Top Fifteen
I have been reading more since the beginning of 2019. These are the top fifteen books that I have read. I will update the best fiction, non-fiction, and poetry as needed.
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by Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver is a must-read page-turner! Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
With more knowledge about the devastation of an economy that works for a few and the opioid crisis, I felt as if I was reading about people I knew. Although the book focuses on the impact on boys, it also details the devastation that girls experience.
If Jan had read Demon Copperhead, she would have encouraged me to read it. It reminds us of the work we must do to repair the world.
As a widow, it was a reminder of the long road that we must all take even after we have hit bottom.
WNYC’s All of it hosted an interview with Barbara Kingsolver in which she speaks about Demon Copperhead and her writing.
Demon Copperhead is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read three of them, The Candy House, The Furrows, and Checkout 19.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damage to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion and, above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
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 David Brooks
It is about “to be a success, make your mark, experience personal happiness.” Even when they reach the top of the mountain, most people find they are unhappy. The climb to the summit has become unsatisfying.
“On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered.” Life becomes interdependent, not independent; it becomes a life of commitment, not about us.
Mr. Brooks “explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community.”
We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways.
When I read The Second Mountain, it became clear that Jan and I never even attempted to climb the first mountain. We were constantly climbing the second mountain.
We had chosen to do work that repaired the world; we both had a faith community and lived in a community.
All we were missing as far as commitments when we met was each other. Our love for each other provided the missing link and allowed us to climb to the top of the second mountain.
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 Hernan Diaz
Trust by Hernan Diaz is an elegant, multifaceted epic that recovers the voices buried under the myths that justify our foundational inequality; Trust is a literary triumph with a beating heart and urgent stakes. The novel is divided into four sections, each engaging and reminding us of the tremendous costs a fortune imposes on those who accumulate wealth. I highly recommend this novel as it is one of the best books I have ever read!
The first section is from Bonds, a successful novel about Benjamin and Helen Rask. Before finishing this section, I was so engrossed that I wanted their story to continue. The second is a memoir of Andrew Bevel, a successful fourth-generation financier, with notations on edits and corrections.
The third section is about Ida Partenza, an Italian-American novelist hired to flesh out Bevel’s memoir. The dynamics between her and Bevel, as well as her father and boyfriend, clarify the storyline and give it depth. Ms. Partenza seeks to find the truth, revealed in the fourth section, comprised of excerpts from Mildred’s diary. Suffice it to say; the admitted fact underscores the burdens of wealth and the antiquated views that limited women’s roles.
Trust is one of the NY Times’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read four of them, Demon Copperhead, The Candy House, The Furrows, and Checkout 19. Trust was the fifth and the seventy-second book I have read this year.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
Even though the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the brilliant daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of seemingly endless wealth. But the secrets around their affluence and grandeur incite gossip. At what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? Rumors about Benjamin’s financial maneuvers and Helen’s reclusiveness start to spread–all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end.
This is the mystery at the center of a successful 1938 novel, Bonds, which all of New York seems to have read. But it isn’t the only version.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust brilliantly puts the story of these characters into conversation with other accounts–and in tension with the life and perspective of a young woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Provocative and propulsive, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the reality-warping gravitational pull of money and how power often manipulates facts. The result is a novel that becomes more exhilarating and profound with each new layer and revelation.
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 Jennifer Egan
The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan focuses on a new technology that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—it has seduced multitudes. According to the NYTimes, “this is minimalist maximalism. As a widow, I live in a world of memories, but I would not want them shared as they are in The Candy House. “It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century novel onto a flash drive.”
Of course, I am not able to access my unconscious memories. Albeit in an amateur way, I write down some of my memories as they remind me of the power of the love that Jan and I shared. For example, the essay when I met Jan rekindles the memory and attempts to tell the story the way it happened, not how some would like it to be remembered.
The Candy House is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read two of them, The Furrows and Checkout 19. Initially, I was overwhelmed by the multitude of characters and was confused. By the novel’s middle, their interconnectedness helped me understand its real meaning. In the end, Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for authentic connection, love, family, privacy, and redemption. As a widow, authenticity Is what I need to heal.
The Candy House is the seventieth (70) book I have read this year.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.
In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and “eluders,” who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.
Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.
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 Therese Anne Fowler
A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler is a book that was difficult to put down once I started it. A Good Neighborhood is a “gripping contemporary novel that examines the American dream through the lens of two families living side by side in an idyllic neighborhood, throughout one summer that changes their lives irrevocably.”
