Each year, I set out on a meaningful pilgrimage to the top of the One Gateway Center in Newark, a tribute to my beloved wife, Jan, and to everyone touched by the harsh reality of blood cancers. It’s staggering to think that every three minutes, someone in the U.S. receives a diagnosis of leukemia, lymphoma, or myeloma, and heartbreakingly, someone loses their fight every nine minutes.
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“Penthouse, please,” I requested, my finger hovering over the button of the self-service elevator. The compact space could barely accommodate three people, yet somehow, it felt roomy. Jan stepped in beside me, her eyes sparkling with anticipation, and one of her friends joined us. In that moment, I couldn’t help but admire her. She had always captivated me, but on our wedding day fifty years ago, she was nothing short of breathtaking.
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“Richard!” A familiar voice called out just as I was about to step into the narrow alleyway between Sofia Color Lounge and the soon-to-open coffee shop where Beadsmith once stood. I turned around and saw—Eric! A genuine smile spread across my face as I recognized him. He was pushing a stroller, his daughter peeking out with bright, curious eyes.
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Rituals often become another item on our to-do lists, rushed and stripped of their more profound significance. When we overlook their meaning and purpose, we hinder our ability to heal from loss and navigate the complexities of grief.
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by Chris Bohjalian
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian is “a compulsively readable novel that explores questions of human responsibility that are as fundamental to our society now as they were when the book was first published.” Forty years after the book was published, it is just as relevant, if not more so. Indeed, the book’s topics are more relevant today with the current set of decisions by the Supreme Court.
After reading The Pull of the Stars and watching every season of Call the Midwives, this was the logical next book for me to read. It is also one that I know Jan read and liked.
I highly recommend this book!
The Goodreads summary provides a concise overview.
The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby’s life. She performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to have died in labor. But what if—as Sibyl’s assistant later charges—the patient wasn’t already dead, and it was Sibyl who inadvertently killed her?
As recounted by Sibyl’s precocious fourteen-year-old daughter, Connie, the ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt except that all its participants are acting from the highest motives—and the defendant increasingly appears to be guilty. As Sibyl Danforth faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her conscience, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the best novels ever do.
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by Timothy Egan
The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Timothy Egan is a book I started reading as The Worst Hard Timesincluded the first fifty pages.
I often only read a few pages and then return the book to the e-library. The Immortal Irishman was not the case, and I could not stop reading and borrowed the book immediately.
I had never heard of Thomas Francis Meagher or his life in Ireland or America. The story was fascinating, unique, and essential.
The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York – the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.
Meagher’s rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War – Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg. Twice shot from his horse while leading charges, left for dead in the Virginia mud, Meagher’s dream was that Irish-American troops, seasoned by war, would return to Ireland and liberate their homeland from British rule.
The hero’s last chapter, as territorial governor of Montana, was a romantic quest for a true home in the far frontier. His death has long been a mystery to which Egan brings haunting, colorful new evidence.
I recommend this book.
by Cleyvis Natera
Neruda on the Park is a novel by Cleyvis Natera that beautifully depicts the complexities of family, friendship, and ambition. The story highlights the community’s efforts to protect their neighborhood amidst the gentrification and the tension between a mother and her daughter.
The Guerreros have lived in Nothar Park, a Dominican neighborhood in New York City, for twenty years. When a neighboring tenement faces demolition, Eusebia, an elder of the community, takes matters into her own hands and devises a series of increasingly dangerous schemes to halt the construction of luxury condos. Meanwhile, Eusebia’s daughter, Luz, a rising associate at a Manhattan law firm, becomes distracted by a passionate romance with the handsome white developer working on the project her mother opposes.
As Luz’s father, Vladimir, designs their retirement home in the Dominican Republic, mother and daughter clash, escalating tensions in Nothar Park and leading to a near-fatal climax. Overall, Neruda on the Park is a captivating story that weaves a rich, vivid tapestry of community and sacrifice to protect what matters most.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Stefan Zweig
“Chess Story,” also known as “The Royal Game,” is the final work of Austrian author Stefan Zweig. He completed it while in exile in Brazil and sent it to his American publisher just days before his suicide in 1942. This story is unique as it is the only one in which Zweig directly examines Nazism, portraying it through his characteristic focus on psychological themes.
The narrative follows travelers aboard a ship bound for Buenos Aires, where they encounter an arrogant, unfriendly world chess champion. Attempting to challenge him, they find themselves thoroughly defeated. However, a mysterious passenger steps forward to offer them advice, dramatically shifting their fortunes. The story delves into how this enigmatic figure acquired his extraordinary chess skills and the personal toll that it entailed.
This new translation of “Chess Story” highlights the work’s distinctive blend of high suspense and poignant reflection.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig’s novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity, as well as the novella Chess Story.
Peter Gay was Director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He wrote Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914.
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by Emily St. John Mandel
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list for months. I recommend the book without reservations. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. It was a page-turner from page one.
With the delay of Artemis I, I have been thinking a lot about the Sea of Tranquility, the original lunar landing site. Sea of Tranquility reminded me of the days of my youth when we believed that NASA would colonize the moon as it is in the novel.
One of the passages that moved me was when Olive Llewellyn asked, “What if it always is the end of the world.” A second profound passage asks, “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.
The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Michael Stephen Daigle
The Swamps of Jersey by Michael Stephen Daigle is the first of the Frank Nagler series. Having read the fourth one – The Red Hand, I thought this was an excellent time to read the first in this impressive deceptive series. It was, in fact, an excellent decision. Understanding Frank Nagler better now, I plan to read the next two and the Red Hand to be ready for the fifth book Dragony Rising.
Ironton, New Jersey has seen hard times before. Deserted factories and empty stores reflect the decades-long decline, that even Mayor Gabriel Richman, scion of one of the city’s leading political families, cannot seem to rectify. Now families are living on the street or in the shells of the old factories.A week-long tropical storm floods the depressed city bringing more devastation as well as a new misery: The headless, handless body of a young woman in the Old Iron Bog.
Between the gruesome murder and an old factory suspiciously burning down, Detective Frank Nagler begins to believe that incarcerated Charlie Adams, the city’s famous serial killer, may have fostered a copycat killer. Determined to find the truth, he follows the case that leads into unexpected places.
Knowing the author and the geography of NJ, I found this book a must-read.
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