This August, we invite you to pause for reading. Reading is a way of listening to others and, in the process, finding ourselves again. In this selection, Vânia Sousa Lima, lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Psychology of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (FEP-UCP), recommends five books that explore identity, loss, laughter, and the restlessness of being human. The text below is authored by her.

 

Vânia Sousa Lima’s recommendations:

The development of alterity — the condition of being a person in relation (respecting oneself, the Other, and the relationship) — requires confrontation with diversity. Reading can support this process, as Natsukawa writes in The Cat Who Saved Books: “Books are full of human thoughts and feelings. People who suffer, people who are sad or happy, who laugh with joy. By reading the words and stories in books, by living them together, we learn about the hearts and minds of others beyond ourselves.”

And if it seems paradoxical to suggest readings when, in Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami reminds us that “if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you’ll only think what everyone else is thinking”, I still embrace the challenge of naming books I believe may contribute to becoming a person in relation — even if it means risking the situation António Lobo Antunes describes about Norman Mailer’s nightmare: “I had been dead for twenty years (...) and people were discussing my books. And I wanted to come back to life to tell them: ‘That’s not it at all!’”

 

4321 – Paul Auster

This novel by one of the most acclaimed American authors, who passed away last year, powerfully illustrates how different a person’s life can be depending on the various events that occur along the way. In the reciprocal and ongoing interplay between personal traits, individual choices, and contextual circumstances, the book reflects the multiplicity of developmental trajectories possible in an individual’s story and in the continuous construction of identity. While this notion permeates much of Paul Auster’s work, it is condensed in 4321: four books in one, multiple lives within the same characters — as Luigi Pirandello crafted in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand.

 

The Unquiet – Linn Ullmann

Valter Hugo Mãe writes in God in the Darkness that “when a father dies, at first all we see is fear”. In The Unquiet, Linn Ullmann revisits recorded conversations with her father, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, initially intended as material for a co-authored book about ageing and the inevitability of life’s end. Seven years after his death, and the obvious interruption of this shared project, Ullmann opens the box containing the recordings and confronts stories that are hers — whether personal or inherited. Immersed in memories from childhood, adolescence, and youth, this is a book about “the complexity of small things”, about family relationships, and about the longing expressed by Bergman to his daughter (then just two years old): that she would “always feel longing and hope, because we cannot live without longing”.

 

Range – David Epstein

Quoting psychologist Gary Marcus — “in real-world problems with multiple solutions, humans are still ahead of machines” — and studying the careers of professionals in various fields (sport, science, management, the arts), David Epstein makes a compelling case (supported, illustrated, and critically examined) for generalist and transferable knowledge. This approach, he argues, leads to greater flexibility, adaptability, and creativity than early specialisation. The potential and value of engaging in a diversity of activities as a driver for personal and professional development is well reflected in this book, through the exploration of the many “possible selves” with whom, as in Dostoyevsky’s works, we may dialogue.

 

Is This Anything? – Jerry Seinfeld

At a time when the boundaries of humour are being re-examined, a book with a question as its title — compiling material from five decades of stand-up comedy by famed American comedian Jerry Seinfeld — may offer an interesting contribution to the conversation. As the author notes, “the audience decides” whether something is funny, despite the paradox that, if the audience could create something humorous themselves, they wouldn’t need to go to a comedy club. Pope Francis’s idea that “a sense of humour humanises us”, even in our imperfections, echoes Seinfeld’s closing acknowledgements in the book: “The real meaning of our lives is that (…) we never stop trying.” Or, as Portuguese singer Jorge Palma puts it, “As long as there’s road ahead, we’ll keep going.” And I do think that’s funny.

 

Selected Poems – Mia Couto

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee writes through his protagonist: “in my experience, poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all.” Mia Couto, though an award-winning novelist, short story writer and essayist, claims to “come from poetry”. In Selected Poems, he brings together a personal selection from Idades Cidades Divindades, Raiz de Orvalho e Outros Poemas, and Tradutor de Chuvas. If poetry is “a beautiful mistake” and, as Maria Rosário Pedreira writes in The Song of the Wind in the Cypresses, “it is in the moment that captures the beauty of a gesture | that life is prolonged”, then this collection — written in European Portuguese and published in Brazil — offers a beautiful prolongation of this Mozambican author’s poetic “mistake”.