Happy midweek everyone! Wow. We are already halfway through the week. How time flies. How has the year been going for you so far? I hope that the year has been kind to everyone. If not, I hope you will experience a reversal of fortune in the coming months. More importantly, I hope everyone is happy and healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

With the midweek comes a fresh WWW Wednesday update, my first this year. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are quite simple, you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

Woah. July is already finally over, which means that my two-month foray into Asian literature has officially come to a close. It was quite a literary journey that took me to various parts of the world’s largest continent, from China to Indonesia to Afghanistan to South Korea to Turkey. It was also memorable on other fronts as I read my first two novels by Israeli writers. I also read my first novels originally written in Tamil, Tagalog, and Bengali. There are a lot of great takeaways. Although it was a very productive journey, there is still a lot of ground I have to cover, at least where Asian literature is concerned. So do look forward to my future ventures into Asian literature.

Enter August. As some Asian cultures refer to it, it is the ghost month. For this month, I will be traveling to Africa to explore its literature. I already have a long list on my mind, including the recently Booker Prize-longlisted novel A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. However, I am opening this journey with a different but also familiar writer, Nobel Laureate in Literature Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire. This is the second book in his highly-heralded Cairo Trilogy, a trilogy I have long been wanting to read. I have started reading the book so any impressions I have of it will be shared later this week, in this week’s First Impression Friday.

What have you finished reading?

I capped my July reading month and my foray into Asian literature with two books. The first of these two books was Criselda Yabes’ Crying Mountain. This is the fourth novel written by a Filipino writer that I read this year. This is the most I read in a year. It is, in a way, my way of making up for last year when I read not a single work of my very own country’s literature. I actually wasn’t planning on reading the book – I had a work by a Vietnamese writer in mind – but I eventually relented. I just learned that Crying Mountain was Yabes’ debut novel. The book was even longlisted for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Crying Mountain recalls a historic event that even I have never heard of although the events following I have an iota about. At the heart of the novel was the burning of Jolo in 1974, another tragic chapter in the conflict-laden southern part of the country. The novel was a fictional account of the rise of the Moro National Liberation Front leader Nur Misuari and the ensuing rebellion he led. In retaliation, the Philippine military retaliated with violence. This historic event is often considered one of the integral incidents that gave rise to the Moro insurgency in the country. These events were captured through the lives of an eclectic set of characters: Rosy Wright, a mestiza; Nahla, a Tausug girl dreaming of becoming famous; Professor Hassan, the rebel leader; and Captain Rodolfo, a soldier assigned at the Southern Command. The polyphony can be confusing but it was, nevertheless, a lyrical but brief read.

Capping my two-month journey across Asia is a very familiar name. When news of Nobel Laureate in Literature Orhan Pamuk releasing new work in 2022 broke out – at least a translation of his latest novel – I was among those who were eagerly waiting in anticipation. There was a bit of a delay but I was eventually able to obtain a copy of Pamuk’s latest novel, Nights of Plague. This was my fourth novel by Pamuk, and third read since the COVID-19 pandemic started. The fact that the novel was about the plague was one of the reasons why I wanted to read it. I was curious about how Pamuk will spin the tale.

Pamuk’s latest novel transports the readers to the turn of the 20th century, to the fictional island of Mingheria. Mingheria is one of the provinces that comprised the once-mighty Ottoman Empire. It was on this remote island that Princess Pakize, “third daughter of the thirty-third Ottoman sultan Murad V” and her husband, Doctor Nuri Bey, was sent by Emperor Abdul Hamid to help aid in the quarantine efforts. There was news of a possible plague which was, on the onset hushed down. There is a lot to unpack in Nights of Plague. The most obvious one was the plague and how it can undermine the institutions meant to look after the welfare of a nation’s denizens. The novel eerily captures the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it was also a novel about a declining empire, the intricacies of politics, the quest for independence, and the rise against colonialism and imperialism, with a murder mystery to boot. It was, as always, an interesting and insightful story.

What will you read next?