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:

The Rest is Silence by Augusto Monterroso

Blurb from Goodreads

The one and only novel by the renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso—Latin America’s most expansive miniaturist, whose tiny, acid, and bracingly surreal narratives Italo Calvino dubbed “the most beautiful stories in the world”—The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres, a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity.

Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres’s friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant’s own comically botched attempts at “criticism.”

Monterroso’s narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author who is profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are—and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall. 

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday, everyone! Just like that, we are already in the second workweek of the second month of 2026. How time flies! It still feels like just yesterday when we welcomed the new year. But time takes its natural course. It flows forward, sans regard to any of. As such, I hope that the year is going—and will continue to go—well for everyone. I hope that the year will curry favor with you all. Things are starting to look up at work. After a couple of hectic and challenging weeks, things are starting to take a more normal rhythm. There are still challenges before me, but hey, I do enjoy challenges. Well, at least some times. Anyway, I hope everyone had a good start to the workweek and the year. The new week brims with hope and fresh starts. I hope that the week will flow in everyone’s favor. Wishing you continued success and happiness.

I know—not many people get excited about Mondays (though I’m sure a few are out there). I, too, am not exactly a fan. I hope that as the week moves forward, you will get your groove back, or gain a semblance of momentum. After all, we’ve got to start somewhere, and Monday is one of those starting points. As such, I hope everyone is doing well—mentally, emotionally, and physically. To commence my reading year, I have immersed myself in the works of Latin American writers, as it has been some time since I last had a Latin American literature month. I just started reading News of Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez. This is my ninth novel by the Colombian Nobel Laureate in Literature. This makes him my most-read Nobel Laureate, one book ahead of Kazuo Ishiguro.

In connection with my ongoing foray into Latin American literature, I am featuring a work by a Latin American writer in this week’s late Goodreads Monday update; the start of a new week also comes with a fresh Goodreads Monday feature. While reading Gina María Balibrera’s The Volcano Daughters, I realized that my venture into the works of Central American was sparse to say the least. Sure, I have ocassionally read works of Mexican writers, but the rest of the region is left mostly unread. The most direct writer who I have read before is El Salvadorian Manlio Argueta. But I know that there is more to the region’s literature. Take Augusto Monterroso for example. I just learned about the Honduran writer just today; yes, I checked his biography and it was mentioned that he was born in Honduras, but eventually adopted Guatemalan nationality.

Monterroso, apparently, is also considered an important figure in the Latin American “Boom” generation. He has earned several accolades across his literary career that spanned over six decades. However, his works are primarily short stories. This makes The Rest is Silence an anomaly. Well, not really. It is Monterroso’s first (and apparently last) venture into full-length prose. Originally published in 1978 as  Lo demás es silencio, it was eventually made available to anglophone readers in 2024, nearly four decades since it was first published. Interestingly, the novel’s main characer, Eduardo Torres, is a Mexican literary critic. Further, he is obsessed with quoting Cervantes. I just hope I get to acquire a copy of the book as it will aid me in the furtherance of my foray into Central American literature.

How about you, fellow readers? How was your Monday? What books have you recently added to your reading list? Drop your thoughts in the comments. For now—happy Monday, and as always, happy reading!