And just like that, we wrapped up the fifth month of 2025. How time flies! May has been, essentially, an extension of April. It was quite “heated” here in the Philippines. The summer heat has been very oppressive although the rainy season has recently been making its presence felt. Nevertheless, I hope everyone is somewhere comfortable. As the year enters its sixth month, how is the year so far? I hope it has been treating everyone with kindness. If not, I hope that the coming months will be brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. I hope 2025 will go everyone’s way. I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered.

But before I could wave goodbye to May, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. A stark contrast to April when I acquired just three books, May was literally about binge-buying books. I acquired way more than I can read; this is against my New Year’s resolution of reading more and buying less. Because of the number of books I acquired during the month, I will be dividing it into parts. The second part features works of Asian writers; I am currently in the midst of an Asian literature reading journey. Interestingly, all of these books were also written a language other than English, which makes it all the more special because my thrust is toward reading more translated works. Without ado, here is the second batch of books I acquired during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Half a Lifelong Romance
Author: Eileen Chang
Translator (from Chinese): Karen S. Kingsbury
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: March 2016 (1969)
No. of Pages: 379

Synopsis: 

Shanghai, 1930s. Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has fallen in love with his colleague, the beautiful Gu Manzhen. He is determined to resist his family’s efforts to match him with his wealthy cousin so that he can marry her. But dark circumstances – a lustful brother-i-law, treacherous sister, a family secret – force the two young lovers apart.

As Manzhen and Shijun go on their separate paths, they lose track of each other, and their lives become filled with feints and schemes, missed connections and tragic misunderstandings. At every turn, societal expectations seem to thwart their prospects for happiness. Still, Manzhen and Shijun dare to hold out hope – however slim – that they might one day meet again. A glamorous, wrenching tale set against the glittering backdrop of an extraordinary city, Half a Lifelong Romance is a beloved classic from one of the essential writers of twentieth-century China.

Title: Love in the New Millennium
Author: Can Xue
Translator (from Chinese): Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publishing Date: 2018 (2013)
No. of Pages: 264

Synopsis: 

In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and conspiracies abound. Some try to flee – whether to a mysterious gambling bordello, underground ancestral homes, or Nest County, where traditional medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self.

Can Xue’s mesmerizing storytelling traces love’s many guises – satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling – against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, and sex and romance drawn from the East and the West.

Title: Mother River
Author: Can Xue
Translators (from Chinese): Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Publisher: Open Letter (University of Rochester)
Publishing Date: 2025 (2022)
No. of Pages: 260

Synopsis: 

In Mother River, Can Xue, one of China’s most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence.

Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries between the known and unknown, between humanity and nature. In these tales, a man tries to chase down an elusive golden peacock, a woman communicates with mysterious, shifting forms of light, and the river that runs through as mall village seems to pulse with memories of its own.

Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue’s status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today – and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

Title: Binu and the Great Wall
Author: Su Tong
Translator (from Chinese): Howard Goldblatt
Publisher: Canongate
Publishing Date: 2007 (2006)
No. of Pages: 291

Synopsis: 

When her husband vanishes from their home, Binu is determined to find him. Her journey will take her across Great Swallow Mountain to a place where armies of men are labouring on one of the greatest building projects the world has ever seen: The Great Wall of China.

Through Binu’s extraordinary story, Su Tong illuminates one of China’s most magical myths. It is an unforgettable adventure.

Title: The Extra
Author: A.B. Yehoshua
Translator (from Hebrew): Stuart Schoffman
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publishing Date: 2017 (2014)
No. of Pages: 249

Synopsis: 

Noga, forty-two and divorced, is a harpist with an orchestra in the Netherlands. Upon the sudden death of her father, she is summoned home to Jerusalem by her brother to help make decisions in urgent family and personal matters. Returning also means facing a former husband who left her when she refused him children, but whose passion for her remains even though he is remarried and the father of two.

For her imposed three-month residence in Israel, her brother finds her work as an extra in movies, television, and opera. These new identities undermine the firm boundaries of behavior heretofore protected by the music she plays, and Noga, always an extra in someone else’s story, takes charge of the plot.

The Extra is Yehoshua at his liveliest storytelling best – a bravura performance.

