History – The Book-Butterfly

Mary Renault: The Persian Boy

From approaching this as someone who has held the belief that Alexander was not so great, to weeping and mourning Alexander’s death by the end of the novel, speaks volumes of Mary Renault’s prowess.

One can tell that this reading choice was not borne out of admiration for a legendary military commander, who, despite his formidable feats, part of this reader still sees as a nepo-baby that merely inherited his father’s experienced army, who had the Greek historians on his side to deify him, and who seized a Persia that had already conquered the world.

Skipping the first and going straight to the second volume of Renault’s Alexander Trilogy seemed imperative because, once again, Persia is besieged by the West. And when the future is uncertain, we search for clues in the past.

The Persian Boy is narrated through the eyes of Bagoas, a real character who can be found in Persian history and in the writings of Plutarch. Plucked from his home and his childhood, he is sold and is made a eunuch against his will, and ends up as a courtier for Darius III, the king who lost the Achaemenid Empire. The empire was not the only thing that was surrendered to the Macedons after the Battle of Gaugamela. Bagoas, too.

Earning Alexander’s trust, Bagoas becomes his companion, a witness to the conquests and to the life that humanizes the godhead. We are introduced to an Alexander who is well-read, and who gently tells Bagoas, “It’s a great loss to you, not to read.” He was the student of Aristotle, after all.

Most interestingly, we learn of a king who sought out the writings of Herodotus and Xenophon to learn more about Cyrus the Great (“Kyros” in the novel), first of the Achamenids, who raised an empire with clemency and respect, a dominion that was by far the greatest the world had ever seen, and whom Alexander greatly admired and wished to emulate.

Of Cyrus, Alexander says, “He did not make subject peoples; he made a greater empire. He chose men for what each man was in himself, not from hearsay and old wives’ tales… Well, I don’t suppose he found it hard to persuade the conquered. To persuade the victors, that’s the thing.” To which Bagoas wondered, “He wants to follow Cyrus even in this.”

Returning to Persepolis after the Indian campaign, Bagoas muses, “I should have known these places, the royal heartland of my country. It was Alexander who knew them.”

Then came the lines uttered by Alexander that made my heart beat fast: “Macedon was my father’s country. This is mine… They told me so often I’m Persianised.”

It isn’t necessarily Bagoas to whom the title refers as The Persian Boy!

How ingenious, Mary Renault! What a brilliant writer! She 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.

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?

Unwritten Women

Unwritten Women is something I intended to read for Women’s Month, but shipping took a while. That’s how this celebration of the Filipina Woman has also become my celebration of National Literature Month.

But there is never a wrong time to read this compilation of essays about eight fascinating Filipina women, written mainly by Filipina women.

The essay on Gregoria de Jesus gently exhorts the reader for esteeming the Lakambini ng Katipunan as merely a “muse” of the Katipunan (“a disservice, a diminution of its meaning… Lakambini is a female lakan, a lord paramount over other lords, a chief among chiefs”) and tells us the story of why she is deserving of the full meaning of the word.

The second chapter, featuring Teodora Alonso, Aurora Quezon, and Aurora Aquino, narrates how these three women were so much more than their appellation as mother of a national hero, wife of the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, and mother to a murdered son.

Another section highlights Rosa Sevilla Alvero, who was a vanguard of women’s education in the country, and who, as early as 1916, led a movement for Filipino women to exercise the right to vote; Maria Y. Orosa, chemist, who literally fed our starving and war-torn nation, and whose contribution to food technology we continue to benefit from; Carmen Rosales, singer and actress turned guerrilla fighter who fought against the Japanese when circumstances demanded it.

The final piece shines a spotlight on Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc whose courage as a journalist helped overthrow a dictatorship.

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.

“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

exlibrisphilippines.com has an official review that beautifully expresses everything I wish to say about this book. Head over to our site to read it and to know more about the book.

As for parents and students of Harana Music Studio, a copy of Unwritten Women is available on the small shelf of Philippine essays that I curated for you to read while waiting. Happy National Literature Month!

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.

Frankenstein | Wuthering Heights

There is a vague memory of my pre-teen self poring over a Signet Classic mass-market paperback edition of Frankenstein. I don’t think I was as interested in the first sci-fi novel as much as I was in the context in which it was written.

The scene in my mind’s eye mimics a Caspar David Friedrich painting: Three figures surrounded by snowcapped mountains on the shores of a lake in Switzerland, faces illuminated by warm firelight. Fire was the source of light, because though the century was already charged with scientific possibility, the world was dark then: The electric battery forged by Alessandro Volta was still nearly as young as the girl, and the light bulb had yet to be invented. The trio consisted of eighteen-year-old Mary, namesake of her mother the pioneering feminist; the poet that would become her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; and his best friend, Lord Byron. It was the latter who would suggest that each should come up with a story built on a supernatural theme, “As a source of amusement”.

