On a trip to Egypt in 2023, I stumbled upon Flaubert in Egypt at a bookstore and thought of getting a copy, but eventually decided against it. Why would I let someone like him color my perceptions of the country?
I’ve harbored qualms about Flaubert since, as a very young girl, I somehow got hold of Madame Bovary. The gold-gilded title against teal cloth made the volume look like any other benign Jane Austen volume. Dear Reader, this scandalized girl soon found out that it was not.
That I still read Madame Bovary until the tragic end should have taught me something about his prose, the pain that dwelt in the spaces between words, and the underlying intentions. But when you are too young, you don’t think about style and subtleties. You are merely left dismayed by the explicit.
Shafak is more sympathetic toward Flaubert. Because of this novel, I’ve realized that perhaps I should be, too. And while I have my little Shafak-ian peeves, literature has triumphed by making me reconsider the French author.
Shafak’s compassion for social pariahs and bringing to light unsung histories and details about the culture and traditions of a particular region in the world is well known. So when a book about Flaubert was announced, I immediately knew it had something to do with his extensive travels to the East. My hunch was confirmed. Upon seeing the cover, I recognized the bird as the Simurgh and guessed that Attar’s Conference of the Birds would play a role. Unfortunately, I also predicted how it would contribute to the story. What failed to register, however, was that the title itself is a line from the same epic poem: “Give up the intellect for love and see | In one brief moment all eternity.”
Despite the spoilers that I brought upon myself, Shafak still manages to turn me into a wide-eyed young girl, enthusiastically feeding on each morsel of this novel that attempts to link the literary traditions of East and West, and which reminds us about what each of us has that is universal… a story.
A Bach Partita is an essential part of a pianist’s repertoire. It is often the first requirement for a classical pianist’s solo recital or audition. But partitas are not what pianists would instinctively pull out from their bag of tricks when asked to play for an audience unfamiliar with classical music. Although extremely demanding, set against a piece composed in the 20th century or Romantic period, a partita would appear underwhelming to the untrained ear. But these partitas, these pieces of understated elegance, these pieces that instill restraint and timelessness, actually contain the foundations of pianistic education; from voicing, to phrasing, to breathing, to relishing counterpoints instead of fighting them, to ascertaining one’s balance, to finding one’s way and eventually arriving at the warm embrace, the sought-after resolution… in short, the Bach partitas teach one about life.
And that is perhaps why, out of all the piano compositions that were meaningful to Livia Bohusz in the story, Kingsolver chose to call the book “Partita”.
As a small-town pianist, there was so much to relate to about the seeming out-of-placeness of classical music in such a setting and in such a life. As someone who was scarred the most by someone whom I once thought was perfect for me, there was even more to resonate with. As someone whose greatest fears involve injuring one’s hands, I wondered for most of the novel if I would ever recover from it.
Surprised by the details presented in the book that, more often than not, only pianists are privy to, I was amazed by the profound level of research that Kingsolver devoted to Partita. Only to find out that she studied classical piano on a scholarship before changing her major to biology. Now I’m even more amazed that it was her lived experience with music that made this story so real and so tangible.
Partita is not only about art: It asks for whom art is and what art is for. Partita is not only about life: It asks whether we allow its difficulties to derail us from seeking that hopeful resolution. Partita is, thankfully, not saccharine about love: It only reveals that perfection and idealism have nothing to do with it. Above all, Partita is about hope: Something we all need these days.
Placed slightly above the complete hardbound series of The Hardy Boys, Dumas used to sit on my older brother’s part of the shelf in the room we shared as children. (Why I turned out to be the more adventurous adult is the mystery.)
But now, Dumas has found me. And maybe it’s better this way. Rather than finding an impressionable child decades ago, who probably would have reenacted getting inside a sack pretending to be a corpse to escape Château d’If, he has found a more discerning adult who delights in its treasure trove of literary references.
Its initial chapters inspired a new reading project of tallying the books I’ll subsequently encounter that allude or refer to A Thousand and One Nights or The Odyssey (between Scheherazade, mother threader of stories in the East, and Penelope, mother un-threader of storytelling in the West).
This one is blatantly steeped in the influence of the former, but as I read on, I realized that the influence of the latter and the Greek tragedies is more subtle, but just as ubiquitous! (Spoiler: There is a Medea hiding in Heloise Villefort!)
This book, and reading classics in general, reminds me of a beautiful passage from a favorite Rushdie essay: “I go back to the old stories many times, I drink at those ancient unpolluted wells, in part because when one is deeply affected by the contemporary, when a good deal of one’s thinking has to do with puzzling out how to fashion into coherent work one’s vision of contemporary life… it helps to be reminded of what has endured, of what claims to being called eternal, to sit and learn at the feet of what persists.”
Dumas frequented those wells and gave us more than a thousand and one pages of pure entertainment. Sure, there were elements of the story that I did not readily accept, but to paraphrase Rushdie regarding these wonder tales: Their power endures because these stories are entirely truthful about human nature.
