Reading Time: 5 minutes

Weekend Watch & Read

Welcome to Weekend Watch & Read, your Friday guide to what everyone is talking about before the weekend begins.

So pour yourself a cup of coffee, settle into your favorite chair, and see what the rest of the world is watching, what readers are buying, and what one retired American living in Brazil thinks deserves a little more attention. Your weekend entertainment starts here.

Netflix Top 10 TV Shows

United States — Week of September 14–20, 2026

Rank	TV Show
1	Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story: Season 1
2	Crew Girl: Season 1
3	Jo Koy: Blue in the Face
4	Raw: 2026 – September 14, 2026
5	The Perfect Lie: Season 1
6	I Survived a Serial Killer: Season 1
7	Death of the Pastor’s Wife: Season 1
8	Gabby’s Dollhouse: Season 14
9	The Gentlemen: Season 2
10	Danny Go!: Season 2

Brazil — Week of September 14–20, 2026

Rank	TV Show
1	Crew Girl: Season 1
2	Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story: Season 1
3	My Name Is Farah: Season 2
4	Not a Stranger: Season 1
5	Gabby’s Dollhouse: Season 14
6	My Name Is Farah: Season 1
7	The Perfect Lie: Season 1
8	The Early Spring: Season 1
9	The Mentalist: Season 1
10	The Gentlemen: Season 2

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New York Times Best Sellers

Latest official weekly list: September 20, 2026

Hardcover Fiction

Rank	Book	Author
1	The Knave and the Moon	Rachel Gillig
2	The Calamity Club	Kathryn Stockett
3	The Most Dangerous Games	MrBeast and James Patterson
4	Yesteryear	Caro Claire Burke
5	The Disappearers	Marlon James
6	Whistler	Ann Patchett
7	Big Little Truths	Liane Moriarty
8	The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook	Matt Dinniman
9	Scion	James Islington
10	Dungeon Crawler Carl	Matt Dinniman

Hardcover Nonfiction

Rank	Book	Author
1	This Is Me	Hayden Panettiere
2	American Scoundrel	Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
3	Regime Change	Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
4	Going Further	Ted Cruz
5	Let Us Do Good	Frank Siller
6	The Final Solution to the Jewish Question	Dara Horn
7	Star of the Show	Dolly Parton with Tom Roland
8	Strangers	Belle Burden
9	London Falling	Patrick Radden Keefe
10	The Nerd Reich	Gil Durán

Paperback Trade Fiction

Rank	Book	Author
1	Theo of Golden	Allen Levi
2	Brain Damage	Freida McFadden
3	Dungeon Crawler Carl	Matt Dinniman
4	Project Hail Mary	Andy Weir
5	Wild Dark Shore	Charlotte McConaghy
6	Verity	Colleen Hoover
7	My Dreadful Darling	H.D. Carlton
8	Carl’s Doomsday Scenario	Matt Dinniman
9	The Wedding People	Alison Espach
10	Red Rising	Pierce Brown

How-To & Miscellaneous

Rank	Book	Author
1	Everyday Eats	Alex Snodgrass
2	The Let Them Theory	Mel Robbins
3	Too Sensitive	Sasha Hamdani
4	Atomic Habits	James Clear
5	Good Lookin’ Cookin’	Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George with Maurice Miner
6	The Protein Meal Prep Plan	Cassy Joy Garcia
7	Pardon My Book	Big Cat, PFT Commenter et al
8	Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times	Skye Perryman
9	What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast	Caroline Chambers
10	Unreasonable Hospitality	Will Guidara

Book Review: Book Review Lacuna

by: Barbara Kingsolver

Rating: ★★★ (3/5)

Opening Hook

This book frustrated me a bit and surprised me, especially since the author is one of my favorites. It was so aggravating that I wrote a pre-review, which you can read here:

My Gripe About a Book – Lacuna

The book could almost need three separate reviews: a slow and confusing start, a strong middle, and a fantastic ending.

