Thunder  in a scale that I didn&#

MS. MARVEL [No Normal and Generation Why]

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I was initially unaware of the hype surrounding this particular title at first because I never considered myself a Marvel Comics fan in general. For a very long time, the X-Men are the only superheroes I love from the Marvel line and since I started my comics diet for this year that centers strictly around them , it's often unavoidable for me to encounter other current Marvel titles online as I do my research of specific X-Men series to read, particularly when they are included in crossover events. SO now  I've expressed interest on four ongoing Marvel titles which are  Thor: The God of Thunder , Loki: Agent of Asgard, She-Hulk and this one, Ms. Marvel . I don't know anything about the Captain Marvel character except that the last one was Carol Danvers and I think she used to be a pilot(?). That's really just about it but I did encounter the actual character when she made a cameo appearance in Chris Claremont's The X-Tinction Agenda  storyline from The Uncanny