MORE than the death of innocence, Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” (HarperCollins, New York, 2015, 288 pages) tells that...
It’s often amazing how much meaning can be put into one name. By now and for most people, Chanel is...
There is perhaps no single institution that has been more influential in Philippine culinary arts as Maya.
What comes to mind when you say Ed Sheeran? As a singer-songwriter, he’s intelligent, quirky, cool—and ginger. Those same adjectives...
“The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures” (Little, Brown and Co.), by William deBuys ...
The tedium of the daily commute has turned out to be pretty productive for Paula Hawkins.
When Vincent van Gogh steps off the train in the coal-mining region of Belgium known as the Borinage, his artist's eye is immediately captivated by his surroundings.
The diversity and quality of new books that appeared on bookstore shelves in 2014 made readers in the Philippines immensely fortunate. Proving to be greatly popular among Filipinos and adopted by the Philippine publishers in a big way, the electronic publishing platform Wattpad flexed its muscles, leading to the wide release of print versions of their best-selling titles, the release of three motion-picture adaptations (“Diary ng Panget,” “She’s Dating the Gangster” and “Talk Back and You’re Dead”) and various television series. Expect more of the same in 2015. What used to be considered niche fare such as comic books, young adult and speculative fiction continues its march toward mainstream domination. Celebrities brought their own wattage to a wave of titles lit up with familiar names. In a year that saw a rising number of foreign authors visiting Manila, National Book Store’s first Philippine Literary Festival wowed fans by bringing in Amy Tan, Chang-Rae Lee and Eric Gamalinda. Filipino authors continued to be prolific and broke new ground all around. Now everybody seems ready to do even greater things in 2015, after a year that literally and literarily provided something for everyone, and proof that, yes, Filipinos do read—a lot. Here are the Inquirer’s selections for best books published in 2014 arranged alphabetically by title:
It takes a master of horror like Stephen King to take an ordinary, innocuous sentence like “something happened” and turn it into an intricate, effective device of enduring fear. After reading “Revival: A Novel” (Scribner, New York, 2014, 403 pages), you’ll never think the same way about that sentence.
What is the weirdest question you’ve ever been asked? Chances are, it’s nowhere as weird as the questions one finds in the best-selling nonfiction book “What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” by Randall Munroe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2014, 303 pages).
