Book 27 for 2026: “Mother Mary Comes To Me”, Arundhati Roy

July 2, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Although Roy has written numerous books including the Booker Prize winning “The God of Small Things”, this is her first memoir. While the prose is easy to read, the subject matter is often heart wrenching. Roy’s mother, a single parent (divorced) in India when this was totally unacceptable, accomplishes remarkable achievements including the founding of a very successful school while acting what often seems very cruel as a mother to her two children, Arundhati and her brother. The mother’s treatment of Arundhati is so disturbing that when she is just 18 and in her third year of architecture school in Delhi, she quits going home to Kerala to see her mother and quits communicating with her for seven years. Yet, she admits to loving her mother irrationally.

Arundhati becomes involved in documentary film making, sometimes as writer and sometimes as an actor in the films. In addition to her activities as a writer and film maker, she becomes an ardent political activist against rising Hindu nationalism. She provides details of spending time with hunted activists in the jungle, getting arrested, and even tried for writing a piece the judiciary considered insulting. This is an unusually honest and intimate memoir about her family, her mother, and life and politics in India.

Book 26 for 2026: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, Kiran Desai

June 25, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

By an author whose previous novel won the Booker Prize, this novel was long listed for the most recent Booker Prize. Although 670 pages long, it did not take me as long as I expected to read this because I found I kept going because I wanted to know what was going to occur. It is the tale of two families and two young people, both of whom have studied and lived in the United States. The background city for both families is the Indian city of Allahabad. The two, retired, family patriarchs get together frequently to play chess even though their families are sometimes rivals for status and influence.. The two do not live far apart and all the older family members know each other, including those who have moved away to Delhi and other places. The youngest members do not know each other and accidentally meet on an overnight train. At that point they do not know that their two grandparents had tried to match make them in an arranged marriage. Later, this becomes an embarrassment.

Sonia wants to become a novelist and is attending college at a small liberal arts college in New England where she becomes involved with a famous but cruel artist who becomes obsessed with her and whose influence she has become unable to escape, initially literally and later psychologically. Sunny lives and wants to stay in NYC to escape the overbearing influence of his mother and the violence between her and the two brothers of her deceased husband.

Not wanting to reveal all the complexities of the lives of these two young people who come to love each other but whose lives keep tearing them apart and the challenges they face as they try to make sense of their lives, I will simply say this is a novel I recommend. The reader learns a lot of about Indian culture and its variances, about the huge differences among different parts of India, e.g. Goa and Delhi, but also how universal family and personal struggles really are.

One Book a Week-52: “Small Things Like These”, Claire Keegan

December 13, 2023 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This book was short listed for the Booker Prize in 2022. It is short (116 pages) and simply written. It illustrates the life of a small businessman in Ireland who delivers coal for heating to both homes and businesses. One of his customers is the local convent which houses young, unwed, pregnant women and their babies. To make money for the convent these young women are forced to do laundry under dire circumstances. While delivering coal one day, he discovers something that disturbs him so much, it changes his life.

The book is dedicated to the women and children who suffered in these Magdalen laundries. The last of these horrible places was not shut down until 1996. Estimates as to the number of young women subjugated to forced labor varies between 10,000 to 30,000. The number of women and babies who died in these places is unknown.

Note: At the beginning of 2023, I created a goal of reading at least one book per week. I am slightly ahead since the above is no. 52. I probably will get to at least 54 because nearly finished with another book. Now I have to decide whether to continues this goal into 2024.

One Book a Week-16, “The Promise”, Damon Galgut

April 17, 2023 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, this novel illustrates the dismal consequences of colonialism and racism. South Africa before and after apartheid comes alive in this story about an Afrikaner family whose matriarch dies young enough to leave her husband with three children, only one of whom is old enough to be on his own. In her dying, she returns to her Jewish roots much to the horror of her husband and many others. Her youngest daughter overhears her dying wish which her husband promises to fulfill even though he has no intention of doing so. This remains an underlying thread, the promise which this daughter never forgets.

The difficult, often prejudiced and unequal, relations between the races underpins the actions of most of the characters, leading a few to greater humanity and kindness, but most into lives of loss, disappointment, and anger.

One Book a Week-12: The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

March 31, 2023March 31, 2023 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

The immeasurable horrors of slavery and the immediate years after come excruciatingly alive in this novel. Decent white people help recently freed brothers but at a terrible price. A “forbidden” romance between two Confederate soldiers highlights the destructiveness of class and hatred. Yet, in spite of the despair and cruelty, resilience, decency, and tenderness prevail in the end. Long listed for the Booker Prize, this detailed and beautifully written novel remains true to some of the most painful parts of US history.