I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.

I Who Have Never Known Men begins with a haunting premise. The narrator is one of forty women locked inside an underground cell. None of them know why they are there, who imprisoned them, or what exists beyond the walls. The only thing that sets the narrator apart is memory. The other women remember a life before captivity. She does not. This prison is the only world she has ever known.

The women spend their days talking about what came before—homes, relationships, routines, freedoms. When the narrator tries to join in, she is gently but firmly shut out. Why include someone who cannot relate? Why explain a world she has never seen? So she learns to stay quiet. To observe. To imagine. In the absence of experience, she builds an inner world of her own.

What stayed with me most is that despite having no real human life to draw from, the narrator still feels everything. Teenage angst. Curiosity. Desire. Even innocent fantasies—like imagining the guard who watches over them from outside the cell. No one ever teaches her what love or longing is supposed to look like, yet she feels them anyway.

This book is not interested in explaining where they are, how they got there, or why they are imprisoned. That absence feels intentional. Instead, it asks something quieter and far more unsettling: how do humans remain human in inhumane circumstances? How do emotions survive when connection is denied?

Then one day, a siren blares. The guards flee in panic, leaving the keys behind. After sixteen years, the door is finally open. But freedom is not taken easily. The women hesitate. They argue. They are afraid of what lies beyond the bunker, afraid of a world they no longer recognize—or one that may not exist at all. When they finally step outside, it is slowly, cautiously, carrying their fear with them.

Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.

The novel is often labeled dystopian, but that word feels insufficient. This isn’t a story about a broken world as much as it is about endurance. About how deeply human emotions run. About how longing, fear, hope, and connection exist even in silence, even in confinement.

At its core, this is a quiet and unsettling book—one that lingers. It reminded me that feeling is not something we are taught. It is something we carry.

This is not a book you read for answers. It’s one you read to remember what remains of us when everything else is taken away.

Books bring colour to my simple life and if I have a book in my hands, it feels like I'm always connected with the world. Whether I'm bored, lonely, upset, depressed, books soothe me and everything feels all right again.

One thing that has changed me deeply since becoming a bookseller is this: my appreciation for people who do this work purely out of love for books.

And along with that, how seriously I now take book recommendations.

A simple book recommendation can be a ray of hope to someone who is barely holding on. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve felt it happen. And maybe that’s why I now go out of my way to read books about books—because they often lead you to the most meaningful recommendations of all.

Recently, I read Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-reum, the author of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop—another book very close to my heart. This book feels like a book lover’s dream. It doesn’t lecture you or overwhelm you. It feels like a gentle, unhurried conversation with someone who understands the quiet power books hold.

I found myself nodding along to almost every page, marking passages, circling titles, mentally building a reading list that kept growing with each essay. I was telling a friend how this would be such a perfect starting point for someone who wants to get into reading but doesn’t quite know why they should keep going. This book gives you those reasons—softly, patiently.

And the sad irony is that it will probably never be picked up by a non-reader, even though it’s precisely the kind of book they would enjoy.

Around the same time, I was talking to another friend— a non-reader—who told me how boring his life felt. Not dramatically sad, just quietly dull. The kind of boredom that comes from days blending into each other, from feeling like nothing new is really happening. I listened, nodded, and understood him. But as he spoke, my mind drifted to a book I had recently finished—I Who Have Never Known Men—and how it had completely altered the way I looked at freedom, suffering, and what it even means to live.

It wasn’t that my life was more exciting than his. It wasn’t that I had more things going on. But books had given me something extra—an inner expansion, a way of seeing beyond my immediate surroundings. They offer borrowed lives, unfamiliar griefs, quiet joys, and perspectives we may never encounter otherwise. And in that moment, I realized the quiet tragedy isn’t that non-readers are missing out on “better” lives—but that they may never know how much more life can be felt, held, and understood through stories.

This isn’t about thinking readers are superior. It’s not about productivity or intelligence or taste. Life is already heavy enough. Books don’t replace it—they soften it. They sit beside us and say, you’re not alone in this. And sometimes, that’s more than enough.

I could have told my friend to read a book. But I know that kind of advice rarely lands. Reading isn’t something you force—it’s something you stumble into, often when you need it most.

Every Day I Read is a collection of short essays on how to read, what to read, how to balance classics with contemporary works, how books help us, how to read more, and even how to socialize with books. It reminds you that books don’t demand perfection or discipline; they ask only for presence.

Which is why this book is exactly the kind of book a non-reader should read.

And also exactly the kind of book a non-reader will ignore.

And maybe that’s okay.

Because books have always been quiet like that—waiting patiently for the moment someone is ready to listen.

You were too sane to teach a child about craziness and cruelty. I had to learn about those from people who were crazy and cruel themselves.