The silliest criticism I’ve heard of Nolan’s The Odyssey is of the movie being anti-war. Every war story is anti-war, if you’re mentally sound.
From the latest Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction to the last book I finished, four out of six books that I read in July tell of the senselessness of war:
Although famed for being penned as a single unbroken sentence, Angel Down was not the first novel I read written in this manner. Before Kraus, there was Krasznahorkai and Énard’s Zone. There is a rhythm and informality in Kraus’s prose that makes it accessible; it was the bloodbath that I found too graphic, but it drives the point — the pointlessness and the obscenity of war. (Hot take: I would personally crown Énard the winner in this category.)
Paradiso 17 probably alludes to Canto 17 of Dante’s Paradiso as it focuses on the life of an exile. A Palestinian exile who asks, “Why do we need this war? Did I ever leave the war behind?” For exiles, it seems that one is only forced to leave the home, but never the war.
A Life’s Music is an elegy for wartime Russia and the musicians forced to abandon their careers under Soviet artistic repression. Makine writes beautiful prose, you could feel the cold and hear the music. I do wish he’d turn this novella into a novel. That Rachmaninoff scene remains vivid.
“What’s the point of saving books when you can’t even save lives?” Ahmad Muaddamani initially asks in The Book Collectors. Believing in “a revolution that was meant to build, not destroy,” Ahmad and a band of rebels against the Assad regime eventually realize how reading could keep them alive, thus assembling from the ruins Syria’s underground library in Daraya.
And while the author of Even Ducks Get Liver Cancer acknowledges that death is the one true outcome for all of us, he suggests we live and laugh; and by writing this book, I guess he suggests we read, too. He is so much wiser than he lets on in his essays, but I’m glad Dr. Will Liangco is not modest about being funny. Speaking of humor…
After a couple of decades, I’ve found that the best way for me to approach The Handmaid’s Tale is to disregard those who hail or criticize it as ideology canon and look at it as a missive written by a mischievous grand-aunt. Yes, it analyzes power and cautions about totalitarian states, but the humor in this book is something we don’t talk about enough! Also, don’t Offred’s flashbacks function as a double-edged sword that asks whether we really know what to do with freedom? However one views this novel, I can only imagine the mischievous grand-aunt rubbing her palms together, secretly thanking institutions that have banned it, knowing full well that they have only ensured its survival.
Anti-war or anti-totalitarianism, Atwood knows: “Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard.”
My favorite Rodin masterpiece is not The Thinker. It is a lesser-known work called The Cathedral, which looks nothing at all like a cathedral. It’s a sculpture of two expressive right hands lightly grazing at the fingertips, in anticipation of a universe of possibility. I love it for its elegance, for its nuance, for what it suggests; and for the thought that the sculptor understood that a place of worship is not confined to temples made with hands, but that he also had humor enough to convey the message with hands.
Claudia Piñeiro’s Cathedrals delivers the same message but not in the way Rodin does. She does it with mystery, disquiet, brutality, and revolting revelations, while indicting the hypocrisies of society’s sacred institutions. She is an author not everyone can stomach, but one does not have to consistently agree with, or relate to, her characters to recognize that Piñeiro is a force in literature.
Cathedrals was my last book for June. In contrast, Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul was my first.
What does Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina have in common with Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul? All have immortalized an architectural edifice as the main character to tell the story of a people.
Sandwiched between these two books that touch on what humans build and destroy: O Caledonia, a pasalubong from a friend’s trip to Scotland, a parable about what happens to a girl when she is pressured to fit in and forced to become someone other than herself; two books with the same title — Good People — that speak less of good people and perhaps more about the judgments we cast on those different from us; and East of Eden, a book one cannot really move on from, because it’s a book you carry with you for eternity.
Piñeiro has a character whose cathedral is built with books. I can’t say I’ve built a cathedral with my books, but at this point, it sure looks like I have built a life with them.
Rain has come to portend the end of summer in my part of the world, and the skies are mirroring our dispiriting political climate.
Cheering myself up by looking back at some of this month’s colorful days and satisfying literary adventures — it was, after all, a month when Mei Mei the Bunny hopped into Harana Music Studio’s library! So here they are, in the words of John Ruskin, “To scatter perfumes in the path of June.”
The Artist, Lucy Steeds 05/10/2026
When I read with my toes digging into white sand, piña colada within reach until the sunset turned into “a riot of color,” as Lucy Steeds would write, I was happy to momentarily leave behind war-torn milieus, ambiguous plots, dystopias, or sentences that needed multiple re-readings to be deciphered.
Part mystery, part lure to Provence, mainly art lesson on light and color, part romance, part statement on the discrimination of women in art and women’s contribution to the art world, part anti-war declaration, and a reflection on our Odysseys and our Ithacas, The Artist was the perfect beach read for me a week ago.
If you’re wondering what qualifies as a “beach read,” it’s pretty much the same thing as a “beach body”; it’s the one that you carry with you to the beach… this one simply had the bonus of being informative and entertaining while being, at least by the end of the book, gentle on the mind and heart.
For the Sun After Long Nights | Defiance
The two books I read in succession for the first week of May.
