Richard W. Brown April 5, 2024
I felt the earth move

I Felt the Earth Move!

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 34 seconds

About ten minutes ago, I was jolted by a sudden tremor that shook the ground beneath me. A minor earthquake occurred in our area. Fortunately, my dwelling remained unharmed, except for a few books that fell to the floor due to the subtle but noticeable shaking. The sensation of feeling the earth move beneath me was unnerving, and for a moment, I thought it was my own body shaking. It’s an experience that leaves one feeling vulnerable and powerless like you’re at the mercy of forces beyond your control. Despite the minor nature of the earthquake, it was a stark reminder of the unpredictable nature of our planet and how we are all at its mercy.

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Richard W. Brown

I Feel the Earth Move by Carole King

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 34 seconds

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Love is a Magical Force!

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Love Never Dies

Love is a Magical Force!

Whenever I fall in love, I do so with all my heart and soul, leaving no room for half-steps. My love is unconditional and knows no boundaries. My wife knew and accepted me for who I am. Together, Jan and I created a legacy for ages to come.
Richard W. Brown March 6, 2024

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I felt the earth move
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Wolf Hall: A Novel

Read: May 2022

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Wolf Hall: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall: A Novel by Hilary Mantel is the first book in a three-part series on Thomas Cromwell. I am an amateur historian, and one of the characters I have always wanted to know more about was Cromwell. Although I might have achieved that by reading actual history textbooks, this three-part series seemed like the perfect next book for me to read. With a vast array of characters overflowing with incidents, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political were separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power, but a single failure means death.

At least this time, I am reading book one first instead of last. I highly recommend this book.

The Goodreads overview provides more details.

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power.

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Civil war could destroy the country if the king died without a male heir.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer, and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters overflowing with incidents, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political were separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power, but a single failure means death.

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The Passing Storm

Read: May 2022

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The Passing Storm

by Christine Nolfi

The Passing Storm by Christine Nolfi is a gripping, openhearted novel about family, reconciliation, and bringing closure to the secrets of the past. From the first chapter, it was a pageturner and a book that engaged me when I needed to focus on life’s challenges. I was looking for something different from my most recent books.

I very much enjoyed this novel. It is focused on losses, including one parent and a daughter. I had not anticipated that but found that Ms. Nolfi handled that in an empathic way that did not trigger my grief but helped me understand my grief. The primary characters Rae, Quinn, Connor, and Griffin are brought to life by the writer. It left me wanting to know what happens to them now that they have survived the early stages of grief.

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview.

Early into the turbulent decade of her thirties, Rae Langdon struggles to work through grief she never anticipated. With her father, Connor, she tends to their Ohio farm, a forty-acre spread that has enjoyed better days. As memories sweep through her, some too precious to bear, Rae gives shelter from a brutal winter to a teenager named Quinn Galecki.

His parents have thrown out Quinn, a couple too troubled to help steer the misunderstood boy through his losses. Now Quinn has found a temporary home with the Langdons—and an unexpected kinship because Rae, Quinn, and Connor share a past and understand one another’s pain. But its depths—and all its revelations and secrets—have yet to come to light. To finally move forward, Rae must confront them and fight for Quinn, whose parents have other plans for their son.

There might be hope for a new season with forgiveness, love, and the spring thaw—a second chance Rae believed in her heart was gone forever.

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The Rest Is Memory: A Novel

Read: January 2025

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The Rest Is Memory: A Novel

by Lily Tuck

Today, I dove into “The Rest Is Memory: A Novel” by Lily Tuck, and it’s already leaving a powerful impression. This poignant tale follows a young Catholic girl’s harrowing journey to Auschwitz, woven in a captivating Rashomon-style narrative showcasing Tuck’s brilliance as a storyteller. Esquire has rightly placed it on their list of Best Books for Fall 2024, and I can see why.

In Tuck‘s skilled hands, “The Rest Is Memory” transforms into an unforgettable piece of historical reclamation, breathing life into an innocent soul who has long been remembered only through a haunting triptych of photographs. It’s a journey that promises to linger in my thoughts long after I’ve turned the last page.

In this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, we first glimpse fourteen-year-old Czeslawa riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle. Tuck imagines Czeslawa’s upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, she arrives at Auschwitz shorn and bearing the tattoo number 26947. Shortly after, she is photographed. Three months later, she is dead.

How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question Tuck grapples with in this haunting narrative, which frames Czeslawa’s story within the tragic context of the six million Poles who perished during the German occupation. A decade before writing The Rest Is Memory“, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took over 40,000 pictures of Auschwitz prisoners—including three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out these photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa. However, she could only gather the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. Tuck crafts a remarkable kaleidoscope of imagination from this scant evidence, something only our greatest novelists can achieve.

Susanna Moore described the novel as “Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror.” Tuck’s language swirls around the reader, yet no word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble forth, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa’s tragic time in Auschwitz, as well as the lives of real individuals, including the brutal Commandant Rudolf Höss, his unconscionable wife Hedwig, psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak, and the sharp Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we know Czeslawa’s fate, we must keep turning the pages, thoroughly captivated by Tuck’s nearly otherworldly prose.

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Blue Skies: A Novel

Read: August 2023

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Blue Skies: A Novel

by T. C. Boyle

I started reading Blue Skies: A Novel by T. C. Boyle today. The book is an eco-thriller with comedic elements. It explores the relationships between humans and their habitats in a world where natural disasters frequently occur, where “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events threatening her survival.

Blue Skies follows the tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with biting wit and intelligent social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.

But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the bland façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, from pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-offs and pummeling hurricanes, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.

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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Life After Life

Read: August 2024

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Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

Today, I embarked on the journey of Kate Atkinson‘s ‘Life After Life,’ a novel that has secured its place among The New York Times 100 Best Books of the Century. The book presents a unique and thought-provoking premise: What if you could live multiple lives until you found the perfect one? With its darkly comic, startlingly poignant, and utterly original narrative, it’s a testament to Kate Atkinson‘s unparalleled storytelling prowess.

The story unfolds in a unique narrative structure, beginning on a cold and snowy night in 1910 when Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before drawing her first breath. However, on that same night, Ursula Todd is born again, lets out a loud cry, and starts a life that will be pretty unusual. As she grows up, she also dies repeatedly in various ways while the young century moves inexorably toward its second cataclysmic world war.

Could Ursula’s seemingly endless life be the key to altering the world’s inevitable destiny? The prospect is both thrilling and hopeful. Yet, the question lingers – if she possesses this power, will she choose to wield it?

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North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Read: October 2025

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North Sun: A Novel

by Ethan Rutherford

“North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther” by Ethan Rutherford is a finalist for the fiction category of the 2025 National Book Award. With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.

Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whales, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.

Ethan Rutherford‘s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections–Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)–and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.

Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut, with his wife and two children.

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!

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