I selected the book as it focuses, among other issues, on gentrification and environmental degradation. But to say that is what it is about would be a disservice. It also includes a full range of the social issues of our time.
But with little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie’s yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers. Told in multiple points of view, A Good Neighborhood asks big questions about life in America today ― what does it mean to be a good neighbor? How do we live alongside each other when we don’t see eye to eye? ― as it explores the effects of class, race, and heartrending star-crossed love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.
Ms. Fowler narrates the book. Greek Chorus. By doing this, she ensures that we are part of the story as much as readers.
We need to find answers to the big questions if we are to be good neighbors.
The effects of class, race, and heartrending star-crossed love make this a must-read book.
I recommend the book to all readers.
by Mohsin Hamid
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid is a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, Anders, the novel’s protagonist, wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first, he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land.
In Mohsin Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.
I highly recommend this book. It was a page-turner that kept me thinking about love, loss, and rediscovery. All three are subjects close to my heart since Jan’s death.
I decided to read the book after hearing an interview with the author on All of It on WNYC.
One morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance to see one another, face to face, anew.
Hamid’s The Last White Man invites us to envision a future – our future – that dares to reimagine who we think we are, and how we might yet be together.
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 Jeremi Suri
Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri is the perfect book to help us understand our failures at creating a multi-racial democracy in the nineteenth century and how this has weakened and divided our nation. Jeremi Suri chronicles the events after the civil war, from Lincoln’s assassination to Garfield’s, and how they were a continuation of the war by other means.
I purchased a signed copy and watched a video presentation by Dr. Suri due to my membership at One Day University. Civil War by Other Means is a vivid and unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets.
I highly recommend Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri.
In addition, the documentary, on Apple TV+, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power is a companion piece that illustrates the continued failure to create a multi-racial democracy. Jeremi Suri makes a convincing case that the eternal struggle for democracy continues in our time.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before.
In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point.
What emerges is a vivid and at times unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself, but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history.
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 Joyce Carol Oates
Reading Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates was a book I knew I needed to read once Jan was diagnosed. Although the book might trigger negative memories, I finally read Breathe. It was what I needed to read at this point in my journey.
Ms. Oates wrote the book in 2019 after her husband, Charlie Gross, died. The novel is a story of love, loss, and loneliness, topics that I write about on this blog. I needed to read the book both for my mental health and for the readers of Sharing Jan’s Love.
The protagonist, Michaela, loses her husband while they are on a sabbatical in New Mexico. Her husband, Gerard, writes a book and teaches a class on memories. Jan and I never considered relocating before her illness, but this book convinced me that it would have aggravated my grief journey.
One of the parallels I observed while reading the novel is the similarity between Gerard’s reluctance to let family, friends, and co-workers know of his illness. Jan shared that reluctance in the early days, but I convinced her that the only chance of beating cancer was with the help of family and friends.
This dialogue could easily be one that Jan and I had.
Of course you want to summon his family—his (adult) children—but quickly, he says no.
Still waiting.
But – When?
Just not yet.
He is not an alarmist. (You are the alarmist.)
The novel is written in two parts – The Vigil and the Post-Mortem.
The opening paragraphs set the tone.
A Hand is gripping yours. Warm, dry hand gripping your slippery, humid hand.
Whoever it is urging you – Breathe!
Leaning over you begging you – Breathe!
As one mourning the death of the love of his life, I found several phrases in the book helpful in understanding what I have gone through and will continue to confront.
Among them is grief-vise, which I have written about in this stream.
In the grip of the grief-vise: all that you will do, all that you even imagine doing, will require many times more effort… Hardly daring to breathe for the grief-vise will tighten around your chest, squeezing the very air out of your lungs.
In the early stages of grief, the vise was strangling me. Breathing was impossible, and weeping was constant at times.
Michaela struggles with her grief. Seeing her husband every time she sees a man alone, even if they are older or younger than he was. I know I have felt Jan’s presence and still expect her to walk into our apartment.
Her struggles with a grief counselor and overly helpful friends are an experience I have not had but are familiar to those suffering from losing a loved one.
The last chapters are ones in which time becomes confusing and chaotic. At times, I was uncertain about which were real or imagined. The end, like all good novels, was ambiguous.
These are some of the other phrases I have found useful and will include in posts.
What you love most, that you will lose. The price of your love is your loss.
I recommend this book to all readers, even those struggling with grief.
When you buy a book or product using a link on this page, I receive a commission. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Viktor E. Frankl
I remember reading portions of Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl at different times, but I never finished the book. However, recently, eight and a half months after the passing of Jan, the book came up for discussion in one of my groups. Frankl’s theory of logotherapy, which derives from the Greek word for “meaning,” centers around the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud believed, but rather the search for what gives life meaning. I now have a framework for my life without Jan.
