Monica Melchor -

My single favorite thing about moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for graduate school is living within a 10-minute walk from a great bookstore. Three bookstores, if you expand the radius by half a mile. On rough days, I console myself by marching up to the ever-enticing displays of my neighborhood bookshop. The covers are an invitation.

I have never had such mastery of the view outside my window before. There are the green slates of my rooftop, the streetlamp and the dull yellow light it emits starting at 6 p.m., the electric wires that droop downward, the handful of coconut trees that frame the house across the street, the silhouette of the Manila skyline in the distance.