Richard W. shared a on November 8, 2021
Anticipation anxiety

Anticipation Anxiety

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 35 seconds

Change is in the air just as it was forty-eight years ago in the days before meeting Jan. The reasons for optimism are the benches arriving and the pending launch of the Sharing Jan’s Love Blog. I shared the Blog with seven people; four have been enthusiastic and encouraging; the others have not responded.

Human Rights Bench
Soul Sisters Bench

The anticipation of both may be more exciting than the reality, just as the expectation of a trigger event is never as complicated as the event.

So, I prepare for my grief roller-coaster to go down to new lows instead of rising to new heights.

Subscribe

Contact Us

Go back to Stream

Share your thoughts and ideas

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund!

Donate Now!
Anticipation anxiety
×
Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea

Read: October 2023

Get this book

Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea

by Hannah Stowe

I recently started reading a book called “Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea” by Hannah Stowe. It’s a captivating book that immerses you in a world of water, whales, storms, and starlight, allowing you to experience what it’s like to sail for weeks and live life to a new rhythm.

Hannah Stowe, a marine biologist and sailor in her mid-twenties, grew up on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, where she fell asleep to the sound of the lighthouse beam. Drawing upon her experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in various seas, including the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean, she explores the human connection to the wild waters. Stowe ponders why she and others are drawn to life at sea and what we can learn from the water around us.

Stowe intertwines her narrative and illustrations with stories of six keystone marine creatures: the fire crow, sperm whale, wandering albatross, humpback whale, shearwater, and barnacle. Through these stories, she invites readers to fall in love with the sea and its inhabitants and to discover the majesty, wonder, and fragility of the underwater world.

If you enjoy the works of Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard, then “Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea” is a must-read. It’s an inspiring and heartfelt tribute to the sea, a testimony to pursuing and achieving a dream, and an unforgettable introduction to a talented new nature writer.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

×
Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

Read: March 2026

Get this book

Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

by Helen Garner

Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most cherished writers, is featured as a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The New Yorker. This collection presents a finely crafted assortment of short stories showcasing Garner’s “generous, category-defying imagination,” as noted by the New York Times Book Review. Helen Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life.

A woman sends postcards from the beautiful Gold Coast to a former lover. A chorus of voices from her hometown gossips about a friend who has returned after going astray. A young girl discovers a hidden box filled with frightening secrets.

In Stories, you will find a collection of short fiction from a unique literary voice. These tales explore the complexities of love and longing, capturing the pain, darkness, and joy of life, all conveyed with Garner’s characteristic sharpness, honesty, and humor. Each story stands on its own as a perfect piece, but together they showcase the remarkable talent of a master of various literary forms.

Helen Garner is an accomplished writer known for her novels, short stories, screenplays, and non-fiction works. In 2006, she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. A decade later, in 2016, she was honored with the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-Fiction. In 2019, she received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Among her notable works are Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, and Everywhere I Look. Her diaries, titled Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story, were published together as a single volume in the United States.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books I’ve personally vetted for quality and enjoyment. Supporting these selections not only helps me continue to provide you with personalized recommendations but also ensures you have access to meaningful stories that enrich your life. Your support truly makes a difference in helping me share more books and insights with you!

×
Beautiful World, Where Are You

Read: July 2022

Get this book

Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, a writer recommended to me, but I have always kept them on the to-read list, not the current reading. Does a beautiful word exist? Is it possible to live in a beautiful world despite the loss of the love of my life? Perhaps reading  Beautiful World, Where Are You, will help me in my grief journey.

Ms. Rooney’s book was a page-turner, and I highly recommend it.

One of the quotes from the book echoed my dream of a beautiful world.

“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.” ― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

It also helped remind me how unique and memorable the love that Jan and I shared was. We could quickly fall into a life lived separately as friends, or we might not have ever fallen in love and married.

As Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Where Are You, wrote:

“If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.”

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, and they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, and they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Subscribe

Contact Us

×
Heartwood

Read: April 2025

Get this book

Heartwood: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

Today, I embarked on the journey of Heartwood by Amity Gaige. This novel unfolds a gripping narrative as a search and rescue team races against time to find an experienced hiker who mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. The suspense of the search for Valerie is palpable, drawing you into the story with great literary ambition and love at its core.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie’s emotional struggle is palpable as she pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother, battling the elements and struggling to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. What’s unique about this narrative is that a puzzle emerges between these compelling narratives, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning). It tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires more significant questions about how we get lost and how we are found.

Amity Gaige is the author of four previous novels: O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, Sea Wife, a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, and a Mark Twain American Voice Award finalist. Schroder was also a New York Times Notable Book and the best book of 2013 according to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and was shortlisted for the UK’s Folio Prize in 2014. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2018, Amity was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut, and teaches creative writing at Yale.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

×
Being Mortal

Read: August 2019

Get this book

Being Mortal

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-Hodgkin 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 – 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 offers an excellent overview of how nursing homes and assisted living facilities have struggled to meet the needs of their residents.

Dr. Gawande provides an in-depth overview of the benefits of hospice care. Although I knew of this option, reading this book helped me understand that I was ready for hospice when my wife came home for the last time.

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.

Atul Gawande is the author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto; and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is the Founder and Chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making surgery safer globally. He is also the chair of Haven, where he served as CEO from 2018 to 2020. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

×
Lessons in Chemistry

Read: January 2023

Get this book

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel

by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel by Bonnie Garmus is a must-read book as it reimagines the gender dynamics of the 1950s and early 1960s. Elizabeth Zott, a chemist, struggles in a male-dominated world where her work is not taken seriously until she meets Calvin Evans. She describes their relationship, “Calvin and I were soulmates,” like Jan and I viewed ours.

What underlies their love affair was “a mutual respect for the other’s capabilities.” “Do you know how extraordinary that is?” she said. That a man would treat his lover’s work as seriously as his own?” Of course, every relationship should be based on the same dynamics, but even after seventy years, we still struggle to achieve equality in our society.

I highly recommend this novel. Reading the story, the Zott/Evans relationship reminded me of the love that Jan and I shared. I know that Jan would have loved this book.

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist. Like Jan, Elizabeth Zott, the protagonist, would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman.

Although Jan and Elizabeth had much in common, I felt Madeline (aka Mad), Elizabeth’s daughter, was Jan’s alter ego in this novel. Jan was smart and ahead of her classmates, just like Mad was. She was breaking barriers when she was Mad’s age.

I also connected to Six Thirty, the dog. Like Oscar, Six Thirty was more intelligent than the average dog.

Lessons in Chemistry has been the number one best-selling book in the New York Times for thirty-four weeks.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It’s the early 1960s and Elizabeth Zott’s all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

×