Goodbye, Madeleine L' Engle...
One month without posting. Again. And belated happy birthday to pere_chan.
Anyway, not much to talk about other than the fact that I started taking up Japanese again last July. I enrolled in the Elementary 1 class at the Nihongo Center in Manila. I was thinking whether I should just take an assesment test and try for Elementary 2, but since it's been a while since my Japanese foreign language class in college, I'd forgotten most of my hiragana and katakana by now (and couldn't bother to dredge my old notes out from storage)...
It's also sale season at most of the major bookstores again--they usually time their branch-wide sales with the Manila International Bookfair, which of course I wasn't able to attend again this year (haven't been able to since they moved the venue from the Megatrade Hall to the much less accessible World Trade Center along Roxas Blvd.). The most interesting book I've picked up so far seems to be Catherynne Valente's The Orphan's Tales: In The Night Garden, which reads like the author's own culture-transcending version of The Arabian Nights.
On a sadder note, I read in a New York Times article that Madeleine L' Engle of Time Quartet and Austins fame has passed away. She was one of the first "serious" contemporary young adult authors (along with Lloyd Alexander, who also passed away this year) I read back in grade school, a time when most of my classmates were too busy collecting the latest Sweet Valley book to care about an "unknown" author like her. I credit her Time Quartet books with getting me interested in science and, to a degree, Celtic history/mythology.
Rest in peace, Ms. L'Engle. You have "tessered" to realms beyond the mortal plane, but you leave behind a body of work that will continue to inspire future generations with its imaginative breadth and its quiet wisdom.
Anyway, not much to talk about other than the fact that I started taking up Japanese again last July. I enrolled in the Elementary 1 class at the Nihongo Center in Manila. I was thinking whether I should just take an assesment test and try for Elementary 2, but since it's been a while since my Japanese foreign language class in college, I'd forgotten most of my hiragana and katakana by now (and couldn't bother to dredge my old notes out from storage)...
It's also sale season at most of the major bookstores again--they usually time their branch-wide sales with the Manila International Bookfair, which of course I wasn't able to attend again this year (haven't been able to since they moved the venue from the Megatrade Hall to the much less accessible World Trade Center along Roxas Blvd.). The most interesting book I've picked up so far seems to be Catherynne Valente's The Orphan's Tales: In The Night Garden, which reads like the author's own culture-transcending version of The Arabian Nights.
On a sadder note, I read in a New York Times article that Madeleine L' Engle of Time Quartet and Austins fame has passed away. She was one of the first "serious" contemporary young adult authors (along with Lloyd Alexander, who also passed away this year) I read back in grade school, a time when most of my classmates were too busy collecting the latest Sweet Valley book to care about an "unknown" author like her. I credit her Time Quartet books with getting me interested in science and, to a degree, Celtic history/mythology.
Rest in peace, Ms. L'Engle. You have "tessered" to realms beyond the mortal plane, but you leave behind a body of work that will continue to inspire future generations with its imaginative breadth and its quiet wisdom.