Lord Byron penned a poem called Prometheus that year, and Percy Bysshe Shelley would author a lyrical drama called Prometheus Unbound four years later, but only Mary Shelley would complete a novel as an answer to the challenge raised on that consequential evening: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Needless to recount the story of Prometheus, but one can see how this complex character associated with creation inhabited the greatest minds of the era. Even though I failed to recognize the significance of Frankenstein’s story as a pre-teen, maybe I acknowledged the value it would have to an older self when I replaced the paperback with a hardcover edition in my late teens. Thanks to Guillermo del Toro, the hardcover ceased to gather dust and was paired with the film.

Right from the beginning, one can immediately detect the drastic difference between book and movie, and somehow, I prefer it this way. I like a filmmaker who announces, right at the onset, that he is creating something entirely different in an adaptation, rather than one who copies most of the text and be unfaithful to some. The book introduces us to noble human characters, the film with sinister ones, and this is necessary in determining the course of its diverging narratives. The book puts emphasis on how man and his ambition creates its own monsters; in the film, man is the monster.

If one wants a film that comes close to what Mary Shelley intended to say, there’s Oppenheimer, whose main character also becomes an “author of unalterable evils”. If one wants contemporary literature that reinforces her cautionary tale, there’s Benjamin Labatut’s books.

But you know what the Frankenstein film beautifully captured from the novel? My favorite part. It’s when the Creature discovers reading. I loved that artistic choice of making him read Ozymandias — a fitting piece, but also a nod to Mary Shelley’s husband, who wrote the poem. In both art forms, we get a creature who is better-read than the average man. Let that sink in, says Mary Shelley and Guillermo del Toro.

And what does Emily Bronte tell us in what seems to be another Elordi-instigated rereading? A screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights will forever be unnecessary, thank you. Sufficient unto the novel is the intensity, the complexity, and the viscerality thereof.

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!

Kiran Desai: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

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.

A Reading Girl in Kazakhstan

That was me. The girl with a Gogol anthology poking out of a backpack pocket while walking the length of Almaty’s Gogol Street a number of times, earning her more than 20,000 steps a day;

who paired her first Kazakh meal of horse meat and fermented camel’s milk with Alina Bronsky’s insane but unexpectedly touching Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine;

who carefully savored the nuances in every Kazakh story from Amanat (Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan) on every fermata between adventures, and upon completion, discovered that it would be one of her favorite collections of short stories;

the girl who brought Buzzati’s The Stronghold (aka The Tartar Steppe) to a stronghold in a Tartar steppe, and who realized that Buzzati would have been happy with her for taking a cue from his novel and living a life contrary to that of Drogo’s;

the girl who felt like a queen when she received a cute note in English with tiny flowers from a barista in Uralsk, and a free pass at the Pushkin Museum by reading and bringing The Queen of Spades with her;

who learned about Pugachov’s Rebellion through Pushkin before knocking on Pugachov’s door;

who reunited Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House with Kazakhstan simply because it’s where he started writing the notes;

the girl who wished she flowed, but instead, lumbered through Sholokhov’s epic “And Quiet Flows the Don,” and being devastated by it, could only take the hefty book to the house where Sholokhov learned that he was awarded the Nobel and play a plaintive melody on his piano while gazing at his portrait, wanting to ask him so many questions;

the impractical girl who carried all these books to a trip, thankful that she did because Kazakh bookstores humble the English reader by catering only to the Kazakh and Russian reader;

the girl who agreed with Marga Ortigas who wrote that reading is, “A special gift that showed you how much of the world still lay beyond the safety of your comfort zone”;

the girl who believes that traveling is one way of acting upon that gift.

The Turkistan Dispatch

There is nothing like steppeland sunrise and snow-capped mountains viewed through a train window to herald one’s entry to the Silk Route.

Built on an oasis at the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, Turkistan was an ancient jewel of culture, trade, and spiritual significance for the Turkic people.

Turkistan shares not only a border with Uzbekistan, but also its Timurid architecture. Its most prominent landmark is a mausoleum commissioned by Timur (Tamerlane) in honor of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a poet and Sufi mystic. In the vicinity is a smaller mausoleum devoted to Rabiya Sultan Begum, Timur’s great-granddaughter, and daughter of Ulugh Beg of whom I’ve written and fangirled during my Uzbekistan trip in 2022.

When dusk falls, the call to prayer suffuses the air and rises with the birds while a mystical crescent moon ascends the purple sky to complete the experience.

As I steep myself in this splendor, I also mourn it. The moment I turn my back on it, I am faced with Karavan Saray, a horrible travesty — a new shopping complex constructed in a theme park version of Timurid architecture that feels dystopian. My heart aches for the beauty we cannot keep and the beauty we ruin for the sake of commercial profit.

When I revisited the mausoleums early this morning to see it in pure sunlight, hardly anyone was around save for a pilgrim on his knees, facing the Khoja Ahmed Yasawi Mausoleum, intoning a sincere and almost heart-rending prayer. I think of the pilgrims who once held this site sacred and who continue to do so, who can only accept the truth that the holy place is but external and ephemeral, and that pilgrimage is, after all, a journey to the deepest parts of the self.