Uncategorized – The Book-Butterfly

A Highly Recommended April

If books are the calendars we keep for the days that elapse, it has to be recorded on this reading journal that I finished reading Project Hail Mary on the day Artemis II was launched. “Amaze, amaze, amaze!”

To expand my literary horizon and push myself to read beyond the familiar zone of my TBR stack or outside the often commercially driven influence of bookstagram, April was devoted to books recommended by friends (2 of whom are not on IG, and 2 of whom do not post their reading exploits on their IG feed).

04/01/2026 Project Hail Mary (recommended by Christian who had me at, “The alien’s language is music!”)

And that’s why, even though most of my friends know that this is not my usual genre, I found it quite entertaining! It was a “light” and welcome break from my usual fare. (You can tell the world’s in a pretty bad state when an apocalyptic bestseller can be labelled “light”.)

Andy Weir’s casual prose exudes a deep but playful enchantment for science, and chapter after chapter reveals an author having fun while taking the reader for a ride! And who wouldn’t enjoy those puns and Beatles references?

I have yet to watch the movie, but I hope they included Ryland Grace and Eva Stratt’s conversation circa page 429 when Stratt discloses that she was a history major. The dialogue that ensues suggests that, despite the exceeding heights of technology and engineering that man achieves, it is still history that puts science into perspective.

04/05/2026 The Bridge of San Luis Rey (recommended by Yuri) imparts a line that carries our whole argument against AI in literature.

Click Here to read full entry.

04/08/2026 Unwritten Women (recommended by Gabi)

“It is in the everyday experiences of ordinary women that we find true history—the texture of our nation as lived, felt, and dreamed.” – Zea Asis

At last, a book that looks beyond the men of Philippine history and, “Beyond the official portraits and the hagiographic accounts,” as Zea Asia writes. At last, a book that celebrates the women on whose shoulders this nation stands.

Click here to read full entry.

04/16/2026 The Persian Boy (recommended by Gabi and Anna)

Mary Renault does not so much bother with dates as open one’s perception of the classical world beyond textbook language and to a nuanced observation of the collision between a highly civilized East and an ambitious West. She does not so much bombard the reader with history as open one’s heart to the depth and texture of feeling, of longing, of belonging. Her musical prose is the novel’s epic cinematic soundtrack. Renault wins one over, heart and mind, the same way only the greatest conquerors knew that winning hearts and minds is the ultimate siegecraft.

Click here to read full entry.

04/21/2026 Breasts and Eggs (recommended by Vera)

This book leaves one, especially a woman, with so much to chew on. It is probably the most existentialist contemporary novel I have encountered so far. A revelatory work of which the main subject is still too personal for me to discuss on social media.

But it is also revelatory in a sense that it sees through the cracks of Japanese society, which, as Filipino tourists in Japan, we tend to envy and glorify, but it is truly through reading that we get a glimpse beyond the surface.

04/25/2026 As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow (recommended by Anna who was right when she said that the gut punch in this book is everything).

When Assad fled Syria in 2024, my initial reaction was, “What? Just like that?!”

I corrected myself immediately. No, not “just like that,” rather, finally. The long-drawn-out revolution had finally concluded.

And it’s interesting how characters in this book correct each other if what has been happening in Syria is referred to as a war. “It’s not a war, Salama. It’s a revolution.”

This was published two years before the Assad regime fell, but it informs an outsider’s view of how the collapse wasn’t “just like that” — and in simple language. Simple enough for an early teen, but straightforward enough for the reader to make the daily struggle, the fear, the trauma, and the humanity tangible. Although it isn’t without heartwarming moments, too.

I thought I knew what was coming, and there was a point when I underestimated this book after I encountered several clichéd lines. But somewhere in these pages, was a gut punch like no other book I’ve read recently has delivered (hint: it’s not exactly at the moment when someone dies) — and that’s coming from someone who has a steady literary diet of stories from places of conflict.

No, it’s definitely not War and Peace. But these books, they carry their own childlike wisdom, too, and add to our understanding of Syria, less from a geopolitical perspective but more from a human one.

04/28/2026 The Museum of Modern Love (recommended by Anna) is highly original and uniquely structured with a title that is clearly a play on Love and Art, cunningly asking, what’s the point of art if we don’t realize their interchangeability?

