Richard W. shared a stream on November 23, 2022
Books, Books Aplenty

Books, Books Aplenty

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 30 seconds

Remembering Jan at Camp Widow!

At the beginning of 2022, I participated in my first reading challenge since grade school. With limited experience, I was bereft like a puppy dog off its leash when selecting a goal. So, I chose a noticeable number: the last two digits of the year. With five weeks left, I have read not twenty-two books but sixty-six in the year!

Each book has been a page-turner and, in unique ways, has helped me manage my grief.

How many more will I read before the end of the year? I have no idea, but I read a book every four days.

  • You can click here to view all the books I have read.
  • You can click here to view all the fiction books I have read.
  • To view all of the non-fiction books I have read, click here.
  • You can click here to view all of the poetry books I have read.
  • Click here to view the top ten books I have read (sometimes more than ten due to ties).

I am all ears if you have books you would like to recommend.

I am ready, willing, and able if you want to chat about books.

It would be wonderful to talk to Jan about the novels I have read and hear from her about the ones she wanted me to read. We could have our book club!

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.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting and sharing Jan’s Love blog.

2022 GoodReads Reading Challenge

2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge

I have set a goal on Goodreads to read twenty-two books this year. Will I be able to read that many books this year? Follow my progress on Goodreads or this stream post.

Do you have a Goodreads goal for this year? What are you reading?

My bookshelf has all of the books I have read since 2019.

Richard W. Brown January 18, 2022

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Books, Books Aplenty
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Love Forms

Read: August 2025

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Love Forms: A Novel

by Claire Adam

Love Forms, a novel by Claire Adam that is longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, is a profoundly moving story about a woman’s journey of self-discovery. This novel stands out with its unique exploration of a mother’s life, emphasizing the enduring bonds of love, family, and home. The protagonist’s search for the daughter she gave up for adoption at sixteen challenges her to reconsider every life decision she has made.

For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something is missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.

More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps—from Trinidad to Venezuela and then to London—and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.

Claire Adam‘s debut novel, Golden Child, was published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP for Hogarth. It was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and the McKitterick Prize. She was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Adam lives in London.

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!

Don’t miss out on an exceptional opportunity! Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

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The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story

Read: October 2022

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The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story

by Alice Hoffman

The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story by Alice Hoffman is a heartfelt short story about family, independence, and finding your place in the world. The overview should be enough to encourage everyone to read the book. I recommend this short story without any reservations. Ms. Hoffman has written a moving story that helped me to grapple with grief and reminded me that love is the highest and most important goal that humans can aspire.

Isabel Gibson has all but perfected the art of forgetting. She’s a New Yorker now, with nothing left to tie her to Brinkley’s Island, Maine. Her parents are gone, the family bookstore is all but bankrupt, and her sister, Sophie, will probably never speak to her again.

But when a mysterious letter arrives in her mailbox, Isabel feels drawn to the past. After years of fighting for her independence, she dreads the thought of going back to the island. What she finds there may forever alter her path—and change everything she thought she knew about her family, home, and herself.

Isabel sums up the power of love in this paragraph,

She was thinking about the way a fish loved a river, and a bird loved the sky, and a mother loved her daughters. She was remembering everything. How love could change a person, how it could cause you the greatest sorrow or shelter you from harm. There were moths hitting against the windowpanes. A night heron called in the marshland as if its heart were breaking.

I have always fantasized about working in or owning a small bookstore.

The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story rekindled that dream and reminded me of the power of 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.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’sJan’s Love blog.

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Funny Story

Read: November 2024

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Funny Story: A Novel

by Emily Henry

Today, I began reading Emily Henry‘s Funny Story, a delightful new novel about a pair of opposites connected by an unexpected bond. It was featured in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024. The narrator, Daphne, finds herself single after being dumped following her fiancé’s bachelor party, and she ends up moving in with her ex-fiancé’s former boyfriend.

Daphne always enjoyed how her fiancé, Peter, told their love story: they met on a blustery day, fell in love over an errant hat, and moved back to his lakeside hometown to start their life together. He was great at telling their story—until he realized he was in love with his childhood best friend, Petra.

