100 Books Like Juggling Truths

My home village of Serowe is a place I find fascinating for its history, its culture, its people and their peculiar mix of self-regard and obeisance. Bessie Head, a writer who has had the most influence on my work, was a great chronicler of Serowe throughout her oeuvre of brilliant novels and short stories. But it is this book, a mix of social and oral history, and interviews with the inhabitants of Serowe (of different races, cultures, and classes), that really has my heart.

Covering various historical eras and years spanning from 1875 to around 1963, the book’s subjects ran the gamut from the reign of Khama the Great to the origins of the green milking rubber hedge that is still ubiquitous in the village today. 

I love a classic tale of forbidden love, and this book explores love across class lines and across traditional Tswana values and modern values: a poor, uneducated boy who fled his family cattlepost and escaped to Gaborone, where he falls in love with the privately educated daughter of a retired diplomat.

What I love about this book, too, is how it provides a portrait of Gaborone at a certain time (the book was published in 1981) and the various people who made the city their home—upwardly mobile Batswana, political refugees from both Botswana and South Africa, diamond smugglers, officers from the colonial government and as the rural wide-eyed boy observes, “men wearing women’s attire and vice-versa…unbelievably high heels on both men and women.” 

I love short stories for all the meaning, depth, substance, and sense of a full life they can reveal in a few short pages, and these short stories by Wame Molefhe do just that.

They are intimate and lovely, and in elegant prose, they reveal women in the thick of life, caught in treacherous circumstances, solitarily mourning extramarital lovers, mourning same-sex love they were not brave enough to pursue, mourning a best friend who might have had an affair with one’s husband thus exposing her to disease.

The characters' names recur in most of the stories, though each character is different, navigating a different set of circumstances. The effect is of intimacy, of encountering and re-encountering relatives or friends around the corner, at the supermarket, at a funeral, or a wedding. 

“In Africa, you want more, I think.” So goes the first line of this sprawling and complex novel by the American writer Norman Rush. The version of me who has had to read countless broad and sweeping generalisations about my country and my continent was alert upon first reading this line. Suspicious and vigilant; ready to slam the book closed at any nefarious stereotypes. But I confess that the narrator’s voice—the funny, wry, intellectual and calculating voice of an American anthropology student obsessed with a celebrated American anthropologist attempting to build a utopian matriarchal society in the Kgalagadi desert—swept my defenses aside. 

The book is expansive and comic, and also serious about relationships between men and women, courtship, love, social movements and Southern African politics. A sequence early in the book in which the narrator is reduced to weeping at the beauty of the Victoria Falls and lamenting her lack… show more.

I will never pass up an opportunity to discuss one of Zack Smedley’s books. This one is one of the most beautiful, truthful, and book-hangover-inducing stories I have ever enjoyed reading.

Its narrator, a boy struggling to tell and come to terms with a difficult truth, will live in my heart and mind forever. I advise people to check for content warnings, as Smedley’s work never fails to leave me an emotional wreck.

These 3 continuous comics from 1966 (Fantastic Four #48-50) were a master class in creativity for me, even before I started out as an artist.

I grew up an avid collector of Marvel comics in the 60s, in Taiwan, where they were not for sale anywhere, and I had to scrounge and search the streets of Taipei for used copies.

I accumulated a massive collection that I later sold for a Martin guitar. These 3 continuous comics from 1966 were a master class in creativity for me even before I started out as an artist.

They taught me: how to tell a story brilliantly; how to embed a twist in the inner core of the story: the villain Galactus, who has the power to destroy Earth, is just another guy who is tending to his needs – he is hungry, and Earth can provide a meal for him. Wow. What… show more.

I was absolutely hooked by the theme of chaotic teenage girldom and hilariously relatable characters, but the thoughtful discussions centering on disability and identity were simply fabulous!

I greatly enjoyed the portrayal of universal feelings of youth—confusion, longing for adventure, and a quest for meaning. The protagonist, who is autistic and Palestinian, highlights representation the world desperately needs more of.

Thomas Covernant is a leper shunned by society but finds himself in the Land where some herald him as the one who’ll save them from an evil sorcerer, Lord Foul. He is not always a sympathetic character, but being on society’s edge where all and sundry openly shun him can do that to anyone.

What I loved the most was the captivating Land with its many peoples and inhabitants, such as the sentient woods and the Forestals that ward them, the Elohim, a benign people with special powers, the Giants and the evil Viles, Waynhim, and ur-viles.

Outside being exotic, the world feels credible and immersive, especially the “wild magic” Covernant begins to wield. I ended up caring passionately about what happened to the Land and wanting Covernant to acknowledge his worth.

Every story belongs to a genre and genre is a part of story development. I found this book to be the best available explaining what genres are and how they work to support the process of story development.

Truby’s book lays out each major story genre, its beats, dynamics, and place in the world of storytelling. This is an essential reference every writer needs on their bookshelf.

Here’s another fantasy I didn’t know I had until I listened to this fabulous audiobook: to be neighbors with the great Chef, Julia Child. Not only that, to solve crimes with her!

Tabitha Knight has arrived in post-World War II Paris from Detroit for an extended stay with her French grandfather. She’s on a journey of discovery and about to get mixed up in a murder investigation.

Mysteries are my favorite genre, especially cozy mysteries focused on a topic and places I’d love to visit. This book combines some of my favorite things: cooking, France, and did I mention Julia Child?