Book Two for 2025: “Memory Wall Stories”, Anthony Doerr

January 13, 2025 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

While wandering around in the library, I found this book. His two more recent novels, ” All the Light We Cannot See” and “Cloud Cuckoo Land” remain two of the most touching and fascinating novels I have ever read so decided to try what he started with, short stories. These stories do not disappoint.

The title of the book comes from the first of the stories. It is a combination of science fiction and paleontology. Via an operation to his head a young boy in South Africa possesses the memories of an old woman. Through her memories he learns of a her deceased husband’s interest in rocks and fossils. This allows him to make a discovery that changes lives. In the next story, due to the death of her parents, a young girl in Kansas has to move to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and makes a myth come true. The following story, “Village 113”, won the O. Henry Prize. It details what happens to one woman, a keeper of seeds for an entire village, when the Three Gorges Dam was built in China. Another story tells what happens to a couple in Wyoming when they desperately want a child but cannot conceive. The shortest of the stories, “The Demilitarized Zone”, is well about that–sort of. The final story, like several others, is about memory, in this case the memories of a Holocaust survivor, who like many who survive horrible events when others they know do not, wonders why her.

I liked these stories so much that I ordered his earlier collection of short stories, “The Shell Collector.” He has won the O. Henry Prize for short stories five times and the Pulitzer for “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in 2015. I keep wondering how he knows so much about so many places. His short stories and novels are set in countries all over the world. The research must never end.

A New Year

January 1, 2025 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

On this new day in a new year

I want you to promise yourself to

-laugh when you see the sunrise

-dance in the moonlight even if you

think you cannot dance

-remember your best day ever, then

make a new best day

-hug your loved ones, tell them you

love them

-walk in nature, touch a flower.

A new year brings no promises.

The world contains too much violence, hate.

Yet you, yes, you your precious self

can transform the world,

project joy where you think there is none,

bring laughter somewhere, sometime,

reach out to others,

send positive vibrations into the universe.

You can make a difference,

make the world a better place.

Book 45 for 2024: “How To Stop Time”, Matt Haig

December 4, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

What would your life be like if you did not age like everyone else? How would others treat you, your family? Would they kill your mother because they think she is a witch? Could you love someone who grew old while you stayed young? Would you have to move all over the world to avoid detection?

These are the issue the narrator faces because unlike ordinary people, he does not age normally. At the beginning he is living in London as a forty-one year old history teacher but has been alive for centuries. He’s met Shakespeare, travelled the oceans with Captain Cook, and played piano at clubs in Paris.

One organization, the Albatross Society, hunts down and “protects” people like him. Their leader has one rule: do not fall in love. He is also convinced that certain groups want to find these non-agers and imprison them for research. What is factual, real? Does life have meaning without love?

Book 22 for 2024: “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, Mohsin Hamid

May 22, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Written in an unusual style, the narrator, the main character, tells his story to an American visiting Pakistan. While they are sitting eating dinner and later walk to a hotel, the narrator relates his life as an immigrant who found US life too shallow, too focused on profit. The narrator, a young, Pakistani man with an Ivy League degree, attains the heights of success in the US, working in a highly desirable career position where he is the star. After 9/11 occurs, he questions who he is, what working in this sought after career means, whether it is even ethical to work in a position for a firm whose job it is to investigate companies, their profits, and ruin the lives of the people who work there. He is sent to Chile to investigate a literary firm, meets the manager who takes him under his wing and helps him look at what he is doing in a totally different light. Is money everything? Do the lives of ordinary workers matter? In addition, it is a love story. He meets a beautiful, young, wealthy, US woman, they develop a close friendship, and he discovers she is not mentally stable and does everything he can to help her.

While on the surface this appears to be a story of a young immigrant who does not ultimately fit in with US life, it is much more. It raises the questions of the definition of success, of what love is, of profit over humanity.

