'Light' in novel title adds shimmer and mystery -- please add to the list

There's a shimmery quality to novels with the word "Light" in the title.

The title of Anthony Doerr's recent, "All the Light We Cannot See," a World War II love story, captured my imagination and ran through my head for weeks after its stunning debut.

I look forward to North Carolinian David Joy's 2015 novel with another mysterious title: "Where All Light Tends to Go." Where does all light tend to go?

A few more titles of novels with the word Light:

1. "Light in August," William Faulkner's 1932 novel,
the 7th of his 19, sometimes called his Great American Novel.

2. "The Light in the Piazza," Chapel Hill resident Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella about a mother and daughter on a lark-turns-dark vacation in Italy. Later made into a 1962 film.

3. "Light Years," James Salter's 1975 portrait of a marriage, hailed as his masterpiece.

4. "How the Light Gets In," Louise Penny's 2013 novel, the ninth in a series starring inspector Armand Gamache, is a counterpoint to David Joy's title. (Penny's title is from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" -- "There's a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in."


5. "The Light and the Dark," by Russia's most celebrated writer Mikhail Shishkin, is a series of letters between a man at war and a woman on the home front.

6. "Claire of the Sea Light," by Edwidge Danticat, is narrated by a 7-year-old Haitian girl whose mother dies giving birth to her.

7. "The Light Between Oceans," a 2013 debut novel by London lawyer M.L. Stedman, is about a childless couple in an Australian outpost.


8. "Mirror and the Light" is Hilary Mantel's sequel to "Wolf Hall" and "Bringing up the Bodies," due in 2015.
 
So tell me: What titles have I overlooked?

U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright: 'Nothing Prepares the Brain'

I have a document in my home computer that I've named "Brilliant Lines." These are lines of poetry

I've typed in from favorite collections on my shelves. When Davidson graduate Charles Wright

was named U.S. Poet Laureate last week, I opened that file and was not surprised to see

that almost half the "brilliant lines" are from his collections.

Wright majored in history at Davidson, and he's told interviewers over the years

that he wanted to write fiction in college -- his mother had dated one of William Faulkner's

brothers -- but Wright discovered he was likely the only Southerner who couldn't tell a story.

When Wright was in Italy, he happened on "The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound," and,

as he once told the Paris Review, "I discovered a form that seemed suited to my mental

and emotional inclinations—the lyric poem, a form, or subgenre, I guess, that didn’t depend

on a narrative structure, but on an imagistic one, an associational one. 'Gists

and piths,' as they say, instead of the intricacy of narrative a line."

Here are some lines of Wright's from my "Brilliant Lines" file: 

Nothing prepares the brain 

        for the heavy changes in the heart. 

Nothing prepares the soul for metaphor’s sleight-of-hand.

Nothing prepares the left hand -- luminous twin -- for the sins

    of the right. 

Nothing prepares the absence of pain for the presence of pain. 

Nothing prepares what is for what’s not. 

“Night Rider,” from the collection, “A Short History of the Shadow" 

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