How This Reader Remembers September

September was many things, but it will be remembered as the month I discovered an author with whom I share a last name, who writes about loss without the melodrama but with sparkling clarity and affection. Lalla Romano, who writes about beauty as salvation, of the melancholy in joy, and of the truth that “what matters isn’t what happens to a person, but how that person lives it.” In Farthest Seas is a gift, especially for someone like me.

Nine months into the year, and I have sustained the personal challenge to read at least one book written by a Filipino every month. Firewalkers arrived with a typhoon, and I read it in the middle of another. Which probably explains why reading it felt like being sucked into a literary typhoon that dropped me disheveled in the middle of nowhere. The closest thing Filipino Lit has to Russian Lit’s Master and Margarita? It’s the only work of fiction I’ve read in September. But then again, is it really fiction? “Who is killing the children?”

On a lighter and more melodic note, Ravel by Jean Echenoz and Piano Notes by Charles Rosen steered my attention back to my first love. Rosen writes, “Music is not limited to sentiment or to the intellect, to emotional commitment or to the critical sense, but engages, at the moment of performance, the whole being. After all, that is why one becomes a pianist.” Oh, yes!

Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple (son of THE William Dalrymple!!!) was the one that took me the longest to finish. (When it comes to nepo babies, I don’t mind literary nepo babies who carry the torch of providing eye-opening perspectives of history.) This is Asia as we’ve never seen before. It is hefty. While Sam may not be as entertaining as his father — yet, and maybe because of the subject matter — I think this work is essential in understanding the very continent and world we live in. Also, this is the book I presented in our first Ex Libris online session in a while, wherein we asked among ourselves, “Why do you read?” To learn. To be free. That was the consensus. “In Libris Libertas.” In books, there is freedom.