“Art did not stop, that’s what Marina had said. Art did not get to five o’clock and say, ‘That’s it, the day is done, go think about TV or making dinner.’ It wasn’t like that. It was there all the time: when you were chopping vegetables, talking with a friend, reading a newspaper, listening to music, having a party. It was always there offering suggestions, wanting you to go write or draw, sing or play. Wanting you to imagine big things, to connect with an audience, to use energy, to find energy. It wasn’t ready when you were, it didn’t come when you wanted it or leave when you were done. It took its time.” — Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

Click here to read full entry.

April was a special reading month, thanks to books and friends. How dreary life would be without you!

Heather Rose: The Museum of Modern Love

For most of us who are not au courant with the Modern Art scene, Marina Abramović probably entered our consciousness with the same video clip.

That video in which we were given a background of her twelve-year relationship with fellow artist, Ulay, and how they exhibited the most dramatic break-up in 1988 by standing 5,955 kilometers apart, each from one end of the Great Wall of China, and walking to each other — for ninety days, exposed to wind, rain, and sun, even through disintegrating parts of the Wall in Mongolia’s Gobi desert — for one last embrace…

…Only for Ulay to show up unannounced at her 2010 MoMA retrospective where The Artist is Present entailed Abramović gazing into the eyes of each stranger who sat in front of her while sharing a moment of silent connection. We held our collective breath when she opened her eyes and found herself face to face with the former lover she had not seen for twenty-two years, we wept quietly as she did, and all we could do was collect ourselves when Ulay stood and walked away when his turn was over, replaced by the next stranger, leaving us with a host of questions whilst being deeply affected by the emotionally-charged encounter.

Given the title, I expected this book to focus on that renowned relationship. Heather Rose is original and evades predictability, however. It is, instead, a uniquely structured novel built around imagined characters who attend as audience or participate and sit still with Abramović throughout the 75-day run of The Artist is Present in New York.

The book begins with a wise and omniscient narrator who retreats when bringing the characters to the forefront, but immediately becomes captivating whenever it speaks beautifully about art. With another clever creative decision, Heather Rose leaves us guessing about the enigmatic narrator’s identity until the end.

One of the main characters, Arky Levin, is a pianist and film composer, married to Lydia Fiorentino, an architect. (Ironically, this reading pianist found herself identifying with the self-sufficient woman in the architect while having little sympathy for the indecisive pianist who seems to be more committed to his work than their relationship.) We are also introduced to recently widowed Jane, an art teacher; Healayas Breen, art critic and journalist; and Brittika, a graduate student writing a thesis on Abramović — all realistic and flawed people who, while struggling with individual grief or internal conflict, find themselves drawn to Abramović’s art and roused by the deep introspection induced by the artistic experience.

It is ultimately a novel about art and connection for which the author found a fresh and imaginative way of expressing. The title is clearly a play on Love and Art, cunningly asking, what’s the point of art if we don’t realize their interchangeability?

Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

04/05/2026 | Concerned about the rise of books adulterated by AI, our book club’s aim for our April session was to present a book that could not have been written by AI.

First published 99 years ago, and awarded the Pulitzer the following year, it makes one certain that The Bridge of San Luis Rey could not have been written by AI. Let people say what they want to say about classics, but the rise of AI has only increased the value of literary works written prior to its advent.

My pick was rather redundant, for it was already chosen by another Ex Libris member for our February session when we were asked to present a book that talked of love in any form. That same recommendation led me to read it, and reading it made me realize how it was the most clever pick for the theme of Love. Despite such a slim volume, it unexpectedly contains and expresses the Four Loves (Storge, the love we have for family; Philia, the love between friends based on shared values and interests; Eros, romantic love; Agape, the altruistic and self-sacrificing kind of love) with an understated brilliance.

How the story is framed is impressive. The chapters end with the bridge collapsing, but it is a different character’s backstory that’s introduced in each one. How Wilder ties these different characters together conveys how everything is connected, and how our actions create ripple effects that are broader than we think.

And yet, the story or the publishing date is not the reason why I chose this. It is because this book contains a line that, for me, hits the bullseye as to why AI should have no place in literature. In a long sentence from the early part of the novel, Thornton Wilder writes, “…the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart.”

And here lies our whole argument against AI in literature: Why entrust it to something that does not have a heart?

Reading and Marching On

A reader’s response to uncertainty, war, misogyny, grief, or happiness, is to read, to carry on with purpose, and to hold those dearest to them closer. March did not lack in any of these, and so this reader read, worked, and spent more time with those dearest to her.

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.