Ugh, February was such a bummer. The kind of month where my headaches weren’t dramatic enough to justify total system failure, but persistent enough to feel like a personality trait. I discovered, quite unintentionally, that I am very skilled at having – and keeping – one. Might fuck around and add it to my LinkedIn profile after I finish writing this.
I am not at my last straw, mind you, but I’m dangerously aware of the fact that my remaining straws are countable now. Three, maybe four. Which makes every minor inconvenience feel like a small accounting exercise. If you bump into me on the street and ask me how I’ve been, the most accurate answer I can possibly give you is: oh, nothing much, just been releasing ghouls. Which sounds dramatic, but mostly means I’m tired of pretending that things don’t accumulate; tired of pretending that I’m not tired.
But at least I read. I still have that to show for. And I’m damn proud to say that I timed these books well; or they timed me – who the hell knows anymore. They all caught me mid-swing, mid-bruise, mid-eye-roll at the universe. And in different ways, they all soothed me a bit, because they all felt like me. Not wholly, of course, but in small fragments. In the part of me that wants a neat puzzle. In the part that can be a pretentious little nerd. In the part that still believes in poetry. In the part that is furious at systems. In the part that suspects love might be an elaborate hallucination.
If my January books circled proximity – how close we dare get to grief, to love, to ourselves – I would say that this month’s crop circled fabrication – the systems we inhabit, the stories we construct to survive them, the thin membrane between performing a life and actually living one. Somewhere between crossbows and witness statements and snow and swan songs and eating ashes, I kept noticing how much of adulthood is maintenance of narrative, of identity, of stamina. Which both unnerved me and soothed me.
Anyway, enough about my mild existential fatigue, you’re not here for that. It is, after all, the final day of February, and I can feel myself choosing – bravely, heroically – to release a sigh so long and theatrical it could qualify as wind power. I am not assigning March the impossible task of reorganizing my entire emotional architecture in 31 days. That feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
So let’s move on to the books. That’s what we’re here for. Not my dramatic little straw inventory.
Close to Death, Anthony Horowitz, Penguin Books, 2024
It’s almost funny that I began February with a murder. Not a psychological spiral, not a metaphysical meditation – a literal murder. With a crossbow. Which is already such a theatrical way to go that I had to respect it.
I am not, by temperament, a murder mystery person. I like my violence interior. But there was something deeply appealing about a puzzle this month. Something with edges. Something that could be solved, that actually has an answer.
It all takes place inside Riverside Close, exactly the kind of neighborhood that believes itself exempt from mundane chaos, the kind of social ecosystem that runs on polite nods and carefully trimmed hedges: a GP and his jewelry-designer wife; a dentist and his ailing spouse; bookstore owners who used to be nuns (because of course); a retired barrister; a chess grandmaster and his wife. And then the murder by way of crossbow.
I won’t bore you with more detail, but I will tell you that what I enjoyed most wasn’t the reveal (though I did clock the murderer early, based on a single clue, and felt indecently smug about it), but the process of getting there.
Also, there’s something soothing about a world in which motive, opportunity, and evidence still matter. Where you can rearrange disorder into explanation, chaos into logic. Where suspicion has a finite list. Where the worst thing is a neighbor with a grudge and not, say, existential burnout.
Was it life-altering? No. Was it profound? Also no. But it was a competent little puzzle. And in a month where so much felt ambient and unsolvable, a gated community murder was almost… restorative. I didn’t need transcendence. I needed to watch something messy be rendered coherent. I needed a small, enclosed drama with an answer at the end of it. And I got it.
The Employees, Olga Ravn, Penguin Books, 2025
Shortlisted for the International Booker five years ago, I somehow missed it when it first came out. Don’t know what made me pick it up now, but I’m pretty sure it’s the universe, because check this out: a couple of days ago, I found out Olga Ravn is longlisted again, this time for The Wax Child, which I’ve already started and will talk about in next month’s installment of A Month in Books. What a serendipitous coincidence, right? I love it when books create their own quiet continuity like that. It makes the reading life feel less random, more like a conversation you’ve accidentally stepped into twice.
Anyway, about the book. The structure is deceptively sterile: a series of measured, bureaucratic, almost bloodless witness statements compiled by a workplace commission aboard the Six-Thousand Ship. But here’s where it gets interesting: the crew that’s being interviewed consists of those who were born and those who were made, those who will die and those who will not. As the interviews progress, something subtle begins to fracture, and longing starts slipping through the cracks. The employees – human and humanoid alike – begin to ache for warmth, for touch, for Earth, for shopping malls and children and the memory of a sky that no longer exists except as nostalgia.
The line that stayed with me – Is this a human problem? If so, I’d like to keep it. – feels almost defiant in its simplicity. Because, yes, YES, the capacity to ache is the last thing worth defending. I will die on this hill.
