Uncategorized – The Book-Butterfly

Reading and Marching On

A reader’s response to uncertainty, war, misogyny, grief, or happiness, is to read, and March was not lacking in any of these.

Restoration, Ave Barrera 03/04/2026

Misogyny has roots in the foundations of society, it escapes through the cracks of our country’s great houses, and cultivated inside rooms where women are not supposed to enter.

Misogyny is perpetuated in careless conversation and by those who laugh in response to what some presidents, law makers, and important men consider funny or normal. It is also perpetuated by women who allow it.

“We all know what happens in stories to women who open doors that men have forbidden them from opening,” Jasmina says, in Restoration.

If the forbidden room in this novel feels like a metaphor for the Epstein Files… it is. Because such rooms have always existed.

And if there’s one thing I know about Ave Barrera, it’s that she doesn’t hand the story on a silver platter. Harnessing her knowledge of art and architecture, she asks you to confront rooms, hunt for symbols, open locked doors, and lead you to the dark labyrinths of the male gaze.

The Afghans, Asne Seierstad 03/08/2026

Here’s a journalist at the peak of her prowess, one who doesn’t draw attention to herself but brings her subjects at the forefront while encapsulating one of the world’s most complex histories in 428 pages; from the monarchy in the 1920s, to its courtship with the Soviets, to the abolishing of its monarchy, to the numerous transitions of power in the 70s, to the Soviet withdrawal, to the civil war, to the rise of the Taliban, the arrival of Bin Laden, to defining the difference between al-Qaeda, the mujahideen, and the Taliban, through Afghanistan’s unfortunate role as chessboard under different US presidents, to the Taliban takeover in 2021.

In a rare insider view across Afghanistan’s social strata, Seierstad takes us right to the heart of a Taliban commander’s home, where women in the family are active participants in jihad, making explosives and suicide vests, and serving the fighters. She also acquaints us with Ariana, a law student whose studies were severed after the Taliban takeover, but who devotes her time home-schooling children in her community. In a place where girls and women are not supposed to desire anything, especially education, this book introduces us to Jamila, a hero for women’s education who persevered through disability, war, and terror, and who is as remarkable as Malala in continuing the fight for girls’ rights to education.

After carefully studying the Quran, Jamila realized that she could use it as a tool for women’s emancipation, so that no one could dismiss it as a Western idea. Nowhere in the Quran does it forbid women from participating in society or getting an education: “When it said ‘Read!’, it was to all. When it said ‘Write!’, it was to all. To men and women. This was a revelation.” How beautiful that their holy book opens with the word “Iqra!” (Read!)

That is a command I can rally behind.

House of Day, House of Night, Olga Tokarczuk 03/12/2026

Olga’s Empusium would have been a more fitting novel to read this Women’s Month, given that it is a work that rightly identifies misogyny as an illness. But reading House of Day, House of Night, written way earlier than her initial works that were translated into English, is like discovering the fount from which all of the other books that we’ve already enjoyed flow.

The mushrooms in Empusium? There’s more here! Fragments of Flights and Yente’s out-of-body experience in Books of Jacob? Present! Here we’ll find the signature literary mischief accompanied by that unique eeriness that lingers in the borderlands of dreams and reality, of history and fiction, borderlands geographical and metaphysical.

Not my favorite Tokarczuk, but a vital piece in her oeuvre.

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag 03/16/2026

“Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)”

Fourth consecutive year of reading my favorite essayist during Women’s Month, and once again, she turns my perspective on its head while tackling the most relevant topics. At times when the first impulse is to disagree with her, I end up conceding that the view I hold of the world and of politics is such a naive one.

Regarding the Pain of Others is known for being a contemplation on contemporary man’s response to, and relationship with, images of war and violence, and how being a witness to the sufferings of others has become a “quintessential modern experience.”

And unless we learn from this constant barrage of other people’s sufferings through various media, we are really just voyeurs.

The Nights are Quiet in Tehran, Shida Bazyar 03/20/2026 (Nowruz)

The irony of reading this at a time when the nights are NOT quiet in Tehran does not escape me.

For someone who has an ample Iranian section in her library, I can attest that this one does not fall among those novels about the Revolution that bend toward the sentimental and the cliché.

