“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!
Grace is a multifaceted word, but even when I contemplate its various meanings, this book still embodies all of its definitions.
The parcel containing Tethered arrived many months ago as I was on my way out to the airport, and I gladly welcomed an additional book in my carry-on luggage.
Dear Mira,
I hope this book transports you to where you need to be.
Tracy
An apt dedication for a book-butterfly. I turned to the sky and the clouds framed by the plane window, and smiled at the perceptive mind behind the message. A page turn revealed a Rabindranath Tagore quote about a violin string that could only be free to sing once bound to the violin. Even the epigraph felt personal, and I paused to ponder its deeper meaning.
Soon enough, the plane landed in the capital. The urban bustle was not conducive to the stillness and attention that this book required, seeing that the initial passages already felt like the beginnings of an intimate conversation with a friend. Thus, it was tucked away and saved for the reading environment it deserved.
Months passed, dozens of other books were read. But just as I was starting to see the light at the end of a mentally and physically exhausting three-week tunnel when a loved one fell ill, this book seemed to beckon. And sure enough, it transported me to a place where I needed to be — a place of faith and gratitude, and I cannot think of a better place to be. What a gift, this book.
Tethered is grace exemplified, the same way Tracy is grace personified. I’ve only exchanged a few messages with her through Blithe Books, but even electronic messages cannot dilute the light in her soul that shines through her words. Imagine an entire book of it!
This is described as an account of a remarkable journey of recovery from a brainstem stroke that attacked all bodily functions and left only the mind to operate; but more than that, it is a beautiful note of gratitude for life, and a celebration of the mind and the spirit. The author’s optimism is apparent, but as one reads on, one realizes that it is not optimism but faith.
For the believer, faith is the thing that both tethers and liberates. Only when the strings are bound to a violin can they be free, for the first time, to sing.
“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.
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.
From Stefan Zweig’s Magellan, to Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daughter, to Aatish Taseer’s A Return to Self, to Kahlil Corazo’s Rajah Versus Conquistador, July seemed to have a fortuitous recurring theme in the books I read and in my encounters with storytelling: New ways of seeing and new ways of reframing self and history.
For someone whose nation regards as a hero the man responsible for Magellan’s death, I have to admit that this book was approached in Lapu-Lapu mode, en garde, expecting a Eurocentric view of history. But Zweig had me at page 11 upon acknowledging that the primary objective of the Crusades was to wrest the trade route barriers from Islamic rule. You don’t often get that admission from a Western book written in the 1930s.
In Philippine history, Magellan’s death eclipses the fleet’s first circumnavigation of the world. This book emphasizes the feat of an adventurer who had, at the time, “far outstripped all others in the exploration of our planet,” and proved beyond theory that the Earth was round. He was bad news for flat-earthers. Zweig humanizes the man whose death we celebrate, and this is a great read for those who would like to peer through another vantage point of the expedition. But dear Stefan, as much as I am a fan of your writing, Magellan did not “discover” the Philippines; he merely set foot on it and placed it on a Western map.
“What we term history does not represent the sum total of all conceivable things that have been done in space and time; history comprises those small illuminated sections of world happenings which have had thrown upon them the light of poetical or scientific description. Achilles would be nothing save for Homer.”
Speaking of Homer… how did I not know that the author of the more famous I, Claudius has penned a delightful book called Homer’s Daughter, claiming he could not rest until this novel was written after finding arguments on a female authorship of The Odyssey undeniable? It is based on the premise that The Odyssey — authored over a hundred and fifty years post-Iliad, more honeyed, civilized, and sympathetic especially toward Penelope — was written by a woman.
It makes for an enjoyable read as Graves imagines the life of Nausicaa, a Sicilian princess who rewrites Homer’s epic with elements from her life. “The Iliad, which I admire, is devised by a man for men; this epic, The Odyssey, will be devised by a woman for women. Understand that I am Homer’s latest-born child, a daughter.”
We have understood through the likes of Virginia Woolf that “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” but how the poet of The Odyssey could be a woman is a concept new and fascinating to me.
What if The Odyssey’s notion of Ithaca holds sway because it was not written by one who wandered off, but by one who stayed?