Defiance is the first book I’ve read about Syria that was written and published after the fall of the Assad regime. Striking not only for its incredibly human and candid account, but also for the fact that it is written by someone whose father led Bassel al-Assad’s security team, and whose American boyfriend’s public execution at the hands of the Islamic State the world witnessed.
For the Sun After Long Nights is the first book I’ve read about Iran that veers away from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and focuses on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement (ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained and beaten for not wearing her hijab according to the imposed religious dress code, and who died in state custody in 2022). In this collaboration between two Iranian journalists, chapters alternate between the points of view of Fatemeh Jamalpour, who joined and covered the protests in Iran, and Nilo Tabrizy, who reported from overseas on the violence and injustices committed by the Iranian government.
The books are remarkable works of journalism written by young women, but this is not the only similarity they share. Read full entry here.
She Who Remains, Rene Karabash 05/13/2026
In the lands of the Kanun, the Kanun is law. The Kanun is above all else. The Kanun is not fictional; the Kanun is ancient, and it is real.
And perhaps this book was written not as a historical record of a disappearing traditional customary law, but as a poetic missive to tell us that the whole concept of the Kanun is not limited to the Balkans, that the Kanun still exists in more subtle ways in modern societies, that women still have to “man up” to survive and afford certain rights, that women are still often collateral damage to men’s laws.
The Correspondent, Virginia Evans 05/15/2026
Can one simply read this epistolary novel and not be compelled to write to a friend afterwards?
On the other hand, it does not escape me that the message it carries is not exactly about letter-writing, but about communication. We often pride ourselves on our voice and how we brandish our opinions whenever we can, as Sybil does, but the story asks us to examine the injustice we do by shirking from communication at crucial moments. This book essentially asks us to ponder the legacy of communication that we leave behind in this life.
“I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: Words, especially those written, are immortal .”
Middlemarch, George Eliot 05/28/2026
A more mature reader will often return to the classics with a reformed insight that the classics are not necessarily meant to be venerated but to be re-examined. Such a reader would trudge through old-fashioned language and time-consuming lengths to defy modern man’s preference for instant gratification and to seek resonance in the historical, intellectual, and emotional bulk. More often than not, the willing seeker finds — and finds more than they set out to find.
To read Middlemarch in a 21st century small town in the Philippines, and be transported to an early 19th century English rural community and notice the same players in society, espy similar outlooks that should be outdated by now but which still exist, and observe national political ferment trickling into daily lives to color preconceptions about other people, makes one marvel at the timelessness of George Eliot’s, or Mary Ann Evans’s, masterpiece. Read full entry here.
Canticles for Dark Lovers, Wilfrido D. Nolledo 05/31/2026
Art, I once told someone, is like someone ripping their heart off their chest and saying, “Behold, my heart.”
It is terrifying. The artist suffers in the process. It is terrifying because the artist knows that some will look away and find the act too violent. It is terrifying because the artist never knows beforehand if someone will ever get it. But no matter how terrifying it is, an artist rips their heart out anyway because they cannot help it. Nolledo could not help it. Behold, his heart.
The two books I read in succession for the first week of May.
Defiance is the first book I’ve read that was written and published after the fall of the Assad regime. Striking not only for its incredibly human and candid account, but also for the fact that it is written by someone whose father led Bassel al-Assad’s security team, and whose American boyfriend’s public execution at the hands of the Islamic State the world witnessed.
For the Sun After Long Nights is the first book I’ve read about Iran that veers away from the 1979 Revolution and focuses on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement (ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained and beaten for not wearing her hijab according to the imposed religious dress code, and who died in state custody in 2022). In this collaboration between two Iranian journalists, chapters alternate between the points of view of Fatemeh Jamalpour, who joined and covered the protests in Iran, and Nilo Tabrizy, who reported from overseas on the violence and injustices committed by the Iranian government.
The books are remarkable works of journalism written by young women, but this is not the only similarity they share:
Both shed light on the ethnic minorities of their respective countries, and reveal how these communities on the fringes of society are prone to abuse from the government because they do not get media exposure. Both books also emphasize how economic sanctions seldom achieve their goals and only affect those who do not have foreign bank accounts;
Both countries have had uprisings that were hijacked by Islamists, teaching their people tough lessons on revolutions that not everyone participating share the same idea of a nation’s future, but on the other hand, through a movement like Woman, Life, Freedom — the largest and most widespread uprising in Iran since the 1979 Revolution — learn that it is possible for everyone to come together for the same cause to shake up a regime and give it reason to be fearful of its demise.
The women in both books undergo rude awakenings to how oppression, especially towards women, trickles down from governments to communities and family units.
Most of all, the accounts are written because their writers believe in the power of documentation despite brutal consequences, and cling to the hope that documenting a government’s injustices is the first step towards ending it.
This made me ponder on our own country. This is what our journalists did during the Martial Law era when they defied censorship. But what did we do with those records? How easily we dismissed them during the last presidential election! Have we learned our lesson yet?
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.
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 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!
