Category: Nostalgia

When National Book Store trended on Twitter a couple of days ago, it was for rather unflattering reasons. Those reasons are apparent to anyone who’s ever been to National Book Store in the last...

I was 12 years old when I read my first Hardy Boys mystery. It was “The Crisscross Shadow,” #32 in the Flashlight series (so-called due to the flashlight in the title logo). I’d been...

Christmas 1984, lunchtime, somewhere in Makati: My brother walks into the kitchen with leaden footsteps, his shoulders hunched forward in defeat. He tosses a gaily-wrapped package on the dining table before slumping on his...

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…a monay?! On July 16, 1972, Typhoon Gloring (international codename: Super Typhoon Rita) tore through the Philippine island of Luzon, leaving 214 Filipinos...

My interest in reading for pleasure was sparked by an “attractive girl of eighteen.” It all started when our fifth-grade English teacher shepherded the class to the school library. Upon seeing the 30-odd girls...

I did not grow up in a reading household, and by that I mean there were no leather armchairs in the family living room nor were our shelves lined with hard-bound editions of “War...

There’s a burgers and burritos stall where a Booksale booth used to stand at my local supermarket. Several weeks before the burger joint appeared, I was aghast to find an empty corner in the...