And yet, Aatish Taseer’s Ithaca remains my kind of Ithaca: “The pilgrim spirit is one that wanders away from the comfort and safety of our home secure in the knowledge that the transformation the pilgrim will undergo over the course of his journey is the destination.” The author has a life story incredible enough, but more importantly, here’s a writer and traveler who shows us how profound traveling can be when we are mindful of the inner journey. A Return to Self is a book I will be returning to.
Speaking of Home… I have never read a novel that came this close to home! As a descendant of a binukot, this book felt so personal and empowering to me. The soul of the binukot does not play second fiddle to anything in this novel.
By reading Rajah Versus Conquistador, I seem to have circumnavigated July and circled back to Cebu. The title refers to Magellan as the Conquistador, and Humabon as the Rajah.
Humabon, in Zweig’s words, “was no such unsophisticated child of nature… He had already eaten of the tree of knowledge, knew about money and money’s worth… a political economist who practiced the highly civilized art of exacting transit dues from every ship that cast anchor in his port. A keen man of business, he was not impressed by the thunder of the artillery or flattered by the honeyed words of the interpreter… he had no wish to forbid an entrance to his harbor. The white strangers were welcome, and he would be glad to trade with them. But every ship must pay harbor dues.”
Often cast as a traitor or as someone who’ll always be lesser than Lapu-Lapu in Filipino eyes, Corazo’s Humabon agrees with Zweig’s Humabon: a cosmopolitan ruler who defies simplification. There is much to be said about this work; from the witty language where Bisaya humor often raises its head, to rethinking our past and the deeper meaning to our myths, to the skillful crafting of the key players. Corazo does not merely reconstruct complex characters from the past, he gives readers a perspective of history “viewed not from the deck of a Spanish galleon but from behind the woven walls of a payag…”
And who lives behind these amakan walls? The women. This is what makes Corazo’s work especially meaningful to me. He brings the hidden women to light and by doing so, honors those who never made it to official records but who nonetheless steered the course of history through their quiet power, and who continue to do so.
“Each generation of binukot learns to reshape herself.”
To which Ruby Ibarra gives a brilliant answer: “Ako ang bakunawa.”
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?
“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.
The perfect day to read this would be on a rainy autumnal day. November 18, to be exact. I read it on a sweltering first of May. But I love how it drew me in calmly and made the temperature bearable. To weave reflective prose with only a tinge of disquieting tension is Solvej Balle’s gift. It is a book for when we read not for the plot but for the language.
Something tells me that this is more than just a story about a specific day that recurs 366 times in the novel but rather a meditation on time and the distance it creates between our relationships with others and with our present and former selves.
If after tonight I’ll wake up to another first of May, I’d still read this… or perhaps, volume two.
There’s No Turning Back, Alba de Céspedes
“Love, like art. It’s there or it’s not.”
Alba is cruel. She tells the truth. This book left the dock before I was able to fully say goodbye. I would have wanted to be with some characters a little bit longer to find out how their lives would continue to unfold. But Alba, after drawing you intimately into both the communal and the separate lives of each girl, shakes off attempts at clinginess and writes with a knife: That is how life is, she seems to say. It moves. It keeps going. And there is no turning back.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
“It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”
There are times when you don’t know why you put off purchasing a particular book despite it being recommended by a friend, despite seeing a lot of people post about it, despite seeing it in almost every bookstore. You’ll only know the answer when, years later, you receive a copy as pasalubong from the Book Street in Ho Chi Minh. Books always hold an added value when falling into your hands this way.
But oh, how this book breaks your heart in different ways! Maybe because of how love is shown in its many degrees along with the pain that comes with each kind of love.
“I’m broken in two… In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, makes us two… Into — yes, that’s more like it. Now I’m broken into.”
Something tells me, however, that this is not peak Ocean Vuong yet, that the magnum opus is yet to come: Could it be The Emperor of Gladness? We’ll soon find out.
Concepcion, Albert Samaha
“History ripples into perpetuity. Decisions, actions, mistakes, and triumphs of one day shape the days that follow, setting irreversible paths into the future…”
In Concepcion, Philippine history ceases to be a structured chronology but a fluid tale that merges with the timeline of world history, personal history, and geopolitics. Read full entry here.
