My reads of three years ago were diverse as ever and comprised three contemporary and two classical works of literature from the pens of female and male writers from Europe and the Americas. The first two were The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey and The Pope’s Daughter by en-Nobel-ed writer Dario Fo, namely biographical novels bringing to life Austrian fin-de-siècle painter Gustav Klimt and the much defamed beauty Lucrezia Borgia from Renaissance Italy respectively. The short-story collection The Country Road by forgotten writer Regina Ullmann took me on a trip across rural Switzerland of the 1920s, while The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary, an award-winning French classic from the 1950s set in Africa, advocated the protection of wild life and more generally of the environment. Finally, I got absorbed in a fictitious Brazilian painter’s arbitrary train of thoughts running through the pages of non-narrative Água Viva by Clarice Lispector.