Reading Poor Things felt like falling into a fever dream—where you’re half-aware, slightly dizzy, and constantly wondering if what you’re reading is real or just a distorted trick of the mind. The book is often described as a feminist twist on Frankenstein, but as I sat with it, I kept circling back to the same question: Is this actually a feminist novel, or just a man’s interpretation of what feminism should feel like? The uneasiness isn’t accidental. It’s built into its bones.

This feeling resurfaced for me recently when I watched a new Frankenstein adaptation on Netflix—one that stays true to the original book and has been receiving so much praise. It was eerie how strongly it reminded me of Poor Things. Though the two stories aren’t similar in plot, they share the same core dilemma: What does it mean to create life, and what responsibility does the creator owe the created? And more specifically, what changes when the “monster” exists in a woman’s body? Watching the movie last night almost reopened something inside me—it dragged all my thoughts about Bella Baxter back to the surface, almost too vividly.

In Gray’s story, Bella is resurrected with a child’s brain inside an adult woman’s body, making her existence inherently unsettling. Baxter, the doctor who revives her, treats her more like a curiosity—an experiment to shape, control, and observe. Because Bella’s mind hasn’t been shaped by society, she approaches the world with unfiltered boldness. She questions norms unintentionally, simply because she doesn’t know they exist. She challenges every expectation of womanhood without even trying to.

This, on the surface, looks like empowerment. But when you look a little closer, the cracks begin to show. How empowering is a woman’s independence when it exists only because the man who created her erased her original identity? How feminist is a story where the woman’s “freedom” is engineered by men and narrated almost entirely through their perspectives?

Bella’s journey becomes even more chaotic when she runs away with a lawyer—after promising marriage to McCandless the very day she meets him. This leads to one of the most interesting moments in the book: the two letters. One from the lawyer. One from Bella. Both describing the same events. Both completely different.

The lawyer rushes to blame Bella—painting himself noble and rational while turning Bella into something reckless or manipulative. Then you read Bella’s version, and suddenly the entire narrative shifts. Her letter is clumsy, curious, naïve, and painfully honest. Those conflicting letters feel like a metaphor for every time a woman’s story has been twisted to protect a man's ego.

This split narrative also echoes the questions raised in Frankenstein—who gets to tell the truth? The creator? The creation? Or the one with the loudest voice?

And then the ending comes, disrupting everything you thought you understood. The twist forces you to look back at the entire book and ask: Did Bella ever truly own her story? Or were we always reading someone else’s version of her? It’s disorienting in the best and worst ways—because once again, it highlights how fragile a woman’s narrative becomes when surrounded by men who insist on defining her.

These layers are why it’s so hard for me to call Poor Things a feminist novel without hesitation. Bella is unforgettable, but she is also shaped, controlled, interpreted, and rewritten by men—within the story and outside it. Even her rebellion exists inside a framework drawn by male imagination.

So when you ask yourself if this book empowers women… the answer doesn’t come easily. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the discomfort, the uncertainty, the shifting truths are all part of what the book wants us to feel—that unease of watching a woman fight for agency in a world where every voice around her thinks they know better.

But what I do know is this: Bella Baxter lingers. She rattles something inside you. She makes you question every narrator, every version of “truth,” and every attempt to package feminism into something neat and easily digestible. Watching Frankenstein last night only sharpened that feeling—two creations, two bodies stitched back to life, two stories about power and autonomy—and one haunting question:

Who gets to decide what a woman becomes?

Some books shake you to your core—not because they’re shocking, but because they’re true. “Mad Woman” is one of those books. It’s unsettling, emotional, and impossible to forget. It’s packaged as a murder mystery, but let me tell you now: this is not a whodunit. This is a raw, unflinching look at trauma, motherhood, and the weight of a past you can never quite outrun.  

The story follows Clove, a woman juggling the exhausting demands of motherhood while carrying the invisible scars of her childhood. She has spent years burying her past, refusing to speak of it—even to her loving husband. But then a letter arrives from prison. Her estranged mother, who killed Clove’s abusive father, is asking for forgiveness. She wants Clove to bear witness, to help prove that what she did was self-defense.  

This one letter cracks open everything Clove has tried to keep locked away. Memories of her father’s violence, the helplessness of her childhood, and the deep, nagging fear that she might become like him. The way she talks to herself, the way she second-guesses her every move as a mother, hit me hard. Because isn’t that what so many of us do? Wonder if we’re doing enough, if we’re breaking cycles or unknowingly continuing them?  

What I love about this book is that it doesn’t shy away from the ugly parts of survival. It doesn’t try to package abuse into something digestible or turn it into a love story like “It Ends With Us” did. And look, I liked “It Ends With Us” when I first read it too. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized how dangerous it is to frame stories of domestic violence in a way that makes them feel romantic. “Mad Woman” doesn’t do that. It makes you sit with the discomfort, with the reality of what it means to survive and still carry the ghosts of your past.  