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, Ian Penman
Gymnopedies… Gnossienes… “If you only know these few exquisite morsels, you only know a tiny fraction of Satie…” This book showed me how little I knew of Satie and how I underestimated the role that this composer played in the trajectory of art and music history.
“Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon.” Ian Penman dips his toes, and luckily, takes willing readers along for the ride! Written in an ingenious form in three parts, I am tempted to assert that there couldn’t be a more fitting way of writing about one such as Satie.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Because how can we make the most of a retelling if we don’t know, or have forgotten, what was originally told in the first place? Yes, you guessed right. This reader is prepping for Percival Everett’s James!
How I managed to find time to read in May was a miracle. What a hurricane, the past few weeks! It threw all sorts of things at me, but it threw some of the best things my way, too: My very own grand piano, the younger brother’s short but sweet homecoming, friends who travelled far just to visit — reading friends to boot! And while books may have appeared to have taken a backseat, they’ve only enriched these moments and this entire experience called living.
The BFF reading Mahmoud DarwishJB, the man behind the legendary La Belle Aurore Bookshop in CebuWith our loot after a second-hand bookshop jaunt with Jaclyn
“That’s why I began to write… Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” Dear Solvej Balle, that’s why we read.
April was manic. It called for two short story collections in sympathy of a fractured attention span.
Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves, Lio Mangubat First, prepare a cup of tablea tsokolate. Kapeng barako will do, but because cacao seeds arrived in the Philippines earlier than coffee through the Galleon Trade, I’ll opt for the former to pair with this book. When the chocolate brew is ready, steep yourself in the richness of both history and drink. Read full entry here.
Covert Joy, Clarice Lispector
There’s nothing here that a Clarice fan hasn’t read. And it’s arguably redundant to have this book when these twenty stories have already appeared in that hefty volume of The Complete Stories. But can you resist an edition that has one of your favorite Lispector stories as the titular story of a collection? No.
Because the thing is, reading Clarice is an experience; re-reading her is a veneration. And if I may say so, a none too covert joy.
“Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap… I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.”
The Dissenters, Youssef Rakha
“…it is Time that happens to people. We talk about having and saving and wasting it as if it is ours to work with, but really it is we who are time’s property.”
Egypt’s modern history is a story of revolutions, but its revolutions are especially ones that are true to the word’s literal meaning — a return, a cycle, a recurrence. How can one analyze over seventy years of a nation’s tumultuous history from its first president up to the current one? Through a woman’s life, answers Youssef Rakha. “Woman after woman using men’s failures and her body to write the ultimate description de l’Égypte.”
Canone Inverso, Paolo Maurensig
Ironic how I have acquired and read Maurensig’s three chess novels but have only read the novel about music now; but how delightful to discover that Bach’s Chaconne is what decorates the endpaper of this edition and learn that the piece plays a role in the story! As a work of literature, Canone Inverso may not be something one would call a masterpiece, but I cannot deny how this story gripped me from beginning to end. It’s a splendid book to entertain a reading musician!
It is only post-novel that I’m finding out that there is a movie for which Ennio Morricone composed the soundtrack! (And Sophie is played by Mélanie Thierry, who is the girl in the window that inspires the pianist in Legend of 1900, but in Canone Inverso she is the pianist!) All the while I read this, I was really thinking about how it would make a cinematic feat through the vision of an insightful director. I could already hear the dramatic soundtrack and imagine the cinematography, the light coming through the windows as dusk falls on the heurigen of Grinzing, and virtuosic music piercing the air…
To the Wedding, John Berger
What shall we do before eternity?
Take our time.
Not all blurbs are to be believed. But when it’s Michael Ondaatje who writes, “Wherever I live in the world, I know I will have this book with me,” and when a friend whose literary taste is most similar to yours recommends it, you just believe. But prepare to have your heart broken.
How was it possible to write a complexly poignant novel with fragmented vignettes? How does one distinguish between poetry and prose? This book deftly blurs the lines.