Book 20 for 2024: “The Midnight Library”, Matt Haig

May 10, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Regrets and depression seem to have overwhelmed the main character, Nora. She’s lost her job, a car ran over her cat, she thinks she has failed at everything, and she says she wants to die. But does she really. Through a series of parallel universe experiences she gets to try out many different lives based on her long list of regrets. None really work because none of them exemplify her real self. She thinks she might like this new life or that new life, but none fulfill her, reflect her true self. She learns that money, fame, riches are not necessarily the answer. But what is the answer? What is the best way to live?

Book 15 for 2024: “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”, Muriel Barbery

April 3, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Before reading this book, I thought of French society as relatively egalitarian. Apparently, it is not if this book mirrors reality. One main character Renee, 54, lives and works as a concierge in a high class building containing eight, large, luxury apartments which the residents own. As she tells her story, she notes that this is her 27th year at this job. She describes herself as “short, ugly, plump”. She rarely says anything nice about herself or any of the residents. She notes she is uneducated, insignificant. She has one friend, Manuela, a cleaning woman originally from Portugal. Renee thinks it is her duty, her lot in life, to pretend to be something she is really not, a person totally lacking in intellectual and artistic acumen. She runs the television to make the residents think she watches mindless melodramas when she is actually reading Tolstoy as well as all sorts of literature and Marx, history, well every genre. After all, her cat is named Leo for a reason. She goes to art galleries, listens to all sorts of classical music, is basically an intellectual in the true meaning of the word, but works very hard to hide this, because she thinks she must stick to her station in life as she sees it. This works until one resident dies and a wealthy Japanese man buys the deceased man’s apartment. Both he, who notes her cat is named Leo, and a young girl, the other main character who lives in one of the apartments and plans to commit suicide and set their apartment on fire, suspect Renee is not as she appears to be. I do not want to give it all away, but this is a book with many life lessons, including that adage about not judging a book by its cover.

One Book a Week-48: “The Buried Giant”, Kazuo Ishiguro

November 24, 2023 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This is not the easiest book to read in many ways. Its setting is not long after the death of mythical King Arthur. Main characters include an elderly couple who have left their home to search for their long lost son, an aged knight supposedly Sir Gawain, a dragon monster, a “gifted” older child, and a Saxon warrior. Some of them are Britons and some are Saxons, and in some cases they view each other as arch enemies. There is a monastery with both good and evil monks, a tunnel, lots of forests and mountains, rivers, and a lake where a boatman ferries people to an island–perhaps the residence of the afterlife. The potential symbolism is endless if the reader is into symbolism. The dragon monster has created an endless fog which dulls the long term memory of the humans. The elderly couple want to get rid of the monster so they can repair their memories, but will this really be a good thing. That is one of the main questions in the book. Most analyses of the symbolism say the buried giant is the dragon, but I think it is the buried memories of everyone, but especially the elderly couple, who are desperate to recover their memories.

One Book a Week-9: “Flights”, Olga Tokarczuk

February 27, 2023 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

How to describe this unusual novel? Here’s a possible list:

-No over all plot.

-Several stories about individuals scattered throughout, e.g. read about a person and event, then many pages later back to that person and the consequences of the event(s).

-Short philosophical musings/vignettes interspersed here and there. One reviewer counted 116.

-One common theme relates to the title, Flights, in that in most of the “stories” people are traveling or have traveled on quests for “meaning” or escape from a cumbersome reality.

I learned the following from reading this book:

-Per his request Chopin’s heart was taken from his body. His body was buried in Paris but his sister secretly transported his heart in a jar of special preservation liquid back to Poland, the land of his birth.

-A Dutch anatomist discovered the Achilles tendon after dissecting his own amputated leg.

-Plastination is the method used in anatomy to preserve bodies and body parts. Several characters in the book make their living or are obsessed with this process.

This is not a book for those who prefer relaxing reading or for the “faint of heart”.

Note: The author won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2018. This book won the Mann Booker for translated literature from all over earth in 2018. I plan to read another of her books–have now read two of them–but since the other one in English is 1000 pages long rather guess it might take more than a week for me to read it. This is actually the 11th book I have read to date in 2023 but did not start blogging about them so two are missing in the blog posts,