This book does not offer a rewarding story, but it lends deeper insight and understanding. Do not let the lack of a satisfying ending distract you from its clever device of having a different family member narrate one chapter, each set ten years apart. It is a brilliant tool that subtly reveals how the years and the distance alter the way the Iranian diaspora reflects on the Revolution and how every generation carries hope differently, how differently they choose their battles, and how differently they hold on to memory. If there is one thing the characters agree with, it is this: The real Revolution is not over.

Free Iran (from anyone trying to delegitimize the Iranian people’s struggle, from within or from without)!

In Diamond Square, Mercè Rodoreda 03/24/2026

“And between gulps of coffee he told me it was better to read about history in books than write it with bullets.”

February Between and Beyond Book Covers

This was February:

Getting “wuthered” by Jacob Elordi, a shared experience with Ex Libris friends and some of the country’s celebrity book people in a special screening of Wuthering Heights;

reading, drinking, eating, and book-buying my way through Makati;

Vigan, whose “heart attack food” often comes up in Memoirs of an Art Forger. The book’s premise, intriguing; the opening passages, captivating; the sociocriticism, on point; the bits on art and architecture, fascinating; yet some elements did not seem to work for me. But kudos on being the only work of fiction I’ve read that mentions the Basi Revolt of 1807, an uprising led by Ilocano peasants against the Spanish monopoly on basi (sugarcane wine) in Ilocos Norte. Visiting Vigan also acquainted me with Leona Florentino, “Mother of Philippine Women’s Literature”. Now there’s a story; and what a family tree!

Also, Hamnet, at last. A book I stayed away from because I knew it would be painful. But my ego wouldn’t let me watch the movie without having read it. But now that I’ve read it, I’m asking how I’ll survive the movie. We, readers, are a crazy lot, no?

And then, Baguio, a mountain in the north where they put strawberries in everything, and where I read Krasznahorkai’s A Mountain to the North. This one came with a note saying: “Dear Mira, I realize in retrospect that I loved this book the way I love park benches. It is an ode to tranquility, to beauty, and to meaning. With the rush of the years, I am more and more convinced that one only needs these three. To me they are the intertwining gusts from the same cool breeze that commands a pause to take in.” Who needs my review after such an utterly beautiful musing?

Afterwards, home: Home is… where the bookmail is sent, and where The Piano Cemetery was waiting. If not for the Saramago blurb, I would have ignored this. I’ve found that it’s something I would read on a trip to Lisbon, a book keenly aware of the city’s soundscape.

But when asked about what I read this month that talked of love in any form, I answered with Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night. It’s about the love for reading, writing, and hence, the love for freedom. It affirms that reading is where we are most unrestrained. It is where we are most free.

January in Books

“No books!” I exclaimed.“How do you contrive to live here without them? …take my books away, and I should be desperate!”

(This line is found toward the end of Wuthering Heights, and for once, I agreed with something that a character from the novel had said.)

A little late in posting, but this was January — a beautiful reading month ripe for the picking — in books:

Frankenstein, of which I wrote at length in a separate post, was a wonderful way to ignite yet another year of reading, followed by the literary experience that is Wuthering Heights, which convinced me that any screen adaptation will forever be unnecessary. Sufficient unto the novel is the intensity, the complexity, and the viscerality thereof.

A Strange Room, given to me as a Christmas present, strangely seems to converse with Emily Brontë. “Nothing fuels revenge as grief does,” Damon Galgut says, as if writing of Heathcliff. To which Brontë replies, “Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.”

“Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.” Maybe Brontë, maybe Galgut. Guess?

From Galgut’s South Africa to North Africa. People ask how I pick my travel destinations. It usually starts with a section of this library that’s mostly arranged by political geography. And it seems like a Tunisian section is born: A Calamity of Noble Houses, an intriguing peek into the historical and social mosaic of Tunis; The Sisters, a 656-page glimpse of the diaspora. The books decide for me.

Atom Araullo’s A View from the Ground to drive me home. The one that hits closest to home, the one that dusts the sugarcoating off of being Filipino. A book that not only deserves to be put on the altar of Filipino essays, but to be taken, deeply, to heart.

