Another month done. How time flies! How has life been? I hope 2025 has treated you well and continues to do so. I hope everyone is treated with kindness. If not, I hope that the last two months of the year will be brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. I hope the remaining days of 2025 will go well for everyone. I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered. But before I could wave goodbye to October, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. Like the past three months, my October purchases are more limited than usual. The past five months, albeit without design, were about holding myself up. This aligns with my New Year’s resolution to read more and buy less. In fact, the number of books I acquired in October—two in total—is the lowest in a while. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in September.

Title: Shadow Ticket
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 293

Synopsis: 

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggard, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied into a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Title: The Cartographer of Absences
Author: Mia Couto
Translator (from Portuguese): David Brookshaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2025 (2020)
No. of Pages: 304

Synopsis: 

Diogo Santiago is a celebrated Mozambican poet and intellectual, a well-known orifessir at the university in his country’s capital. On the eve of a cyclone that will devastate the East African coast, he sets out for his hometown of Beira to receive a tribute from his fellow citizens. As he travels across Mozambique, his mind turns to the past—to his upbringing, and to the history of his country when it was still a Portuguese colony.

Diogo’s father, himself a poet and a journalist, witnessed a terrible massacre committed during the waning days of the colonial regime. He was arrested by the Portuguese secret police for trying to reveal what happened – but the officer who oversaw the case kept a journal, which later finds its way into Diogo’s hands. As the storm approaches Biera, threatening to wipe away the physical traces of his childhood, Diogo sorts through the journal, old letters, and family stories, and confronts the impermanence of his own memories. Along the way he meets Liana, a woman whose past is mysteriously connected to his own, and whose story just might shed light on what happened to his father.

A haunting novel of historical testimony, The Cartographer of Absences is one of Mia Couto’s finest works. Drawing on the author’s own life in colonial Mozambique, this book is a significant new entry in the world literature canon.