Our best Filipino books of 2020 Written by CNN Philippines Life Staff Updated Dec 29, 2020 2:57:26 PM enablePagination: false endIndex: We asked a few critics, writers, and publishers to give us some of their best or favorite reads of 2020. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — I’d like to think there are more Filipinos who read this year. The success of online book fairs such as Aklatan and the ease of having a book — or books — delivered to your home have certainly satiated our need to explore worlds elsewhere or understand the direness of our situation. In Glenn Diaz’s essay on the function of fiction in the time of the pandemic, he says, “Fictional stories are most ‘instructive,’ I feel, in these moments of overlaps and slippages, when they approximate our ‘real’ experiences and perceptions just enough that we are jarred to take a second hard look. What fiction provides is not ‘information’ or ‘facts’ in the way that guidebooks or think pieces dispense things such as instructions on navigating the so-called new normal. What it provides is the imaginative clearing — necessarily collaborative between writer and reader — with which to imagine, and with work perhaps even refashion, our world anew.”