Speaking of home, a January highlight was an invitation to Balay Tawhay in my hometown. In that house by the sea, delightful conversations and original artworks by Arturo Luz, BenCab, Abdulmari Imao, Borlongan, et al, serve as appetizers for lovingly prepared feasts.

And they have books. Lots of books! Because really, how does one contrive to live without them?

December in Books

“Sonia’s heart was a Hopper painting.” The title is blunt about Sonia and Sunny’s loneliness, but it’s this Hopper line that makes one grasp how lonely: A profound loneliness that has something to do with a vulnerable and fluctuating selfhood, an abstract loneliness that is tied to urban and modern life, an existential loneliness craving real connection that cannot be quenched by mere companionship. Lonesomeness was Edward Hopper’s leitmotif, and Kiran Desai weaves this theme into an unfolding raga… Read full entry here.

The Woman from Tantoura was my pick for #ReadPalestine week. Radwa Ashour’s best work, if you ask me. Started 2025 with Edward Said and ended it with something a bit less intellectually demanding, albeit informative and genuinely affecting. Why #ReadPalestine? Until we know enough to be able to call a spade a spade.

Brightly Shining by was my hope for a more festive read, and my first Dua Lipa recommendation. Surprisingly, all three books touch on immigrant life, and two have Filipino minor characters. But this one broke my heart.

It makes me extra grateful to have been able to squeeze in Tethered on the last day of 2025. Not because it helped me achieve my goal of reading at least one Filipino author a month, but primarily because this book is a gift. Grace is a multifaceted word, but even when I contemplate its various meanings, this book still embodies all of its definitions. Read full entry here.

That’s my December in books. The 2025 reading wrap-up will have to wait. It’s a wonder I was able to read at all with all the season’s bustle while caring for a loved one who was ill for most of the month, leaving me to (wo)man the fort. But we said goodbye to 2025 on a healthier and happier note. Gave and received bookish presents. Attended the last Ex Libris session of the year and felt revitalized. BFF paid us an impromptu visit: We attended a Rizal Day literary event and said goodbye to the old year / welcomed the new year reading quietly… and it was precious.

Wishing all my reading friends a happy new reading year!

October’s Horrors

The Ex Libris October horror theme and Krasznahorkai being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature seemed to point to one title on my shelf for my book of choice, the author’s debut novel, Satantago. Although set in post-communist Hungary, it reminds me of another Nobel laureate’s masterpiece, Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jakob, in the way the direst of circumstances require a savior and people recklessly fall for a con man that they believe could fill the longing for a messianic figure, inevitably leading to grim consequences. Its chapter numbers reveal a curious anomaly: Upon reaching VI, it counts down to I, apparently resembling the tango steps that go six steps forward and then six steps backward. If I’m right in thinking that this devilish dance, this Satantango, is a depiction of the cycles of history and society, then it is a rather bleak portrayal of humankind, but it is not far from the truth.

Thankfully, Krasznahorkai’s eerie shadows and unrelenting rain were tempered by Lasco’s ever hopeful outlook, despite raising questions about uncomfortable truths, demanding accountability and transparency from our leaders, making us understand that a crime against the environment is violence, while simultaneously encouraging moral response rather than moral panic. This reader prescribes Lasco’s Second Opinion for a healthy and much-needed dose of social medicine.

Aboard the Voyager I is a “golden record,” compiled by a NASA committee chaired by Carl Sagan, that includes Gould’s recording of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C. Gould’s piano tuner is quoted to have said, “…it was like a dream. There’s Bach writing the music, Glenn is playing the music, and it’s my tuning that’s giving it voice. And it’s going somewhere in outer space.” A Romance on Three Legs is an essential and enriching read for pianists that, as promised, chronicles Gould’s “obsessive quest for the perfect piano” but goes beyond his brilliance and his eccentricities and ventures deep into the world of pianos and uncommonly highlights the often undervalued contribution of piano technicians. For this reading pianist, this book was read in the key of fascination.

But it was Arturo’s Island that exceeded my expectations. It has the allure, the perturbing quality, and the devastating effect of a Greek tragedy — where the tragedy, if one reads deeper into it, is to live without love, especially a mother’s love. (Now that 800-page NYRB doesn’t seem so daunting anymore. Now I understand why every significant Italian author reveres Morante.) This book has prose so lush that I want to steep in it all day!