The Glass Room, Simon Mawer
The Glass Room, but not the ‘room’ of English, expresses the author. Rather, the Teutonic ‘raum’ with a broader sense of space. The novel correspondingly hints at architecture while maintaining a broader sense of architecture by concerning itself beyond the architect and the building, and taking into account the lives that inhabit a particular space. Similarly, it is an acknowledgment of how one cannot write about the Modernist shift in architecture without conveying how it is an entire geopolitical and cultural movement. Read full entry here.
Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq
How do you extinguish the light in a woman’s heart?
With these short stories Banu Mushtaq seems to count the ways.
Addendum: Through a Booker discussion with Ex Libris friends a day before the awards were announced, I understood that the winner of the International Booker Prize should define 2025. As touched as I was with this book, I did not think it would fit the criterion. And yet it emerged as the winner: The first book originally published in Kannada (the official language of the author’s state of Karnataka in southern India) and the first collection of short stories to win the award.
Through this I am reminded: Woman is always relevant, and that stories of everyday life are still worth telling.
Journey to the Edge of Life, Tezer Ozlu
“It is the boundless realm of literature that has set me on this road, through words and beyond them…”
Malika Moustadraf is Morocco’s answer to Egypt’s Nawal el Saadawi whose depictions of how women are viewed and treated are unflinching. But Malika has a distinct style that draws the reader right into a scene, into the midst and into the cracks of such a society, sometimes forcing us to look through the eyes of the scoundrels themselves. I daresay she is the more masterful fiction writer. Fiction, as we know, is just a tool to reveal the rawest of truths. Read full entry here.
A Woman is a School, Celine Semaan
Even though this one did not exceed my expectations, it has its merits. I love how she writes of art as “the ultimate act of giving.” It may be enlightening to someone younger who is reading about the effects of colonialism for the first time, but readers may find more substantial memoirs and more informative books on Lebanon and Lebanese culture, and better books that encourage attentiveness to social justice.
The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams
An exceedingly apt book for Women’s Month that would also make a splendid companion read to Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. It is this one that left my heart with a tender aching.
“Never forget that… Words are our tools of resurrection.”
The Book of Disappearance, Ibtisam Azem
In another Palestinian masterpiece, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the entire book is a bullet in motion that hits you with a staggering force on the very last page. There is an abrupt and brutal finality. There is no closure in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. It ends without a concluding cadence and leaves the reader suspended in an unsettling limbo. But that does not imply that this book pales in comparison. Perhaps we are given a nanoscopic glimpse of what it feels like to be Palestinian. Read full entry here.
We Do Not Part, Han Kang
“Extermination was the goal. Exterminate what? The reds.” But Jeju’s inhabitants were not all reds, and yet it was easier for the military to operate by decimating the population. For nearly fifty years after the massacre, it was a crime punishable by law for a South Korean to mention the event. A huge percentage of the thousands that perished were innocent.
“Collateral damage.” That’s what they call it. Now where have I heard that term recently? Read full entry here.
Cold Nights of Childhood, Tezer Ozlu
Bursts of beauty in the prose amidst a stream of surreal disclosures from a woman grappling with mental illness and electroshock therapy. But it is ultimately a sad and disturbing portrayal of a particular societal context and its effect on the psyche, framed affectionately by Aysegul Savas’ introduction and Maureen Freely’s translator’s note. Read full entry here.
Light: Monet at Giverny, Eva Figes
An impressionist painting in book form with the most elegant feminism I have ever read.
“I’m sitting at the restaurant reading. Some books take me to worlds far greater and more tender than real life.” This line was lifted from Tezer Ozlu. She could have been referring to this book. Amidst the cacophony of social media and political rants, my mind is thankful to have been transported and softened by such a beautiful, beautiful book!
Three Filipino Women, F. Sionil Jose
This reader’s Women’s Month has usually been reserved for reading women authors, but an exception had to be made for this. Curious as to how a man would paint a portrait of the Filipino woman, I soon realized that this is more portrait of Philippine politics than it is of the Filipino woman. It is a dismal but virtuosic depiction. Three women: A politician, a prostitute, and a student activist. Maybe parable, maybe allegory, maybe both. Beyond death, F. Sionil Jose reminds me, once again, that he was the closest thing the Filipinos had to a Nobel laureate in literature.
The Book-Butterfly 