For those like me who are widows, Frankl understands suffering,
In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
Jan and I lived meaningful lives. My challenge now is to continue to find meaning in my life without Jan.
As Frankl writes,
Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.
The love Jan and I shared was one of my primary sources of meaning. In addition, I stopped working full-time at the end of 2018 and struggled to replace the purpose I had gained from repairing the world. After Jan died, I suffered the “provisional existence of an unknown limit.” Frankl experienced that when he was in the concentration camps.
I have replaced the loss of meaning and purpose with a series of activities:
I am also beginning to serve on the board of a few non-profits. It is time to transition from hands-on work to providing leadership differently.
Will this be enough to give my life meaning?
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
I must continue focusing on my search for meaning, as life will change over time.
My grief journey has taught me that love never dies,
For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
My path forward is to keep Jan’s love alive and continue to share it with others.
I recommend this book without reservation.
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.
by Andrea Elliott
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott was a gift from my son Jon. The New York Times selected “Invisible Child” as one of the best books published this year. It is indeed one of the top books on my all-time list.
GoodReads summary provides a good overview,
The riveting, unforgettable story of a girl whose indomitable spirit is tested by homelessness, poverty, and racism in an unequal America—from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott of The New York Times
Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. When Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis explodes as the chasm deepens between rich and poor.
In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools, and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system. When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?
By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.
Jan and I were involved and knew that child poverty and homelessness needed repair. In addition, Jan lived on Washington Park across from Ft. Greene Park in 1974-75. We knew the neighborhood where much of the book’s story takes place.
Before meeting Jan in 1973, I was both a community/tenant organizer and a youth worker. In the latter role, I made weekly hostel trips for eight to ten young boys from East Williamsburg during 1973. The trips were the first the boys had ever been outside of their neighborhood.
Many of them had imaginations like Dasani. They also had her instinct to fight. One of my first tasks was to check for any weapons.
Decades later, when I would see any of them, now adults, they would ask when we were going on another trip. I wish I had met Jan when I made those trips. She would have helped me improve them and document the impact. If I could re-write history, I would have her join me as the second adult on the hostel trips.
After that summer, it was clear my primary skills were as a community/tenant organizer. Over the next few years, my work focused on creating affordable and supportive housing.
Jan and I did meaningful work that made a difference, yet the need for a permanent solution to the crisis remains. The book highlights the crucial role of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. As a nation, we cannot undermine those values by breaking up families, impeding resilience, and maintaining racial and economic inequality.
The current debate in Washington over the Build Back Better legislation needs to focus not on how much we spend but on its impact on children and families.
David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has supported these expenditures for what they can do to address this country’s cultural and economic crisis.
These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision.
This is how you fortify a compelling moral identity, which is what all of us need if we’re going to be able to look in the mirror with self-respect. This is the cultural transformation that good policy can sometimes achieve. Statecraft is soulcraft.
If you can only read one book this year, this is the one to read. Child poverty, homelessness, and inequality impact all of us. Ending child poverty and homelessness will make us a healthier and more inclusive nation. It is time for a compelling moral call to action!
When you buy a book or product using a link on this page, I receive a commission. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Atul Gawande
Before departing for Toronto to celebrate our 44th Wedding Anniversary, I went through the e-library. Everything on my list that I wanted to read was not available except for this book. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is the book I read on our vacation before Jan’s diagnosis of non-Hodgkins Large B cell Lymphoma.
Selecting Being Mortal might seem an accidental choice to some, and I believe it was a divine intervention. It prepared me to be a caregiver to my wife over the nineteen months of her fight with cancer. It helped me focus on the good life that my wife lived and not the pain and suffering.
Atul Gawande describes his book as “riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life – all the way to the very end.”
When I read the book, I wondered what I could have done to help my mother in her final years. The book provides an excellent overview of how nursing homes and assisted living have not been able to meet the needs of the residents.
He reminds us that “when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.” As he writes in the book, the current system does not work and, in many cases, actually shortens life.
This book has had a lasting impact on my life. It allowed me to be a loving caregiver to my wife when she needed it more than anything else. I read it when it would be most beneficial to me.
I highly recommend this book.
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.
by Elizabeth Strout
Lucy by the Sea: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout is a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown–and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart. Having lost Jan during Covid, I was apprehensive about reading this book. However, it was not only a page-turner but also a novel that gave me a new perspective on loss which helped me manage my grief.
