Rituals are critical to my recovery. For many years, I participated in the High Holidays with minimal engagement. As I had adopted Jan’s religion, I followed her lead, but, in many ways, it was as if I was sleepwalking.
This year, I was fully engaged. This year, for the first time, I understood that it’s the time when my fate stands in the balance as God reviews our past year and decides whether to renew our lease on this planet.
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by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s best presidential historians, offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth and exercise of leadership as demonstrated by Presidents Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Johnson.
I received this book for Hanukkah from my granddaughter and son Mike and his girlfriend Elyssa. They know me very well. A book by Ms. Goodwin is always a must read. If you add in Lincoln, the two Roosevelt’s and LBJ, it is a book I cannot put down.
This NPR interview with Ms. Goodwin is worth listening to.
by Rebecca Novack
Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack delivers a thrilling, unpredictable tale of a sex worker who morphs into a political assassin, thrust into a high-stakes game of survival. This captivating story weaves together elements of deception, murder, and the complexities of today’s political landscape, offering readers a fresh, gripping perspective that keeps them on the edge of their seats.
The protagonist, a thirty-two-year-old sex worker, is taken by surprise when undercover government agents approach her to assist in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as Meat Neck. However, after the assassination, she realizes the harsh truth: she has been deemed 100% disposable.
Now holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life.
Her best chance is to reach out to the popular feminist investigative podcast, Justice for Bimbos. In a series of hastily typed emails, the newly dubbed Murder Bimbo reveals how she was recruited and trained by a group of covert U.S. agents to eliminate Meat Neck.
Next, she opens a new email addressed to her ex, where the facts present a different narrative.
Structured in three increasingly unhinged acts, each offering a more subversive version of the story than the last, Murder Bimbo is simultaneously a thrilling literary work, a satirical manifesto for vigilantes, or a raucous commentary on the political madness we experience daily. Regardless, it serves as a serious announcement of an electrifying new voice in American literature.
Rebecca Novack grew up in the Rocky Mountains. She has a master’s in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.
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by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li, grappling with life’s deepest sorrows, invites readers into a poignant conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Where Reasons End, composed in the aftermath of the loss of her son, ventures into the liminal space between life and death. Here, mother and child engage in conversations untethered from past images and narratives, a profoundly moving portrayal of the love and complexity of their relationship.
The narrator of Where Reasons End shares a profound insight, saying, “I clung to one delusion with all my might: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m recreating it, this time through words.” This emotional journey of recreating a life through words is a central theme that resonates throughout the novel.
With a unique blend of originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End immerses readers in a world of intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love. The novel’s emotional impact is profound, leaving a lasting impression on those who delve into its pages.
Yiyun Li, a prolific author, has penned six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.
Her literary prowess has been recognized with numerous awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize.
She was also featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work, which has been published in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications, is a testament to her literary excellence.
Currently, she imparts her knowledge at Princeton University and resides in Princeton, New Jersey.
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by Emily St. John Mandel
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list for months. I recommend the book without reservations. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. It was a page-turner from page one.
With the delay of Artemis I, I have been thinking a lot about the Sea of Tranquility, the original lunar landing site. Sea of Tranquility reminded me of the days of my youth when we believed that NASA would colonize the moon as it is in the novel.
One of the passages that moved me was when Olive Llewellyn asked, “What if it always is the end of the world.” A second profound passage asks, “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.
The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
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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by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
I recently read “Something About Living” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a poet and essayist whose work resonates deeply. The book of poems won the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and delved into Palestinian life through the lens of the American language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. It questions what happens when language packages ongoing disasters for consumption and disposal.
As a Jew supporting a two-state solution, I initially hesitated to read this collection of poems. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the lyrical beauty of the verses, which explore love not just as an emotion but as a transformative force and “a radical act.” Every poem that genuinely resonated with me. “Something About Living” is a book I highly recommend for its depth and insight!
Ms. Khalaf Tuffaha has an incredible literary repertoire; her previous work, “Water & Salt,” earned the esteemed 2018 Washington State Book Award, while “Kaan & Her Sisters” was a finalist for the Firecracker Award. In addition, “Something About Living” also received the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. I’m excited to explore her profound insights and lyrical mastery!
Adrian Matejka, the author of “Somebody Else Sold the World,” has written about “Something About Living,”
“It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that simultaneously holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha‘s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that. Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed. This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us,” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities. In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first.
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by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was a true page-turner, and I did not want to stop reading it even when I got to the last page. I am not a fan of sequels, but if I was ever going to change my mind, this is the book I would want to read a sequel.
Ms. Bennett focuses on two twins who run away from home at age 16. They have grown up in Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana. “In Mallard, nobody married dark,” Bennett writes starkly. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.” The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have delighted the town’s founder. One of the women chooses to pass as white while the other does not.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
The question of why people choose to live differently than their origins is one that I often ponder. Growing up in a small town and living in a metropolis raises questions for me as to what my life is now and what was once.
I strongly recommend this book.
