Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is currently hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and explain why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

Transit by Anna Seghers

Blurb from Goodreads

Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of transit papers.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! Technically, it is already Tuesday. Nevertheless, how was your weekend? I hope you all had a restful one. I hope you were able to recuperate and prepare for the work week ahead. I know. Nearly everyone loathes Mondays; everyone includes me. On the brighter side, I also see Mondays as doors for new starts and opportunities. As such, I hope everyone is starting or has started the work week on high note. I hope everyone makes it through – or survives – the workweek. I hope everyone has been equipped for the tedious week ahead. I hope everyone gets to achieve something this week or at least everyone makes significant progress toward their goals. I wish everyone a great week ahead. More importantly, I hope everyone is doing well, in mind, body, and spirit, not only this week but for the rest of the year.

Woah, the time has been flying past us. Today is the first day of the seventh month of the year. How time flies! In a couple of days, I will be turning 35. Man, my age is getting serious. HAHA. It also means that we are already halfway through the year; July 2 is the midpoint of the year. With time taking its natural course, I hope that the year is treating everyone well. As 2025 moves forward, I hope everyone be showered with blessings, positivity, healing, and growth. I hope the coming months will shower everyone with good news and kindness. I wish success and blessings for everyone. Reading-wise, I am on the right track. I am already midway through my goal of reading at least 100 books. Ironically, I have been lagging behind in my reading challenges. As e pivot toward the second half of the year, I will be focusing on these reading challenges.

With the start of the week is a fresh Goodreads Monday update. With the shift to the second half of the year, I will also be changing my reading motif. From Asia, I will be spending my birth month immersing myself in the works of European writers; I am currently reading Magda Szabó’s Abigail, the second novel by the Hungarian writer I read. This week’s featured book, however, is by a writer who I am not familiar with, or at least whose oeuvre I have yet to explore. Like in the case of Szabó, it was through online booksellers that I first encountered Anna Seghers. Apparently, Anna Seghers is the pseudonym used by Anna Reiling who war born to a Jewish family in Mainz but, interestingly, acquired Hungarian citizen when she married a Hungarian Communist and academic. She published her debut novel, Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara), in 1928.

Among her most renowned and most enduring works is Transit; many literary pundits also call it as her magnum opus. Published in 1944, it was written during her and her family’s flight from Europe after the Second World War broke; after moving from one city to another, they eventually settled in Mexico City. From what I understand, the novel captures her experience as a refugee, or at least the refugee experience. It is, thus, a work of historical fiction. Seghers would return to Berlin after the end of the Second World War but Transit endures. Out of curiosity, I acquired a copy of the book and hopefully it becomes part of my ongoing foray into works of European literature. How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!