With her trademark spare, crystalline prose, Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic.
I highlighted several passages that specifically spoke to me.
We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.
Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us.
It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss, and I had been finding that to be true, even before I came to Maine with William. But now there were times I felt that I was just learning of David’s death again for the first time. And I would be privately staggered by grief. And to be in this place where David had never been (!)—I was really dislocated is what I mean.
And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing.
We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart–the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.
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 Audrey Blake
I completed the Big Library Read of 2022, The Girl in His Shadow, by Audrey Blake. I highly recommend it. The Girl in His Shadow is historical fiction about one woman who believed in scientific medicine before the world believed in her. Ms. Blake has a split personality— because she is the creative alter ego of writing duo Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois, two authors who met as finalists of a writing contest and have been writing together happily ever since.
The pen name – Audrey Blake – was in response to the publishers recommending a more straightforward author’s name. Regina’s daughter is named Audrey, and Jaima’s son is Blake.
I cannot praise this book enough. It was well written, and the characters, especially Nora Beady, jumped off the page. I recommend The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake and encourage you to read the book and share your thoughts.
For more information and to start reading The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake, visit: Big Library Read.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
Raised by the eccentric surgeon Dr. Horace Croft after losing her parents to a deadly pandemic, the orphan Nora Beady knows little about conventional life. While other young ladies were raised to busy themselves with needlework and watercolors, Nora was trained to perfect her suturing and anatomical illustrations of dissections.
Women face dire consequences if caught practicing medicine, but in Croft’s private clinic Nora is his most trusted–and secret–assistant. That is until the new surgical resident Dr. Daniel Gibson arrives. Dr. Gibson has no idea that Horace’s bright and quiet young ward is a surgeon more qualified and ingenuitive than even himself. In order to protect Dr. Croft and his practice from scandal and collapse Nora must learn to play a new and uncomfortable role–that of a proper young lady.
But pretense has its limits. Nora cannot turn away and ignore the suffering of patients even if it means giving Gibson the power to ruin everything she’s worked for. And when she makes a discovery that could change the field forever, Nora faces an impossible choice. Remain invisible and let the men around her take credit for her work, or let the world see her for what she is–even if it means being destroyed by her own legacy.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. 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 Tess Gunty
My sixtieth book this year, The Rabbit Hutch, was a page-turner that I highly recommend. The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is a debut novel that won the 2022 National Book Award for fiction. It is a novel about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.
As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
Ms. Gunty’s book focuses on that ultimate and higher goal. If you can read only one book this year, I recommend The Rabbit Hutch!
“This week is the ceremony for the National Book Award, and one of the finalists is Tess Gunty, whose debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a finalist in the fiction category,” said Kerry Nolan as she spoke with Ms. Gunty.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, several people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors a great fear. But C4 is of particular interest.
Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.
Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.
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.
by Bushra Rehman
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman is a book I encouraged friends to read before I finished reading it. I highly recommend this page-turner novel, which is punctuated by both joy and loss, full of ’80s music and beloved books. Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a must-read coming-of-age story of Razia Mirza, a girl struggling to reconcile her heritage and faith with her desire to be true to herself.
Razia Mirza, the protagonist, leaps off the page or screen. Bushra Rehman describes Corona with prose that is vibrant and clear-eyed. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had, on a few occasions, meetings in Corona a decade before the novel’s setting. Reading the book made me remember that time and place and understand intuitively the world that Razia was struggling to reconcile.
Razia’s choice between her heart and her family is one I will not reveal. However, the novel defines the conflicts between the Pakistani-American community and the love that Razia and Anglea experience in clear prose, and the reader can easily accept various resolutions.
The choice that Rasia makes left me desiring to know what happens next. I have added Bushra Rehman to my favorite authors and plan to read more of her novels.
I had this novel on my list for the last month but could not get to it until now. I wish I had read it sooner. It is the eighth book I have read in 2023.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. Razia’s heart is broken when a family rift drives the girls apart. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city.
When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. When an Aunty discovers their relationship in the community, Razia must choose between her family and her future.
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.
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by Shirley Ann Grau
The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau is a book that I read a portion of for a college class, but for reasons that I cannot now remember never got around to reading it from cover to cover. In the early stages of grief, I found a copy in our bookshelf and said, let me read it now. It was a decision that I did not regret.
Having grown up in the American South, the book resonated with me, as did the sections I read fifty years ago. It’s a many-layered indictment of racism and rage that is as terrifying as it is wise.
As someone who likes history and values the importance of place, the book’s focus on the continued ownership of the same land since the early 1800s by the Howland’s provided a broad historical perspective. Abigail Howland has learned many important family legacies, but not all.
