May Book Recommendations
By Rafa Horle
You’ll often hear people who love reading describe its ability to transport them to different worlds, and while that is certainly true, I’ve always been drawn to books for a different reason. The books that stay with me are the ones that reveal parts of my inner world back to me, the ones that describe feelings I’ve always had but never fully understood. I don’t read to escape myself; I read to understand myself.
As the spring and summer time roll around, I’ve found myself drawn to books that reflect on the joys and melancholy of being a young woman traveling through Europe while trying to understand where they fit in the world. Here are a few that have stayed with me!
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Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Whenever anyone asks for book recommendations, I always implore them to read Stefan Zweig. I will never cease to be impressed by how he was able to capture feelings and thoughts so innately human that decades after they were written remain relatable. This novel, in particular, follows a young Austrian girl who, for the first time in her life, experiences the pleasures of frivolity and gains the freedom to reflect on who she is and what she truly wants, rather than moving mechanically through the routines of her mundane existence.
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Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Armin
While T.S. Eliot may have believed April to be the cruelest month of all, this book offers the very opposite. Written in the 1920’s, the novel follows four women from vastly different walks of life who meet while renting a beautiful castle in Italy for April. April. Each arrives emotionally hardened or dulled by the routines and disappointments of life, and the trip gradually allows them to rediscover a softer, more joyful version of themselves. Though not without its flaws, many of which reflect the era in which it was written, the novel feels like a delizia al limone in book form.
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
While this may seem like a departure from my other recommendations, I couldn’t in good conscience write a list of books without including at least one romantic gothic novel. I also wanted to include this one because the protagonist is so deeply relatable. Who wouldn’t be swept off their feet by a handsome millionaire in Monte Carlo and begin to believe that his approval meant something, that it somehow made them special? And who among us hasn’t tirelessly compared ourselves to someone we perceive as the picture of perfection, an ideal we can never reach but remain haunted by? Perhaps we may not be plagued by these thoughts in Manderlay quite like the novel’s protagonist, but we’ve all had them nonetheless.