Book Overview

The story takes place in Mexico and the U.S., beginning in 1916. It is historical fiction, something I enjoy reading. It blends the young life of a person who leaves the U.S. with his Mexican mother for her homeland of Mexico after her divorce from her American husband.

The child lives a very disjointed life. His mother is a bit flighty, has little money, and pays little attention to her son while spending her time chasing men in search of a better life. At one point, she sends her son back to the U.S. to live with his dad, who doesn’t spend much time with him and puts him in a boarding school for a year before he eventually returns to Mexico.

As the story unfolds, we follow his young and somewhat unusual life. He eventually works as a cook for Leon Trotsky, who is being protected in Mexico from Stalin. Trotsky and his wife become part of his life, along with the famous Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

After Trotsky is assassinated, he makes his way back to the U.S. with the help of Frida Kahlo. She gets him out of Mexico while the investigation is ongoing by having him travel as a courier transporting her artwork to the U.S. for a show.

He spends the rest of his life in the U.S., becomes a famous writer, and eventually gets wrapped up in the Red Scare of the 1940s and is blacklisted.

What Worked

This was a good historical fiction novel and tied together real and fabricated places and people. It did a great job with the historical pieces, particularly the Red Scare and communism in the U.S. after World War II.

The story was good, but it always felt a bit fragmented. You wanted more about these time periods, but that is the point of the title, The Lacuna, which means gaps.

The author did a nice job of working in how the government and media will run with stories and fill in unanswered questions with fake or incomplete information to generate buzz and attention. I think this was her way of making a statement about the world we live in today. What she describes isn’t new, just more advanced.

Strong Ideas

The idea for the book was interesting, building a story around actual historical events while fabricating some fictional characters, particularly the protagonist, and showing how historical times can impact a person without using an actual historical person to tell that story.

It was also presented in a way I had never seen before. The story was written and told through the protagonist’s journals, which he kept throughout his life. Those journals also helped create the gaps in the story, which ties back to the title, The Lacuna.

Strong Characters

The strong characters are really the protagonist, Harrison, Frida, his friend in Mexico, and the painter who helped him, and Violet Brown, his secretary when he settled in the U.S. Violet handled much of his life and helped manage things for him. She also became an important part of preserving and telling his story.

The other characters played good supporting roles, but these three really held the story together.

Strong Writing

Barbara Kingsolver is always a strong writer and always builds a good story. She takes you on a journey that is never quite straightforward and always gives you some surprises. She takes you to a time and place you would like to visit and leaves you wanting more.

This is my seventh novel of hers that I have read. It is not my favorite, and the start puzzled me, but the end was fabulous. That is why I mentioned in my opening that this could almost be three reviews: a slow and confusing start, a strong middle, and a fantastic ending.

What Didn’t Work

If you read my pre-review post, and the link is above, the start really frustrated me. The end tied everything together and explained why it was done that way. However, it took 600 pages to understand that.

That being said, I was not a fan of the presentation. Writing a book that reads like a person’s journal was not something I expected from the author. As I noted at about the 100-page mark, the short, almost childlike entries eventually got better and longer, with more detail. I did find this approach odd and it was not something I expected from Kingsolver.

Modern Relevance

This did show that even in today’s world, we take stories and shape them depending on the audience. There are conservative and liberal news slants to stories, and whether something is false or even true, the stories can be skewed in a way to generate what we now call clicks or likes.

What we think is new has really been around for some time. It started many decades ago and is now using that same formula with an even greater and more diverse way of presenting information, sometimes to sway the public along political lines.

Final Verdict

I would give this 3 to 3.5 stars. I liked the story and loved the ending. I was not crazy about the journal style and would have preferred the story to be presented as straightforward narration rather than through the actual journal entries.

I also did not like the fabricated book reviews based on the protagonist’s writing after he returned to the U.S. I just did not care for that and found it a bit distracting. Those reviews could have worked better for me if they had simply been woven into the story, since that was already part of the story.

Barbara Kingsolver has several books I would read again, but this was not one of them.

Rating: ★★★