However, when William’s, her grandfather, relationship with Margaret Carmichael, a black housekeeper, is revealed to the community, the racism and fury boil over. Abigail chooses to get even with the town her family built by punishing them.
The Keepers of the House is a book that I wish I had read in its entirety half a century ago. Having read it now, I recommend it to all who care about life and community.
by Vinson Cunningham
Today, I began reading “Great Expectations: A Novel” by Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer and theatre critic at The New Yorker. David, the protagonist, had seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his. Still, the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.
Upon hearing the Senator from Illinois speak, David experiences conflicting emotions. He is fascinated by the Senator’s idealistic language yet ponders the balance between maintaining solid beliefs and making the necessary compromises to become America’s first Black president.
The book Great Expectations narrates David’s experience working for eighteen months on a Senator’s presidential campaign. During his journey, David encounters diverse individuals who raise questions about history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood. These inquiries prompt David to introspect his life and identity as a young Black man and father living in America.
Meditating on politics, religion, family, and coming-of-age, Great Expectations is a novel of ideas and emotional resonance, introducing a prominent new writer.
by Barbara Karnes RN
My journey from the Island of Grief back to the Land of Love is long and arduous. Friends, especially those who have also lost a loved one, are the guideposts on this journey. One of these friends, Sue Gramacy, sent this book to me during the early phases of my grief journey.
My Friend, I Care: The Grief Experience may be one of the shortest books I have ever read, but it is also one that has been most helpful. Barbara Karnes, RN, provides a concise understanding of grief, and she includes a list of dos and don’ts that are very helpful to someone who has recently lost the love of their life.
She provides a compelling explanation of the new life that we all must strive to achieve.
Our inability to further enjoy life does not measure our loss. The quality of our relationship with the person who has died is found in our strength, our resilience and our ability to create a new and meaningful life.
The endpoint of my journey is a new and meaningful life. This book has helped remind me that it is an achievable goal.
by Michael Stephen Daigle
A Game Called Dead by Michael Stephen Daigle is the sequel to “The Swamps of Jersey,” the first Frank Nagler Mystery. Having read the fourth one – The Red Hand, I recently read the first one and thought this was an excellent time to read the second in this impressive deceptive series.
Reading the Frank Nagler Mysteries is rare when this reviewer knows the author. Mr. Daigle wrote this is the overview of A Game Called Dead.
Nagler is called to investigate the brutal attack of on two women at the local college. It begins a tale of urban terror, much of which seems to be directed at Nagler and his associates.
The story introduces the mysterious terrorist #ARMEGEDDON, who taunted the police from cyberspace.
The story also digs deeper into Nagler’s past, especially the old Charlie Adams serial-killer case, and his relationship with Lauren Fox, who played a key role in exposing the political corruption in “Swamps.” She is back and steps into the front of Nagler’s life.
The story also introduced Harriet Waddley-Jones, a college dean, who is Nagler’s nemesis, and later ally.
Each book is a challenge to write a “better” book. In this case I wanted tighter, faster action and to develop a theme and flow to help carry the story. Sound and the description of sound, are keys.
I also wanted Nagler to confront aspects of his past. Can he reconcile them, or will they always haunt him?
This reviewer’s opinion was a more substantial plot than the first book in the Frank Nagler Mysteries. Like all good mysteries, the suspense built page by page, and I could not figure out who the villain was until late in the novel.
The one part that was difficult for me to read was the ending and the potential reigniting of the relationship with Lauren Fox. Having lost Jan, my wife, this year, I am aware of Frank Nagler’s pain in the first book about losing his wife. Ms. Fox only appeared in The Swamps of Jersey as a lost friend. I understand that some widows need to find love again to feel happy, which is not what I need or am seeking. The next book may provide some difficult moments on this topic, but I look forward to reading the next Frank Nagler Mystery.
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by Paul Lynch
In 2024, I started my reading journey with the Booker Prize 2023 winner – Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. The book presents a chilling and astonishing outlook of a nation sliding into authoritarianism while also painting a profoundly humane portrait of a mother’s struggle to keep her family together. I have not set a goal of the number of books to read in 2024, but this is an excellent first-day pageturner.
It all begins on a dark, rainy evening in Dublin when Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, opens her front door to two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police. They are there to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart as the government is gradually turning towards tyranny. As her world crumbles and the people she loves disappear, Eilish faces the dystopian reality of her country. How far is Eilish willing to go to protect her family? And what, or who, is she ready to leave behind?
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.
