Tag: book-reviews

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.”

Kiran Desai: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“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: at times beautiful, at times disorienting, at times cruel and repulsive, at times disquieting, at times capriciously meandering.

I have no qualms with the length. Although considered massive in proportion to the contemporary reader’s short attention span, I imagine the typeface and the font size would make Tolstoy say, “Hold my vodka.” But the book often offers clues to Desai’s literary and artistic inspirations and subtly discloses why the author found its length necessary: “How many millions of observations and moments it had taken to compose this book!” Sonia thought about Anna Karenina.

It is not, however, “an unmitigated joy to read” as Khaled Hosseini claims in a blurb. Reading about Sonia’s toxic relationship with Ilan, the narcissistic artist, was nauseating to the point of causing an unpleasant physical reaction that made me want to give up one-third through the book. Although aghast, it was accompanied by the awe of how much the author fathoms an artist’s relationship with darkness. There is no question about this being a work of art, but I will admit that I hoped to love and enjoy this more than I did.

While Sonia and Sunny failed to endear me to them, I was drawn to Sonia’s mother, who kept company with books and understood that there are worse things than loneliness, and Sunny’s father, who desired to break free from the cycle of corruption in the family for the sake of his son, believing that to be honorable is to be free. While I was concerned that portrayals of men beyond the main characters would perpetuate stereotypes of Indian men, it was Desai’s keen eye for psychological and cultural detail, and her vast insight into the plight of the immigrant, that made me continue reading.

To paraphrase a memorable line from the novel: I knew when I saw this book that the story would not be simple. And simple it is not.

June in Books

Reading The Leopard is like viewing a portrait of a bygone monarch in a gallery. They mean nothing to you but notice how the brush strokes are skillfully done as it immortalizes a world that no longer exists; you acknowledge that it is important as a record… and then walk away and move on to the next portrait. But you retrace your steps, give it a tender, wistful gaze, and your eyes rest on Bendico, the Prince’s faithful Great Dane; the one detail that truly manages to tug at your emotions and whose fate emphasizes the vicissitudes of life and history.

Background for Love allowed me to lean back momentarily, put my feet up, and whisked me toward the sunlight despite the bittersweet awareness that darkness would soon descend on the sunlit Europe of this story. That darkness came for A Bookshop in Berlin, a true account of a bookseller’s incredible escape from Nazi-occupied Europe that eerily mirrors the current state of the world where prejudice and ignorance defy truth and multitudes are easily swayed by propaganda, but where hope also shines through in heroic acts of kindness.

Lawrence Ypil’s poetry served as punctuation marks between these novels. And Alba de Céspedes? The powerhouse that is Alba de Céspedes? She demands a separate post.

So that was June. It did not leave time or headspace for making concrete reading plans. While it started with that epitome of a retelling which is James, whenever there was a need to retreat in the solace of books, I’d instinctively pick up a volume from a stack of Pushkin Press Classics that hadn’t been assigned places on the shelf yet.

In the month wherein my heaviest schedule clamored to be felt and the risk of a WWIII threatened to make everything inconsequential, it somehow made sense to work harder, to live more, and to continue reading. Wait, is it really July already?

Helen Wolff: Background for Love

“What do you think I should do now?”
“You should read a good book for a change.”

“At my death, burn or throw away unread,” wrote Helen Wolff on the envelope in which the manuscript was found in 2007. Being a revered editor and publisher of literary giants such as Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Gunter Grass, among many others, she probably judged her own writings with more exacting standards and deemed Background for Love unfit for publication.

After all, it is a perfectly imperfect novella. We can find fault with the characters and their decisions if we want to. Nothing grand or earth-shattering happens here. It is a story of a young girl wrestling between the desire for independence and the man she loves. And most of us have been there, and may or may not have ended up acting wisely. But you see, some of the most authentic writings are those unfit for publication, simply because life is flawed and will not live up to a lot of ideals.

What made me relish the pages so easily — aside from the cat she named Colette after the writer, aside from the picturesque beauty of Saint-Tropez as a backdrop, and the bittersweet awareness that darkness would soon descend on the sunlit Europe of this story — was the authenticity and intimacy of Wolff’s writing. It makes me wish she had written more, and one can only wistfully imagine the triumph of what she would have considered fit for publication!

But we can only be grateful for how this little gem did not perish into oblivion. As rain begins to steal into the sunny days in my part of the world, this book made me lean back, put my feet up… and whisked me toward the sunlight.