Book 40 for 2026: “Homegoing”, Yaa Gyasi

October 9, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

The history of Ghana from the 18th century through the slave trade and the into what occurs to the descendants of two sisters.

Effia and Eli are two half sisters who never met. Effia is married off to a prominent Englishman in what later became Ghana during the time of the slave trade. She lives in comparative luxury at Cape Coast Castle. Meanwhile her sister, Esi, has been captured and is in the dungeon under the castle waiting to be transported. She is shipped off to the United States where her children and grandchildren will endure slavery, later work in the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, and eventually make it to Harlem.

The son of Effia and the Englishman is sent off to England for his education. Later, he and his descendants will endure the warfare between the Asante and the Fante tribes as they battle each other for power in the slave trade and resist colonization. Eventually, the Asante fight the English and lose. One of Effia’s descendants becomes a school teacher in what is now Ghana and eventually makes it to the United States where he is a professor at a community college.

This novel presents details of events in the slave trade and what happens to families through the centuries that follow. Without reading a detailed history book, this novel enables the reader to learn a lot of history through the lives of these two half sisters.

Book 39 for 2026: “Men Without Women”, Haruki Murakami

October 2, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Unlike all the other books by this author which I have read, this is a collection of seven short stories. Most of his fiction includes bars, coffee shops, jazz music, and libraries. Sometimes a library is even almost a character. None of these stories contains anything about a library which surprised me. The main characters vary from a lovesick doctor who is sure he would never love a woman but just enjoyed long affairs with them until…; a man who lives in a small apartment and cannot leave so the government has assigned a special woman, a nurse, whose job is to shop for him, acquire books he wants to read, and service his sexual needs; a bar owner who suddenly has strange snakes show up in the tree outside his bar and receives a message regarding what he must do; an actor whose wife has died and he has to hire a driver who happens to be a young woman who says very little; others are lonely men who think they are fine, but are they in reality?

While most of the stories are about men who seem to be perfectly normal men, events occur, and things are said and done which makes the reader think about what is and what is not normal? Who defines normal?

Evil

September 28, 2026September 28, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Today I participated in something called Black Out Poetry. I had never heard this term before. In this case, everyone picked a magazine, opened it up, found an article, and were told to black out whatever did not speak to you or you thought unimportant, etc. and create a poem from what was left. The magazine I picked up was published in early 2002; all the articles focused on 9/11 and its ongoing aftermath. Articles about evil, its nature, who is and who is not, and how to react to evil dominated. This is the poem I created after blacking out almost all of one article.

The human capacity to create hell haunts our dreams.

We knew the Holocaust, Pol Pot, Middle Passage, Trail of Tears,

horrors.

Wakeup-evil deeds touch our lives. Terror spreads.

Evil is the assertion of self–

treating people like things,

forgetfulness of our better selves, of sacred creation,

of life as an ultimate value.

We live in a tragic world; But

there are creative, healing forces:

the power of Love,

the power to seek Justice,

the power to celebrate Beauty.

Book 37 for 2026: “Women Without Men”, Shahrnush Parsipur

September 9, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Shahrnush Parsipur, a renowned Iranian writer, died this summer at the age of 80. In Iran her fiction was considered subversive, so much so that she was imprisoned repeatedly (one time for nearly five years) by both the Shah and the Islamic Republic. This year, this novel, Women Without Men, was published for the first time in the UK and was long listed for the Booker Prize. Her prison memoir will be published in 2027.

“Women Without Men” is set in Tehran during the 1953 coup d’stat. It links the stories of five women who seek refuge from patriarchal oppression in a garden. However, before they “find” the garden, their varied lives from upper class to prostitute to rural peasant demonstrate the hypocrisy and oppression toward women in Iran. This novel, like several other Iranian novels I have read, contains elements of magical realism, e.g. mind reading and the ability to fly. Much of the novel also contains elements of satire. I found myself laughing .

With the exception of a somewhat eccentric gardener, the men in the novel are not portrayed in a very favorable light. For example, one 40 year old man insists on marrying a much younger woman because he thinks she must be a virgin and chaste and rejects an older woman who actually cares for him. The real virgin is the older woman, not the one he marries.

Although the novel focuses on Iranian society, many of the themes apply worldwide wherever there are issues of class, women’s rights, oppression of the poor, etc.

I Live in Beauty on the Rim

August 29, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A number of years ago I lived on a canyon rim in the Panhandle of Texas, a side canyon to Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the country. I wrote this poem when I lived there.

The canyon edge looms out my bedroom windows,

pale adobe, stark.

Fall to death or serious injury.

I will not fall; I love living on the edge.

Rain brings a one hundred foot deluge,

roar of water, red adobe, cascading, screaming.

Someone said my house is pink; it is not pink.

Color of canyon, worldwide color,

Moroccan, Pueblo, Saudi, Mali, Navaho, Timbuktu,

desert alive and lovely.

Everywhere.

Three bucks watch me through my bedroom windows.

They see me move; they stare.

Isabella stands, rigid, watching…what?

I kneel to her level, follow her eyes.

Bobcat casually climbs the canyon wall, impervious.