Also, what unsettled me wasn’t just the blurring of human and artificial consciousness (the humans begin to sound mechanical; the humanoids begin to sound haunted), but also how easily the book translates into the language of contemporary work. Performance reviews. Productivity. Identity reduced to output. The way labor seeps into selfhood until you’re no longer sure what remains when the work stops, what happens when you begin to want something else.
Is exhaustion a human problem? If so, I’d like to keep it.
Is longing? Is disillusionment? Is cynicism?
The Great Enigma, Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton, New Directions, 2006
After so much structure, I opened Tranströmer, and something in me softened for the first time this month. These poems cocooned me, not by denying the fragility of everything, but by teaching me how to look at it. I felt, absurdly, like this quiet little volume helped me – for lack of a better word – earn a master’s degree in yearnalism; in the art of wanting without demanding, observing without clinging; in hanging on to slivers of hope instead of guarantees. And for me, at this point, that felt quite radical.
There’s one poem in particular that I liked – Noon Thaw – and there are two verses there that I highlighted: “The wind came out gently as if it were pushing a pram”; “The vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow”. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt like someone had tilted the world a few degrees so that light hit differently. It made me wish to be adept at holding impermanence without panic. Because everything is temporary – the thaw, the season, the weight of things – and it’s so easy to despair.
I’m forever grateful for this lesson that he placed quietly in my palms. I’m forever grateful that he trusted me to recognize it. That everything passes. Winter passes. Headaches pass. Heartaches pass. Months pass. But the vowels are still blue sky. The consonants are still twigs. The world doesn’t become less fragile because we notice it. But it becomes briefly bearable.
I know I’ll forget this lesson at some point. I’ll panic again. I’ll cling. I’ll dramatize the minutiae of my life. But for a few evenings in February, I held it without flinching.
Love, Maayan Eitan, Penguin Books, 2022
Full disclosure: I picked this up because I read about it in a LitHub article on the best book covers of the last decade. There is something almost embarrassing about admitting that, but it’s true. I literally judged it by its cover and expected the interior to burn accordingly. Let that be a lesson, because spoiler alert: it did NOT.
The premise is charged: a young sex worker in a nameless Israeli city, navigating the blurred border between violence and intimacy, objectification and desire. The blurb promised me intensity, transgression, heat, friction. Dearest gentle reader, it did not deliver. What I got was deliberately opaque, intellectualized prose that, for a subject as raw as prostitution, felt curiously airless, anesthetized. As if the author was terrified of being accused of excess, so she evacuated the room before the emotion could settle in. A lot is described, a lot less is felt, and for me, that was a betrayal.
It’s not that I needed spectacle. I didn’t want melodrama or gratuitous cruelty. But I do need a pulse. I need at least one sentence that risks embarrassment in order to mean something.
Libby moves through cars and hotel rooms and clients and other sex workers, constructing stories to negotiate the gaze of men and the shape of her own survival. She seeks love, and what she finds resembles the same pattern, wearing a different coat. There is intelligence here. But I couldn’t shake the sense that the intensity had been curated rather than lived.
A book about bodies that refuses to sweat.
Ida Elisabeth, Sigrid Undset, Ignatius Press, 2011
Now here’s a book where restraint does serve a purpose. Where it doesn’t spell evasion, but discipline. Where it works because it feels oddly steadying.
In a nutshell, Ida Elisabeth is a book about a woman who leaves her husband and attempts to build a life on her own terms, raising her children, navigating social judgment, economic precarity, and her own conflicted heart. It’s domestic, slow, attentive to the smallest humiliations and the smallest triumphs.
What struck me most is how unsentimental Ida’s freedom feels. There is no swelling orchestral moment when Ida chooses independence. There is no triumphant montage of self-actualization. There is instead the daily arithmetic of survival: money, respectability, fatigue. The knowledge that self-respect doesn’t automatically heat a room in winter. Ida is not glamorous, she is not mythic, she is stubborn, weary, and dignified in a way that feels almost subversive now. She chooses difficulty over diminishment, and the book never pretends that difficulty is ennobling in itself. It is simply necessary.
There’s something bracing about that. About a narrative that doesn’t reward its protagonist with fireworks for doing the hard thing. Because you know what? Self-determination is rarely cinematic. It is incremental. It is lonely. It is sometimes deeply inconvenient. But when the alternative is diminishment, the hard road becomes the only option one can make.
The Copywriter, Daniel Poppick, Scribner, 2026
I have a soft spot for pretentious little books. Maybe because I have a soft spot for pretentious little selves.