Another thing that stood out to me was how the book explores the way women are forced to shape their own stories to be believed. Clove’s mother spent years hiding the truth of her abuse, and when she finally fought back, she became the villain. And isn’t that the way the world often works? Women are expected to endure, to stay silent, to survive quietly. But the moment they fight back, their stories are questioned.  

There’s also a quiet but sharp commentary on social media—how we curate our lives, filter our pain, and present only the best, most polished versions of ourselves. Even when our lives feel like they’re crumbling, we still find ways to make them look beautiful on the outside. It’s something I think about a lot.  

I don’t know if I can say I “enjoyed” this book, because it’s not the kind of story you enjoy. But I felt it. Deeply. And I know I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.  

So if you’re looking for something raw, something that doesn’t sugarcoat trauma but instead forces you to sit with it, read this book. Read it for the women who’ve had to fight to be heard. Read it for the conversations we “should” be having about domestic abuse, generational trauma, and the impossible weight of being a mother in a world that never makes space for them.  

And when you’re done, let’s talk about it. Because stories like this deserve to be heard.

When I read "Days at the Morisaki Bookshop" by Satoshi Yanagisawa, and it evoked the feeling of basking in a late autumn sunset while sipping a hot coffee, enveloped in the warm joy of the words on the page. As a bookstore owner myself, I found a deep connection to the themes and sentiments woven throughout the narrative.

At first glance, the book may not boast a mind-boggling storyline, and readers who favor fast-paced plots might find it lacking. However, it’s the perfect read for anyone seeking a calm vibe, free from expectations. It paints a serene picture of the Jimbocho district in Tokyo, capturing the essence of its book streets and the mutual love for reading that reverberates throughout the pages.

The story centers on two main protagonists: a niece and her uncle, both seeking fresh starts in their lives, bound together by their affection for their generation-old second-hand bookshop. Through their journey, we witness the tender exploration of familial bonds and the solace found within the confines of their beloved store. 

As a bookstore owner, I resonated deeply with their connection to books and the community they serve. There’s a unique magic in second-hand bookstores, a tangible history in every book, and a sense of belonging that comes from sharing stories with others. Yagisawa beautifully captures this magic, illustrating how books can bring solace, joy, and even the courage to face life’s challenges.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop serves as a lyrical ode to the love of reading and the transformative power of stories. It’s a gentle reminder that sometimes, the most profound journeys occur not through action and drama, but through the quiet moments of connection, reflection, and the magic found in the pages of a book. 

This book is perfect for those who appreciate the art of storytelling and the simple joys that come from a life surrounded by books. If you're looking for a cozy read that allows you to savor each moment, I wholeheartedly recommend giving this one a chance.

Sometimes, a book finds its way into your life and lingers long after you’ve turned the last page, weaving its words into your very soul. This was one of those books for me.

Olive is a woman in her thirties, surrounded by her three best friends, all navigating different phases of womanhood. One is a mother of three, another is on the journey to becoming a mother, while the third struggles with infertility, going through her second round of IVF. Olive, however, stands at a different crossroads—she’s recently broken up with her long-time partner because she doesn't see herself having children. This decision haunts her, as societal pressures and the judgment of those around her make her feel as though something is wrong with her for not wanting to become a mother. Yet, deep down, she knows it’s the weight of those expectations talking. Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling of isolation as her friends seem to drift away, their lives moving in a direction that Olive can’t follow.

This story masterfully explores the complexity of womanhood and how each of Olive's friends, including Olive herself, defines it in their own way. It’s a debut novel that feels honest, sensitive, and deeply relatable, particularly for women in their thirties who are navigating the uncertainties of adulthood. The narrative approaches the subject of motherhood—and the choice to forgo it—with an authenticity that is rare, and I found myself pausing every so often, closing the book, and reflecting on the emotions it stirred in me.

As a woman working in a male-dominated field, Olive's journey resonated with me on a personal level. There’s a parallel in the way both she and I have been shaped by societal expectations that don’t necessarily align with our own desires. Like Olive, I’ve often felt the weight of being “different” or not fitting the mold that others expect. The guilt Olive feels for not wanting children is something I’ve experienced too—although in a different context—when I’ve chosen to prioritize my career and personal passions over what others believe is the “right” path for me. Reading about Olive’s struggle with her decisions made me reflect on my own choices, the pressures I've faced, and the courage it takes to own your truth, even when it feels like the world is moving ahead without you.

This book isn't just about Olive’s story—it’s about all of us who feel like we’re navigating life out of step with the people around us. It’s a reminder that our paths don’t have to look the same and that the beauty of womanhood lies in its many forms. I wholeheartedly recommend this book, especially for those who feel they’re stuck in that #adulthood phase where everyone else seems to be charging forward while you’re standing still. This book will remind you that you’re not alone—and that there’s no one way to live a fulfilling life.