Title: More Than I Love My Life
Author: David Grossman
Translator (from Hebrew): Jessica Cohen
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2021 (2019)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: 

More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her middle-aged daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each o=mother and daughter pair, though Gili – abandoned by Nina when she was just three – has always been close to her grandmother. Together, they travel to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera, as a young widow, was imprisoned for three years after she refused to betray her husband’s memory and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This journey – filtered through the lens of Gili’s care, as she seeks to make a film that might explain her life – lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.

The novel was inspired by the true story of one of Grosmman’s long-time confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Oto (“the Adriatic Alcatraz”). With its flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, this novel is a thrilling addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living novelists, whose revered moral voice continues to resonate around the world.

Title: Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam
Author: Elias Khoury
Translator (from Arabic): Humphrey Davies
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publishing Date: 2019 (2012)
No. of Pages: 428

Synopsis: 

Lit by the sublime beauty and tragedy of classical Arabic poetry, Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian falafel seller in New York, sets out to piece together the fragments of his family history into a novel. But it is only when he encounters Blind Ma’moun, the teacher and father figure of his early childhood, that Adam discovers the story he must tell. Ma’moun’s testimony brings Adam back to the first years of his life in the ghetto of Lydda, in Palestine, where his family endured thirst, hunger, and terror in the shadow of a massacre.

With unmatched literary craft and burning empathy for the oppressed, Khoury peels away layers of lost stories and repressed memories to reach the heart of Adam’s trauma. Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam weaves history, memory, poetry, and atrocity in a sprawling memorial to the Nakba and the strangled lives left in its wake.

Title: Sanshiro
Author: Natsume Sōseki
Translator (from Japanese): Jay Rubin
Publisher: Perigee Books
Publishing Date: 1985 (1908)
No. of Pages: 248

Synopsis: 

Sanshiro leaves the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the fast-moving “real world” of Tokyo, its women, and the cool dark world of the Imperial University. To the timid, unsophisticated though not insensitive man, the new world and its people are at once exhilarating and frightening. There is Hirota, a higher school English teacher who makes pronouncements on everything from art to ethics and the perilous state of Japanese society. Yojiro, a student who lives with Hirtoa and takes Sanshiro under his wing, is a well-meaning, wheeling-dealing maneuverer. His campaign to win a university appointment for Hirota, whom he has nicknamed the “great darkness,” constitutes the novel’s subplot. Nonomiya is a scientist whose research on the pressure of light has won him a reputation. In order to continue his success he must live underground in his “cave.” Nonomiya’s sister Yoshiko and her beautiful, elusive friend Mineko complete Sanshiro’s circle. The novel follows Sanshiro’s shadowy, inarticulate pursuit of the bewitching Mineko. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Sōseki’s lively humor and our awareness of Sanshiro’s doomed innocence, the novel comes to light.

Title: The Understory
Author: Saneh Sangsuk
Translator (from Thai): Mui Poopoksakul
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publishing Date: 2024 (2003)
No. of Pages: 170

Synopsis: 

The lovable, yarnspinning monk Luang Paw Tien, now in his nineties, was the last person in his village to bear witness to the power and plenitude of the jungle before agrarian and then capitalist life took over his community. Now he entertains the children of the village nightly with tales from his younger years: his long pilgrimage to India, his mother’s dreams of a more stable life through agriculture, his proud huntsman father who resisted those dreams, and his love, who eventually led him to pursue those dreams all over again.

Thoroughly entertaining and already beloved, Sangsuk’s first novel available in the U.S. is a celebration of the oral tradition of storytelling and that tradition’s power to preserve (and embellish) cultural memory.

Title: Serenade for Nadia
Author: Zülfü Livaneli
Translator (from Turkish): Brendan Freely
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2019 (2011)
No. of Pages: 403

Synopsis: 

Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is asked to look after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university’s invitation. He is charming yet distant at first, but Maya gradually learns of the terrible circumstances that brought him to Istanbul sixty years before, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him.

Inspired by the 1942 Struma disaster, in which a shocking betrayal by Allied forces led to the deaths of nearly 800 refugees fleeing the Holocaust, Serenade for Nadia is both a poignant love story and a gripping testament to the power of human connection in the midst of despair. Revisiting the past, Zülfü Livaneli beautifully illustrates the lengths we must go to in order to find the closure we need.