And with that, the first three quarters of the year have officially closed their doors. We are already in the last quarter of 2026. How time flies! I hope the first nine months of the year have been kind to everyone. As time takes its natural course, I hope you were able to generate momentum as you pursued your goals and aspirations. I hope the following months will repay you for all the hard work you poured in the past nine months. But before I could wave goodbye to September, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. After having a bookless stretch – yes, I was not able to secure a copy of any book from May to August – I somehow made up for it in September. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in September.
Title: East, West
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: January 1996 (1994)
No. of Pages: 211
Synopsis:
In his first major work of fiction since The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie gives us nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. From rickshaw drivers to occultists, Christopher Columbus to Hamlet’s court jester, the characters in East, West inhabit a world in which nationality, and even identity, shift unpredictably and deliriously.
In London in the swinging sixties, an elderly Indian ayah and a Slavic porter strike up a romance based on a mutual appreciation of chess and The Flintstones. In fabulous Srinagar, a moneylender is tragically enthralled by a purloined religious relic. And in the territory between, two diplomats, who as schoolmates entertained themselves with Star Trek fantasies, go boldly into the hyperstate of international terrorism. Daring, extravagant, comical, and humane, East, West renews Rushdie’s stature as one of our most gifted – and genuinely prophetic – writers.
Title: This Mournable Body
Author: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 284
Synopsis:
When Tambudzai first set out to rebuild the financial and social status she spent her youth working for, she could not have known that every move she made would bring her one step closer to sacrificing the dignity of her family and community. Her choices seem innocuous: she moves from a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare to a widow’s boarding house, and she finds work, first as a biology teacher and then in the opportunistic field of “ecotourism.” But when a long-overdue homecoming culminates in a humiliating spectacle, Tambudzai is forced to consider whether it was her circumstances or her decisions that brought her to this breaking point.
Title: Hotel Lucky Seven
Author: Kotaro Isaka
Translator (from Japanese): Brian Bergstrom
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2025 (2023)
No. of Pages: 288
Synopsis:
Nanao, ‘the unluckiest assassin in the world’, has been hired to deliver a birthday present to a luxury Tokyo hotel. By the time he leaves the guest’s room, one man is dead and more will soon follow. As events spiral out of control it becomes clear that several different killers are taking a stay in the hotel at the same time. And they’re all looking for a young woman with a photographic memory, hiding out on one of the twenty floors.
Title: Notes of a Crocodile
Author: iu Miaojjin
Translator (from Chinese): Bonnie Huie
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2017 (1994)
No. of Pages: 242
Synopsis:
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.
Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.
Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
Title: The Reader
Author: Bernhard Schlink
Translator (from German): Carol Brown Janeway
Publisher: Phoenix House
Publishing Date: 1998 (1995)
No. of Pages: 216
Synopsis:
A schoolboy in post-war Germany, Michael collapses one day in the street and is helped home by a woman in her thirties. Later he visits the woman, at his mother’s insistence, taking flowers to thank her. A week later he returns again. He is fascinated by this older woman, and he and Hanna begin a secretive affair.
Limited to seeing Hanna a few hours a week, he learns little of her. She is sometimes harsh and domineering, and his questions about her life and her family are ignored or rebuffed. Gradually, he begins to be frustrated by their relationship, but then is shocked and obscurely guilty when Hanna simply disappears, leaving job, potential promotion, her apartment and the city in which they both have lived. His life goes on, but the memories and questions remain with him.
Some years later, as a law student, Michael is in court to follow a case. To his amazement he recognizes Hanna as one of the defendants in this major trial. The object of his adolescent passion is a criminal. Her attitude during the trial is bizarre, as she allows herself to be presented as the ringleader of her co-defendants and seems to be almost wilfully mishandling her defence. But suddenly Michael understands that her behaviour, both now and in the past, conceals a secret buried deeper even than her terrible crimes.
The past erupts into the present – the past of their relationship and Germany’s past. Both are to trap Michael for the rest of his life, haunted by the memories of a relationship that he cannot move beyond – and by the dilemma of an entire generation.
Powerful, haunting and unforgettable, The Reader is both an extraordinary story of memory and desire and a profound exploration of modern Germany’s relationship with its past.
