Time flies fast. We are already in the sixth month of the year. Woah. I hope that the first five months of the year have been good and kind to everyone. I hope that the remainder of the year will shower everyone with good news and blessings. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy, in mind, body, and spirit. Reading-wise, May has been an exploration of the works of European literature, with an emphasis on the works of Nobel Laureates in Literature. For June, I will still be focusing on this part of the literary world as several of the books on my reading lists and challenges are works of European literature.

But before I could say goodbye to May, let me share the books I have acquired during the month. As prolific as my reading journey is my book hauling. I was able to obtain several titles I have been looking forward to for some time and some titles that have piqued my interest. Oops. It seems that I forgot something. I am supposed to be reading more and buying less. I guess I am setting myself up for failure yet again. This has been a struggle but, oh well, can you blame me for wanting to read more knowing that there are amazing titles out there waiting to be read. Without ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Devils (also published as The Possessed and Demons)
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translator (from Russian): Constance Garnett
Publisher: Wordsworth Classic
Publishing Date: 2009 (1871-1872)
No. of Pages: 694

Synopsis:

In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave a small group of revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of Devils, a title that refers to the young radicals themselves and also to the materialistic ideas that possessed the minds of many thinking people in Russian society at the time.

The satirical portraits of the revolutionaries, with their naivety, ludicrous single-mindedness and readiness for murder and destruction, might seem exaggerated – until we consider their all-too-recognisable descendants in the real world ever since. The key figure in the novel, however, is beyond politics. Nicolay Stavrogin, another product of rationalism run wild exercises his charisma with ruthless authority and total amorality. His unhappiness is accounted for when he confesses to a ghastly sexual crime – in a chapter long suppressed by the censor.

This prophetic account of modern morals and politics, with its fifty-odd characters, amazing events and challenging ideas, is seen by some critics as Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

Title: White Teeth
Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2001 (2000)
No. of Pages: 542

Synopsis: 

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing – among many other things – with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.

Title: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Author: Richard Flanagan
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publishing Date: 2014 (2013)
No. of Pages: 448

Synopsis:

In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

Richard Flanagan’s savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

Title: Babel Tower
Author: A.S. Byatt
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1996
No. of Pages: 619

Synopsis: 

Babel Tower follows The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in tracing Frederica Potter, a lover of books who reflects the author’s life and times. It centers around two lawsuits: in one, Frederica — a young intellectual who has married outside her social set — is challenging her wealthy and violent husband for custody of their child; in the other, an unkempt but charismatic rebel is charged with having written an obscene book, a novel-within-a-novel about a small band of revolutionaries who attempt to set up an ideal community. And in the background, rebellion gains a major toehold in the London of the Sixties, and society will never be the same. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Bring Up the Bodies
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publishing Date: 2012
No. of Pages: 407

Synopsis:

By 1535 Thomas Crowell, the blacksmith’s son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry’s actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as he falls in love with the silent, plane Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king’s pleasure, but the safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court, its miasma of gossip, he mus negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.

In Bring Up the Bodies, sequel to the Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. This new novel is a speaking picture, an audacious vision of Tudor England that sheds its light on the modern world. It is the work of one of our great writers at the height of her powers.

Title: The Mirror & the Light
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 872

Synopsis: 

England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.

Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.

Title: The Fox Wife
Author: Yangsze Choo
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 384

Synopsis:

Manchuria, 1908.

In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach – until perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them – their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change – or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.

Title: The MANIAC
Author: Benjamín Labatut
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 354

Synopsis: 

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labataut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, Hohn von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest – an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein’s – who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go master Lee Sedol and the AI program Alpha Go, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann’s most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

Title: The Covenant of Water
Author: Abraham Verghese
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 715

Synopsis:

A #1 national bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl – and future matriarch, Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.