This is where Daphne begins her new chapter: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family, but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (which barely pays the bills). She proposes to room with the only person who might understand her situation: Miles Nowak, Petra’s ex.

Miles is scruffy and chaotic, finding comfort in the sounds of heartbreak ballads. He is the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her that they have a running bet whether she is in the FBI or witness protection. The two roommates initially avoid each other, but one day, while mourning their circumstances, they develop a fragile friendship and devise a plan. Their plan includes posting misleading photos of their summer adventures together—who could blame them for wanting to create a better story?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would start this new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex… right?

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!

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1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History

Read: October 2019

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1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History

by Jay Winik

1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History by Jay Winik is a book that I had put off reading several times. When I finally did read it, I could not remember why I had not read it sooner. Had I gone to graduate school and become a professor, it might have been the type of book I might write, and I certainly would have had on my list of books for my classes. 

As The NY Times wrote, “Jay Winik brings to life in gripping detail the year 1944, which determined the outcome of World War II and put more pressure than any other on an ailing yet determined President Roosevelt.” Reading a book about events five years before my birth that transformed the world I live in becomes an easy page-turner.

It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did or that it would even end well. Nineteen forty-four was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler’s waning power. Instead it saved those democracies – but with a fateful cost. Now, in a superbly told story, Jay Winik, the acclaimed author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval, captures the epic images and extraordinary history as never before.

1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris, and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history, the Final Solution. Just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis were accelerating the killing of millions of European Jews.

Winik shows how escalating pressures fell on an all but dying Roosevelt, whose rapidly deteriorating health was a closely guarded secret. Here then, as with D-Day, was a momentous decision for the president. Was winning the war the best way to rescue the Jews? Was a rescue even possible? Or would it get in the way of defeating Hitler? In a year when even the most audacious undertakings were within the world’s reach, including the liberation of Europe, one challenge – saving Europe’s Jews – seemed to remain beyond Roosevelt’s grasp.

I recommend this book.

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Killing Stella

Read: July 2025

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Killing Stella

by Marlen Haushofer

Yesterday, I read “Killing Stella,” written by Marlen Haushofer and translated by Shaun Whiteside, which is a domestic horror story that culminates in an apocalyptic ending. This novella captures many of the themes present in Haushofer’s acclaimed novel, “The Wall,” presenting them within a claustrophobic, gothic, and striking narrative. It offers a gripping and incisive exploration of a fractured marriage, highlighting the remarkable talent of the author of “The Wall,” now available in English for the first time.

Main description: Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children visit her in-laws, the narrator of “Killing Stella” recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, to their already tense and tumultuous household. As she stares out the window at her garden, she worries about a baby bird in the linden tree, her husband Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to another, her son’s gloomy demeanor, and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything. Most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has met a sudden and disastrous end.

Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian author known for her short stories, novels, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has significantly influenced many German-speaking writers, including Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to Haushofer. One of her most notable works, “The Wall“, was adapted into a film in 2012, directed by Julian Pölsler and starring Martina Gedeck.

Shaun Whiteside is known for his translations of classic works from German, including those by Freud, Musil, and Nietzsche.

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!

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Station Eleven: A Novel

Read: August 2024

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Station Eleven: A Novel

by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel, one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the Century, is set in the unsettling days of civilization’s collapse and tells the captivating story of a Hollywood star, his potential savior, and a nomadic group of actors traveling through the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region. They risk everything for art and humanity, reminding us of the enduring power of culture even in the most dire circumstances.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That night, a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Little did she know that this event would set events to shape the world’s future.

Twenty years later, Kirsten, a key figure in the story, traverses the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They are The Traveling Symphony, a group that has made it their mission to keep the remnants of art and humanity alive. Their encounters, particularly in St. Deborah by the Water, with a violent prophet threatening their existence, form a crucial part of the narrative. The story’s unique structure, moving back and forth in time, vividly depicts life before and after the pandemic, and the strange twist of fate that connects them all will keep you on the edge of your seat.

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