We did not have to seek after books that portrayed the supernatural; we only had to look into literature depicting history, current events, corrupt politicians, and human nature to be reminded that there is horror enough in the real world. But it is through reading that we can try to make sense of it all.

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.

Reading in August

Our ecological crisis is also a ‘crisis of forgetfulness’… we have forgotten how sacred the nature of creation is,” Iraqi-British writer, Dalia Al-Dujaili, reminds us in Babylon, Albion.

Although I read this in a perfect setting on a weekend getaway — amidst soothing sounds of nature, enveloped by clean air, and surrounded by mountains blanketed by mist — this ‘crisis of forgetfulness’ where the greed of many has replaced the sanctity of nature manifests in international and national news, and in the floodwaters that lap on my own doorstep back home.

Readers who find the lyrical wisdom of Aimee Nezhukumatathil refreshing will surely love this wholesome rumination into identity, migration, land, rivers, borders, national and personal myths, familial and arboreal roots, and humanity’s natural heritage. While these somber topics usually weigh down on the reader, Al-Dujaili imparts a hopeful outlook while encouraging us to make our very own existence into a form of praise, and challenging us to scrutinize how we carry identity. Needless to say, Babylon, Albion was a profoundly beautiful way to end August.

August is Women in Translation Month and Buwan ng Wika (National Language Month). To celebrate the latter: Munting Aklat ng Baybayin by Ian Alfonso. No better way than through learning more about our pre-colonial script! To celebrate the former: Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat and Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works.

“The best investigative reporting is storytelling,” says journalist Jane Mayer. Traces of Enayat is proof of this as Iman Mersal takes the reader on a quest to find traces of Enayat, an Egyptian writer who took her own life in 1963. Mersal affectingly expresses the attachment and resonance we find in the authors we encounter and whose works derail us from an otherwise uneventful trajectory. It also begs the question: How many Enayats has the world lost into oblivion?

As for Collected Works, seven pages shy of six hundred, this novel quietly draws you into its world. It acquaints you with its setting and its characters without haste. It knows how to linger. It lingers on one’s thoughts on literature and art, on a character’s indecision to call someone or not, whether to read a book or not. It often lingers on everyday scenes where words turn into still life paintings and everyday portraits. But these scenes and characters exist in the shadow of Cecilia’s disappearance. Almost fifteen years after she vanished without a trace, her daughter, Rakel, believes it is her missing mother she is reading about in a novel, and measured suspense and mystery begin to replace the monotony of their lives. I would recommend this to the unhurried reader. Ultimately, Collected Works is a meditation on what one’s life amounts to.

As for reading life in August? This is what it amounted to. It felt very much like a defiance of my country’s frustrating political climate.

Percival Everett: James

The epitome of a retelling. The kind that does not feel contrived or produced to merely appeal to a woke market, the kind that is not more focused on stripping off anything that might offend a hypersensitive audience whilst taking no thought about artistic quality or literary merit, the kind that does not disrespect the original work but ennobles it instead. The kind that’s necessary.

This reader prepared for James by reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; because how can we make the most of a retelling if we don’t know, or have forgotten, what was originally told in the first place? Percival Everett revolutionizes the tale by rewriting Mark Twain’s novel through the perspective of Jim, Huck’s African American companion. Fresh from its antecedent, the contrast between old and new becomes more striking as Everett furthers the adventure by lending it more depth and feeling with layers that contemplate identity, family, sacrifice, the “tidiness of lies” in narratives, and even song lyrics, that justify prejudice.

My initiation to Everett’s work was through his humorous and modern retelling of Medea, For Her Dark Skin. As I delayed the reading of James, thinking that Medea’s story would always be more relevant to a woman, James continued to garner more awards — the National Book Awards, the Booker Prize shortlist, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last month. I had to see why.

Published amidst another era of book bans that include several works that confront racism in the United States while Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains on the shelves, this book is a timely gift that takes the subject by the horns and transforms Jim’s story into a greater call to educate oneself, to master language, to read, and to write one’s way to freedom.

May Books and Friends

On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

The perfect day to read this would be on a rainy autumnal day. November 18, to be exact. I read it on a sweltering first of May. But I love how it drew me in calmly and made the temperature bearable. To weave reflective prose with only a tinge of disquieting tension is Solvej Balle’s gift. It is a book for when we read not for the plot but for the language.

