Today, November 12th, Mexico celebrates National Book Day, chosen to honour Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the most extraordinary minds of the 17th century and a woman who changed the course of literature in Spanish.
Sor Juana was born in 1648 in a small village near Mexico City, and by her teens, she was already a scholar, philosopher, and poet whose brilliance intimidated men twice her age. When she entered a convent, it wasn’t out of pure devotion, but as an act of rebellion —it was the only place where a woman could read and write freely. Her library became her world, her survival, her form of resistance.
One of my favourite poems by her is “Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón…” (“Silly, you men-so very adept at wrongly faulting womankind…”). It begins with a voice that still feels startlingly modern, mocking the hypocrisy of men who condemn the very faults they provoke. But beneath its sharp wit, there’s a devastating tenderness: Sor Juana was writing not only about injustice, but about the frustration of being misunderstood in a world that punishes intelligence in women. It’s a poem I’ve carried since I first read it at school; it still burns like truth written centuries too early.
I think of her often —not only as a poet, but as a reader. Someone who devoured books in the same way many of us devour air. For her, every page was a declaration of freedom.
And maybe that’s why National Book Day in Mexico isn’t just a celebration of reading —it’s a quiet act of remembrance for all those who fought to think, to imagine, to keep a light alive in the dark.
For me, reading has always been a form of shelter, a way of understanding what it means to be human. A book doesn’t change the world directly —but it can change the way we see it. It rearranges something in us, small but irreversible. Today, I find myself thinking not only about the books I’ve loved, but about the ways in which they have loved me back — silently, patiently, as if they knew I’d return to them every time I needed to figure out who I am.
I grew up surrounded by words. Reading was not just a pastime but a way to exist, to find refuge and clarity. Among all the books that have marked my path, three voices have stayed with me like constellations I can always look up to: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Kundera’s novel came to me when I was in high school, when I was just beginning to imagine my first novel. It opened up a new way of seeing love — not as possession, but as surrender. I was captivated by the strange balance between tenderness and cruelty in his characters, by how each one carries their own private form of suffering. My favourite characters are Sabina, who seems to exist in a perpetual state of fleeing, and Karenin, the dog, whose quiet loyalty carries more love than any of the humans around him. There’s an image I will never forget: Teresa taking photographs in a destroyed city. It taught me that beauty doesn’t always perish in the ruins, and it insists on being seen. Reading Kundera also gave me an early glimpse into freedom — its weight, its danger, its cost — and how political silencing can reach even the most intimate corners of life.
Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha met me in a quieter time. I was following a thread through his works, one book leading into another, like a slow pilgrimage. This one made me feel at peace. It taught me to find meaning in simplicity — to understand that happiness doesn’t always arrive with a revelation, but with the calm of a river that keeps moving, even when no one is watching. It shaped the way I now think about impermanence: I am not in love with things or moments; I simply try to live them, to remember that everything passes, and that’s precisely what makes it beautiful. Memento mori.
Then came Dickens, with Great Expectations. It’s easy to think of it as Pip’s story, but I’ve always been drawn more to Estella. In my eyes, she is not a secondary character— she’s a girl shaped, and almost ruined, by someone else’s idea of what she should be. I recognise her: the woman told how to feel, what to desire, how to be loved. Her tragedy isn’t just that she can’t love Pip back, but that she was taught not to. I’ve known that feeling too — of being with a man who could not bear the idea that I had better grades in school, or that my first publications arrived before his success did. Society still asks women to be a certain kind of softness, and punishes those who refuse. The ending of Great Expectations breaks me every time; not because love is lost, but because illusion is.
Books have this power: to illuminate the rooms we didn’t know existed inside us. To show us that love can be surrender, that peace can be silence, that expectations can imprison or free us — depending on what we choose to hold onto.
So today, on National Book Day, I think of all the books I’ve loved as small mirrors. Each one reflected me differently at different times. Each one asked: who are you becoming now?
Alejandra Gotóo (Ciudad de México, 1991) estudió Lengua y Literatura Modernas Inglesas por la FFyL, de la UNAM. Después se aventuró a la maestría en Antropología Social, Universidad Iberoamericana. Su trabajo ha sido publicado en Chile, Colombia y Croacia, entre otros. En proyectos recientes ha explorado las intersecciones entre las experiencias de profesionales de la salud durante la pandemia de COVID-19. Realizó su investigación de posgrado sobre las vidas en la primera línea de batalla contra el virus. Su anhelo actual son las experiencias compartidas; las comprensiones mutuas. Durante sus elucubraciones encontró algo que antes no había logrado sentir de este modo, los cuerpos humanos, animales, y los espacios se entrelazan de una manera que podríamos sintetizar con la palabra paradoja. Ama a su perro peludo, el mathrock y el juguito de las satsumas.