The Copywriter reads like the notebook of a poet in his early thirties who spends his days writing advertising copy while Trump begins his first presidency in the background. He quotes Proust. He records dreams. He skews reality until it almost breaks, distorting his own life into parables. He and his three struggling-poet friends drift through financial precarity, heartbreak, furniture-moving disasters, pregnancy scares, artistic doubt. And yet, underneath the intellectual performance, there’s something painfully recognizable: the quiet panic of realizing that your twenties are over and your art has not yet justified your sacrifices. The fear that you have become fluent in theory but not in living. That you haven’t got a clue what you’re supposed to be doing with your life and what this is all for.
It is self-conscious. It is indulgent. It is occasionally insufferable, but at least it’s honest about its insufferability. There’s something endearing about a narrator who knows he’s performing intellect and can’t quite stop. About someone stumbling through adulthood while insisting that literature still matters.
The Proust thread amused me more than it should have. Especially because Departure(s) by Barnes, which I read later this month, also drifts through Proustian memory. Two separate authors circling the same gravitational field of time and recollection. It felt less like a coincidence and more like a gentle nudge.
Am I supposed to reread Proust? Is that what’s happening here?
Departure(s), Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape, 2026
In what’s supposed to be his swan song – and it reads as it might be – Barnes reflects on cancer, death, memory, and the strange elasticity of time near the end of life. He also writes about two friends who meet at Oxford and reconnect decades later, tracing the contours of their love story across years and misalignments. It’s metafictional, or perhaps it simply acknowledges the porous border between invention and recollection. Fiction wearing nonfiction’s clothes. Or the other way around.
Barnes seems less interested in labeling the genre than in interrogating the limits of fiction even as he uses it. He admires the great works that came before while gently dismantling their illusions. He writes like someone who has nothing left to prove. Which, at this stage of his life, he truly doesn’t.
What I admired most was the steadiness, the lucidity, the unsparingness. This is not a sad book; it is a clear-eyed one, dignified, controlled, even funny at times, yet the humour is not used to deflect, but to carry the weight lightly. It contains depth without veering into theatricality. It’s tender without collapsing into sentimentality. The tone feels like someone who has already made peace with the inevitability of departure and is now curious about how memory rearranges the path behind him. No grand pronouncements. No desperate insistence on legacy.
In a month where I felt stretched thin and quietly irritable at the world’s demands, Barnes’s composure offered me clarity.
I loved it.
Eating Ashes, Brenda Navarro, translated by Megan McDowell, Liveright, 2026
Some books you finish and place neatly back on the shelf. Some books linger in the doorway long after you’ve closed them, as if they’re waiting for you to admit you’re not done. As you can probably guess, this was the latter. I might have finished it, but its residue sure as hell is not finished with me.
At its core, it follows a brother and sister raised by their grandparents in Mexico while their mother relocates to Spain for work, the kind of decision that sounds pragmatic when explained out loud and seismic when lived. Eventually, they follow their mother, chasing the promise of a better life, only to discover that migration has its own, brand-new humiliations: xenophobia, economic precarity, displacement, a life lived in translation – all of these become a background hum.
Then Diego takes his own life, proving that rock bottom has a basement, proving that whatever fragile scaffolding you manage to assemble can always tilt, will always tilt.
Listen, the pain of immigration has been written and rewritten numerous times before. I know that. I’ve read so many books on it – some good, some less than good, some quite exceptional. I should have been – at least in theory – emotionally prepared for it. But this was different. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to explain how or why or in what ways. I can try, but I already feel that I’ll just be scratching the surface. The prose is raw, I can tell you this much, but not in a way that performs its own brutality. Maybe that’s why I felt it so intensely. Because it didn’t try to redeem the brutality it was describing. It only poured and gushed on the page. I felt the pangs of survivor’s guilt. I felt that leaving and staying both involve some kind of loss.
I think it might be a case of spectacle versus accumulation. This grief, this displacement weren’t presented as grand revelations, but as sediment, if that makes sense. I was ensconced in layer upon layer of raw pain that bled and hardened. And I couldn’t witness any closing of those fractures because they were never surface-level to begin with.
It scraped and sanded me down without asking permission. Because it wasn’t the usual story of immigrant resilience, it was about endurance, and I hope you know the difference between the two.
When I finished, I felt like I had been submerged and resurfaced covered in something I couldn’t rinse off.
This month, I distrusted everything: love, productivity, narrative closure, polite society, even my own stamina. If last month engulfed me in last year’s memories, this month saw me open my eyes, pace the room, and notice the cracks in the walls. I refused to insulate myself with narratives; I refused to perform coherence. Which is ironic, considering this entire piece is a carefully constructed narrative about not constructing narratives. But I suppose that’s the game.
And yet, it turns out I can be cynical and still yearn. I can be dead tired and still pay attention. I can release ghouls and still notice the way sunlight sticks to eyelashes like pollen.
And for now, that will have to be enough. See you in March. Hope I don’t lose any more straws by then. But if I do, I suppose I’ll count them honestly.
