Garden Photos
Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 0 seconds
Garden Photos
Garden Photos
Contact US!
Have a question? Suggestion?
Subscribe to Sharing Jan's Love Newsletter!
by Sena Jeter Naslund
Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund is a book that I could not put down. It is a page-turner. The title is from the four girls killed at Sunday School in Birmingham. When that happened in 1963, I was only a few years older and the impact brought home to me that we lived in a broken world that required repair. Like Stella Silver in the novel, my life changed as a result of the bombing.
As my reading list may indicate, I have always preferred non-fiction with a preference for history. Picking this novel up combined my prior reading habits with my desire to read books that my wife, Jan, recommended.
Weaving together the lives of blacks and whites, racists and civil rights advocates, and the events of peaceful protest and violent repression, Sena Jeter Naslund creates a tapestry of American social transformation at once intimate and epic.
In Birmingham, Alabama, twenty-year-old Stella Silver, an idealistic white college student, is sent reeling off her measured path by events of 1963. Combining political activism with single parenting and night-school teaching, African American Christine Taylor discovers she must heal her own bruised heart to actualize meaningful social change. Inspired by the courage and commitment of the civil rights movement, the child Edmund Powers embodies hope for future change. In this novel of maturation and growth, Naslund makes vital the intersection of spiritual, political, and moral forces that have redefined America.
Stella’s idealism reminded me of how I became the person I am. Change is not easy but, it takes all of us to risk our lives to repair the world so, it works for all of us.
The book’s critical focus on the “intersection of spiritual, political, and moral forces that have redefined America” makes this a must-read. The redefinition has made America a better country but, we may be retreating from that ideal.
by A.M. Homes
The Unfolding by A.M. Homes is a darkly comic political parable braided with a Bildungsroman that takes us inside the heart of a divided country. The Unfolding is an alternative history that is terrifyingly prescient, profoundly tender, and devastatingly funny. Will this novel help me to understand how we became a nation that no longer shares the same definitions of truth, freedom, and democracy, much less a shared vision of the future?
Although I understand more clearly the crisis facing the US, I highly recommend this novel.
Ms. Homes has written a must-read book that compliments the January 6th Committee report and should make us all more vigilant.
The characters are so well defined that at the end of the novel, I wanted to continue to read about them, especially Meghan.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
The Big Guy loves his family, money, and country. Undone by the 2008 presidential election results, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of the American Dream. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family. His wife, Charlotte, grieves a life not lived, while his 18-year-old daughter, Meghan, realizes that her favorite subject–history–is not exactly what her father taught her.
In a story that is as much about the dynamics within a family as it is about the desire for those in power to remain in force, Homes presciently unpacks a dangerous rift in American identity, prompting a reconsideration of the definition of truth, freedom, and democracy–and exploring the explosive consequences of what happens when the exact words mean such different things to people living together under one roof.
In her first novel since the Women’s Prize award-winning May We Be Forgiven, A.M. Homes delivers us back to ourselves in this stunning alternative history that is both terrifyingly prescient, deeply tender, and devastatingly funny.
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 Tana French
Today, I began reading “The Hunter: A Novel” by Tana French, often called the Queen of Irish crime fiction. The story takes place in a small village in the West of Ireland during a hot summer. Two men arrive, one returning home and the other seeking riches. However, one of them is also seeking death.
Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago police officer who moved to rural Ireland for a peaceful life. He has built a relationship with a local woman named Lena and has been mentoring Trey Reddy, a troubled teenager on a better path. But when Trey’s long-lost father returns, accompanied by an English millionaire and a plan to find gold in the townland, everything they have built is threatened. Cal and Lena are willing to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey is not interested in protection. What she wants is revenge.
This novel, written by the acclaimed author described by The New York Times as “in a class by herself,” tells a nuanced and atmospheric tale about what we are willing to do for our loved ones, what we will do for revenge, and what we may have to sacrifice when the two collide.
by Rachel Blythe Kodanaz
Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time by Rachel Blythe Kodanaz is a book I wish I had long before Jan died. It provides helpful information that can help maintain an organized lifestyle and assist with the possessions of a loved one.
Having lost almost everything I had except for the clothes on my back after a house fire in 1972, I thought I had adopted a view that possessions were not significant. With Jan’s death, the truth is that she and I had collected essential possessions, and now it was my responsibility to decide what to do with them.
Rachel provides a comprehensive overview of the meaning of possessions and how to build a game plan to manage them. Chapter 3 focuses on Building Your Game Plan: The Ten Essentials and this covers all the crucial topics – triggers, building a team, and creating a timeline, among others.
Magic of the Six Piles is a well-designed plan that will help most of us confront the possessions of our loved ones. The piles are:
Having read the book, I need to move from pondering to action. This book will be by my side as I work to move my wife’s possessions into the six piles. Hopefully, it will also assist in reducing m possessions to make it easier for my sons.
Ms. Kodanaz has presented at my bereavement groups and has been an inspiration. She has encouraged me to journal and writes about my love for Jan.
by Susanna Clarke
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is about a man known as Piranesi who lives in a big house and explores the labyrinth of rooms and hopes of understanding the meaning. Is it any surprise that I would pick this book as my thirtieth of the year? As a widow, I journal and journey in a life I did not expect to live, and I still believe I will find meaning and purpose.
In addition, a labyrinth is one of the options we have discussed for the next phase of the work in Hanson Park.
Piranesi is a page-turner, but that does not fully describe the beauty of the world that Susanna Clarke created. I highly recommend this book as it is one of my best this year.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.
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 Kathleen Grisson
The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom was a book that I knew very little about who I took from our bookshelf. My wife had encouraged me to read it as it focused on the south, and she knew I ofter read both about that place and enjoyed history.
From the opening pages, It became a book that I could not put down.
Two characters narrate the book. One is Lavinia, an Irish girl orphaned and brought to the plantation by the master, a ship’s captain. She is assigned to the kitchen house to work with Belle, who is the illegitimate child of the master of the estate.
As Lavinia grows under the tutelage of Belle, the story highlights the struggles of a plantation. Lavinia finds family and love from the enslaved even though she is only indentured. The distinction that skin color would have on their lives is one that Lavinia only learns at the end.
Through the unique eyes of Lavinia and Belle, Grissom’s debut novel unfolds in a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of class, race, dignity, deep-buried secrets, and familial bonds.
The Kitchen House is Ms. Grissom’s first novel and impressed me and inspired me even though I have no skills as a writer.
I strongly recommend this book.