Something tells me that this is more than just a story about a specific day that recurs 366 times in the novel but rather a meditation on time and the distance it creates between our relationships with others and with our present and former selves.

If after tonight I’ll wake up to another first of May, I’d still read this… or perhaps, volume two.

There’s No Turning Back, Alba de Céspedes

“Love, like art. It’s there or it’s not.”

Alba is cruel. She tells the truth. This book left the dock before I was able to fully say goodbye. I would have wanted to be with some characters a little bit longer to find out how their lives would continue to unfold. But Alba, after drawing you intimately into both the communal and the separate lives of each girl, shakes off attempts at clinginess and writes with a knife: That is how life is, she seems to say. It moves. It keeps going. And there is no turning back.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

“It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”

There are times when you don’t know why you put off purchasing a particular book despite it being recommended by a friend, despite seeing a lot of people post about it, despite seeing it in almost every bookstore. You’ll only know the answer when, years later, you receive a copy as pasalubong from the Book Street in Ho Chi Minh. Books always hold an added value when falling into your hands this way.

But oh, how this book breaks your heart in different ways! Maybe because of how love is shown in its many degrees along with the pain that comes with each kind of love.

“I’m broken in two… In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, makes us two… Into — yes, that’s more like it. Now I’m broken into.”

Something tells me, however, that this is not peak Ocean Vuong yet, that the magnum opus is yet to come: Could it be The Emperor of Gladness? We’ll soon find out.

Concepcion, Albert Samaha

“History ripples into perpetuity. Decisions, actions, mistakes, and triumphs of one day shape the days that follow, setting irreversible paths into the future…”

In Concepcion, Philippine history ceases to be a structured chronology but a fluid tale that merges with the timeline of world history, personal history, and geopolitics. Read full entry here.

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, Ian Penman

Gymnopedies… Gnossienes… “If you only know these few exquisite morsels, you only know a tiny fraction of Satie…” This book showed me how little I knew of Satie and how I underestimated the role that this composer played in the trajectory of art and music history.

“Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon.” Ian Penman dips his toes, and luckily, takes willing readers along for the ride! Written in an ingenious form in three parts, I am tempted to assert that there couldn’t be a more fitting way of writing about one such as Satie.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Because how can we make the most of a retelling if we don’t know, or have forgotten, what was originally told in the first place? Yes, you guessed right. This reader is prepping for Percival Everett’s James!

How I managed to find time to read in May was a miracle. What a hurricane, the past few weeks! It threw all sorts of things at me, but it threw some of the best things my way, too: My very own grand piano, the younger brother’s short but sweet homecoming, friends who travelled far just to visit — reading friends to boot! And while books may have appeared to have taken a backseat, they’ve only enriched these moments and this entire experience called living.

“That’s why I began to write… Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” Dear Solvej Balle, that’s why we read.

Simon Mawer: The Glass Room

“There was, however, a catch. There is always a catch, in stories as in life.”

The verdict: I could have easily stopped reading this because of the unashamed and irritating amorality of the characters. But Simon Mawer knows how to tell a story and wrap you around his finger.

It’s true what readers who occasionally dabble in cinema are saying: The Glass Room > The Brutalist. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter admitted to taking inspiration from the former. The twisted parallels are there: Among other details, Modern man’s spiritual aloofness, characters who worship at the altar of their ego, and the pretentiousness that seems to be an essential quality of the zeitgeist.

The Glass Room, but not the ‘room’ of English, expresses the author. Rather, the Teutonic ‘raum’ with a broader sense of space. The novel correspondingly hints at architecture while maintaining a broader sense of architecture by concerning itself beyond the architect and the building, and taking into account the lives that inhabit a particular space. Similarly, it is an acknowledgment of how one cannot write about the Modernist shift in architecture without conveying how it is an entire geopolitical and cultural movement.

While glass seems to reflect not the transparency but rather the fragility of human relationships and ideologies, in its un-clichéd way, this novel concedes that it is architecture that outlives and bears witness to it all.

“The Glass Room remained indifferent… Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark…” — The Glass Room, 2009

“…but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.” — The Brutalist, 2024