Richard W. shared a stream on December 9, 2022

Grateful for Jan’s Love and Support

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 13 seconds

Expressing gratitude and love may seem effortless but require commitment and dedication. My wife, Jan, and I shared an unbreakable bond of love and mutual responsibility to repair the world. Despite our individual and collective flaws, we remained passionate about our work and helping others, giving us purpose and fulfillment.

Unfortunately, Jan was diagnosed with Lymphoma three years ago, and although we were optimistic about her recovery, her cancer took an unexpected turn.

Life has taught me an important lesson: Never take the people you love for granted. Be thankful for today because, in one moment, your entire life could change.

Jan’s passing has caused me immense pain, but I am grateful for her love and support, and I will continue to honor her legacy by helping others. Though my financial resources may be limited, I will continue to give generously, just as Jan and I did.

As we approach the end of 2022, we should never forget to cherish the people we love because life can change in a moment.

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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Gratitude for All of Life's Blessings

Gratitude for All of Life’s Blessings

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday since I was a child.

It is not the large table of food that made me prefer this holiday.

Thanksgiving is a collective day to express our gratitude for the blessings we have been granted.

In his proclamation almost a century and a half ago, Abraham Lincoln established a holiday amid war "to observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."

Richard W. Brown November 24, 2022

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My random thoughts on love, grief, life and all things considered.

My Big Climb to Conquer Cancer on April 25, 2026
Please join me in making a difference! No matter the amount, your contribution can have a meaningful impact. As I do every year, I will match every donation made. Thank you! […]
50th Wedding Anniversary
All we ever needed was love—true love! It's the most powerful force in the world—a force that can heal, uplift, and give us our only hope for salvation. […]
The Infamous Walker Limps Home
My Apple Fitness app shows that I’ve averaged four miles daily over an unpredictable month, which might be my new normal. As long as I can walk every day, my streak will continue. Today marked 1,555 days and counting. […]
Living and Grieving
I am believed and seen. I believe in others and recognize their true selves. Though I may reside in my home, I live, grieve, and thrive within my community. […]
The Triad of Love
I focus on being good, rather than feeling good, and living a life my wife would be proud of, rather than letting sorrow overshadow my remaining days. […]

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The Sisters

Read: December 2025

The Sisters: A Novel

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a time frame from a year to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri‘s The Sisters is a vivid family saga of exceptional quality—an engaging and entertaining tour de force. The novel has been recognized as one of the New York Times’ Top 10 Books of the Year and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. Additionally, The New Yorker featured it in their list of 24 Essential Reads for 2025.

Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, and compulsively organized. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, and a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything they believe about themselves.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of short stories and essays. His writing has been translated into over 35 languages. His novel The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and received the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. Khemiri has been a finalist for Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize three times, winning it once. His play Invasion! earned an Obie Award for Best Script.

Khemiri is a recipient of the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and numerous other publications. His novel The Sisters is his first book written in English. Khemiri lives in Brooklyn with his family and teaches creative writing at New York University (NYU).

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 that I’ve personally vetted to ensure quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!

Anxious People

Read: June 2022

Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, a poignant comedy about a crime that never occurred. A would-be bank robber disappears into thin air, and eight highly anxious strangers find they have more in common than they ever imagined. Anxious People is a novel that Jan and I would have both enjoyed reading. It jumped off the e-book shelf while looking for a new book to read.

Although Anxious People is a humorous comedy, it is really about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness and hope, which are the key to our survival as individuals, couples and communities. It is the core of what made the love that Jan and I shared special and unique, but it is also what I gain from my participation in my various grief groups as well as Friday night Shabbat services.

I highly recommend this book.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

Viewing an apartment usually doesn’t turn into a life-or-death situation. Still, this particular open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage. As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers slowly open up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.

First is Zara, a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else until tragedy changed her life. Now, she’s obsessed with visiting open houses to see how ordinary people live—perhaps, setting an old wrong to the right. Then there’s Roger and Anna-Lena, an Ikea-addicted retired couple who are on a never-ending hunt for fixer-uppers to hide the fact that they don’t know how to fix their failing marriage. Julia and Ro are a young lesbian couple and soon-to-be parents who are nervous about their chances for a successful life together since they can’t agree on anything. And there’s Estelle, an eighty-year-old woman who has lived long enough to be unimpressed by a masked bank robber waving a gun. And despite the story she tells them all, Estelle hasn’t come to the apartment to view it for her daughter, and her husband isn’t outside parking the car.

As police surround the premises and television channels broadcast the hostage situation live, the tension mounts, and even deeper secrets are slowly revealed. Before long, the robber must decide which is the terrifying prospect: going out to face the police or staying in the apartment with this group of impossible people.

Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People’s whimsical plot serves up unforgettable insights into the human condition and a gentle reminder to be compassionate to all the anxious people we encounter every day.

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The Director

Read: December 2025

The Director: A Novel

by Daniel Kehlmann

“The Director” by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, is a thought-provoking novel inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst. Pabst fled to Hollywood to escape the Nazis but later returned to Germany to produce propaganda films for the German Reich. The novel is a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year, an NYPL Best Book of the Year, and a notable book by the Washington Post.

An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he learns that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll, shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World have been translated into more than forty languages and are among the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.

Ross Benjamin is the translator of numerous works of German-language literature, including Franz Kafka’s Diaries, Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo, Joseph Roth’s Job, Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll and You Should Have Left. The recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, Benjamin was also awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov. His translation of Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.

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 that I’ve personally vetted to ensure quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!

Death Takes Me

Read: December 2025

Death Takes Me: A Novel

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Originally written in Spanish by Cristina Rivera Garza, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that turns the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, the story unfolds with the dreamlike logic of a surreal experience, transitioning from the police station to a professor’s classroom and through the intricate worlds of Latin American poetry and art. It invites readers to explore the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

A city is always a cemetery.

In the narrative, a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and promptly reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she discovers a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

The professor becomes the primary informant in the case, which is led by a detective who is newly obsessed with poetry and haunted by a list of past failures. But what has the professor truly witnessed? As more bodies of castrated men alongside lines of verse, the detective attempts to decipher the meaning of the poems in hopes of stopping the spreading violence throughout the city.

Cristina Rivera Garza is an acclaimed author known for works such as The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest. Her memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. Currently, Rivera Garza holds the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and serves as director of the PhD program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Sarah Booker is a teacher and a literary translator. Her translations include novels by Mónica Ojeda, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Gabriela Ponce. She is also an associate editor at Southwest Review.

Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations encompass Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche, Claudia Peña Claros’s The Trees, Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation.

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. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!