He marks the juniper tree, walks a deer path,

disappears, secretive, rarely seen.

The huge hoot owl’s voice echoes down the canyon,

drifting into my dreams.

A young roadrunner calls, scratchy voice,

running across the patio–on the edge.

In spring the mocking bird sings all night,

“This is my territory.”

I sing all year, full of joy!

Is the Problem Young People Are Having Global?

August 22, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Earlier today I am sitting in a coffee shop in Claremont, California, drinking horchata and eating tiny donuts, a specialty of this shop. I look around and realize I must be at least 4 times older than the average age of most of the other customers–it is a college town. Three library books form a stack in front of me as I decide which one to open first. I pick up “Supersaurio” by Meryem El Mehdati, a young author who was born in Morocco but lives in the largest of the Canary Islands which is the setting of this, her first novel.

The main character is also named Meryem, just like the author. She is twenty five, a college graduate, unable to find the job of her dreams so she is stuck in an internship at the largest super market chain in the Canary Islands. She hates her boss, finds her job dreadfully boring, and wonders if life is worth it, if she would choose to be born if she had a choice. “I’m not at all what I thought I’d grown up to be. I was convinced I would…succeed. That I’d become a financially independent adult.” She’s not. “I for one don’t know where heaven is anymore, or hell.” I’ve gleaned all this in just the first seven pages as I sit here watching all these young people getting their drinks and others on their computers or chatting. The nearby Claremont Colleges are top colleges with high tuitions. I’ve heard the news, heard young people comment, their frustrations. Yesterday, on the news I heard a young woman from a good college in the Southeast with an electrical engineering degree and good grades say she had sent out over 400 applications and nothing. She’s wondering if AI is a factor. Then they interviewed some top professor who had no advice except for her to hang in there. Really. Is this supposed to make her feel better? On another bit of news I heard that 25% of those looking for employment have been looking for at least six months.

What stuck me is this: If I did not know the setting for this novel is in the Canary Islands, I would have thought it is in the US. It sounds exactly like what I hear on the news, from individual young people. What will the future hold for them and not just in the US, globally?

Book 32 for 2026: “Together Tea”, Marjan Kamali

August 6, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

The previous book I read is the author’s most recent novel. This one is her first novel published in 2013. Like the Lion Women novel, this one tells the story of Iranian families. When the novel begins in 1996, an Iranian couple who have lived in NYC for decades are trying to find a man for their daughter to marry. Well, the mother is, not so much the father, who is a successful doctor. He has adapted very well to the US, is into self help books, optimistic and enthusiastic. Although she has a job she likes, she misses Iran.

Part II begins in 1978 when their children are younger–they have two older sons and a younger daughter–and the Shah’s power is crumbling but its sequence is in question. Some of their relatives suddenly become so religious that they hardly recognize them. Then the revolution occurs, their daughter’s school has become all girls with mandatory hijab. Then the Iran/Iraq war occurs and the grandmother is killed by an Iraqi bomb while out buying pomegranates. They cover their windows with aluminum foil so Iraqi pilots cannot see the lights in houses. Finally, in desperation they leave for NYC after medical colleagues the father knows in NYC help them find a place there. While studying to take the test for his US medical license the dad works in a pizza parlor making pizza.

Then back to 1996, the daughter, Mina, decides she needs to visit Iran even though her father does everything he can to dissuade her. Mother, who still misses Iran and her family there, decides it is ok if she goes too. This part of the novel relates their visit to Iran, Mina’s reconnecting to her best friend who never left, how people there manage to live double lives with parties, Western clothes, and alcohol at home, but hijab and conservative behavior in public, including avoiding the morality police.

Like her other novel, this one is a good way to learn recent Iranian history while learning about Iranian food, family, friendship, love, and every day life.

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.

Books 15 and 16 for 2026: “The Wrong End of the Telescope” and “The True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)”, Rabih Alameddine

April 3, 2026 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This award winning author has a writing style all his own–both serious and very funny. How anyone can make serious topics so entertainingly funny is a unique gift. The setting of the first is the island of Lesbos when masses of Syrian and other refugees are landing and many NGOs go there to help the refugees. Mina Simpson is a Lebanese American doctor who goes on a two week trip there to help a friend who works for an NGO. Mina is a trans woman who has been rejected by all her Lebanese family except one brother with whom she is very close. He goes there to meet her. This is also the story of a refugee family, the mother of whom is dying from cancer, her small children, her husband, and the NGO people and others who do everything to help this family.

The second is his most recent novel and tells the life story of a philosophy teacher in Beirut. It starts in Beirut in 2023 then goes back to the Covid pandemic and the banking collapse in Lebanon from 2001 to 2021. Then it skips back to his childhood in 1960 to 1975, the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, and later to the port explosion that destroyed much of Beirut. This novel is Lebanese history from the viewpoint of this main character. We learn all about his mother, her best friend who seems to be some kind on international criminal gang leader, some of his students, classmates, and others. While much of it relates horrors of living in dire circumstances, it is also very funny. I found myself frequently laughing.

Note: I enjoyed these two books so much that I intend to read other novels by this author.