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 month of the year will be brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. As time takes its natural course, I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered before the year draws to a close. But before I could wave goodbye to November, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. Like the past four months, my November purchases are more limited than usual. The second half of the year, albeit without design, was 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 November—and also in October—is the lowest in a while. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in November.

Title: Death Takes Me
Author: Cristina Rivera Garza
Translator (from Spanish): Sarah Booker, Robin Myers
Publisher: Hogarth
Publishing Date: 2025 (2008)
No. of Pages: 293

Synopsis: 

A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaing of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Originally written in Spanish, where the word for “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gnendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the vitimes, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the usntable terrains of desire and sexuality.

Title: Suggested in the Stars
Author: Yoko Tawada
Translator (from Japanese): Margaret Mitsutani
Publisher: Granta
Publishing Date: 2024 (2020)
No. of Pages: 229

Synopsis: 

Hiruko, from the now vanished archipelago ‘somewhere between China and Polynesia’, and her band of friends have searched in vain for someone who speaks her native language. They finally track down Susanoo, a sushi chef from the same nation, but there is a problem – he has lost the power of speech. As they set out to help Susanoo regain his voice, they encounter magic radios, personality swaps and a sceptical aphasia specialist, who may be Hiruko’s last hope.