I started reading Anna Quindlen's "After Annie: A Novel" today. Forty years ago, my wife Jan and I used to read Ms. Quindlen's column "Life in the Thirties" in The New York Times, even if we didn't have time to read anything else. We clipped and saved each column, which helped us manage getting older with children. I am reading "After Annie," which is about how love can overcome loss.
by Anna Quindlen
I started reading Anna Quindlen‘s “After Annie: A Novel” today. Forty years ago, my wife Jan and I used to read Ms. Quindlen’s column “Life in the Thirties” in The New York Times, even if we didn’t have time to read anything else. We clipped and saved each column, which helped us manage getting older with children. I am reading “After Annie,” which is about how love can overcome loss.
Anna Quindlen, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs and One True Thing, is known for her insightful wisdom on family, friendship, and the bonds that unite us. Her latest novel explores the power of love to overcome loss and adversity.
The story centers around the Brown family and their matriarch, Annie. When Annie suddenly passes away, the family is forced to navigate life without their beloved wife, mother, and friend. Bill, Annie’s husband, struggles to cope with the loss, while Annemarie, her best friend, must confront the bad habits she once overcame with Annie’s help. Ali, Annie’s eldest child, must take on new responsibilities to care for her younger brothers and father.
Although Annie is no longer physically present, her memory continues to guide and inspire those who love her. Her voice resonates in their minds, offering them comfort, wisdom, and clarity. Through the power of her love, Annie gives her family the strength they need to move on without her. They learn that even though their beloved Annie is gone, she will always be with them in spirit.
“After Annie” is a poignant and touching story exploring the unanticipated ways adversity can transform our lives. With her signature style that strikes an emotional chord, Quindlen delivers a heartwarming tale about the tenacity of love and how it can triumph over even the most formidable obstacles. This story of hope is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit and its ability to rise above life’s challenges. It inspires us to believe in the power of love and its capacity to reshape our lives for the better.
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by Elena Gorokhova
A Train to Moscow by Elena Gorokhova is set in post–World War II Russia; a girl, must reconcile a tragic past with her hope for the future in this powerful and poignant novel about family secrets, passion, loss, perseverance, and ambition. In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her dream of becoming an actress.
When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.
Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage.
After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are genuinely worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.
This was a page-turner, as I held my breath to find out the next steps that Sasha would take. Her ambition combined with the secrets she learns keeps the reader focused on the next page.
I recommend this book.
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by Emma Donoghue
After Jan’s death and over two years of COVID, The Pull of the Stars might not seem like a good read for me. But I had placed this book on my to-read list a few months ago. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue is set in 1918 in Dublin; a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love. It was a page-turner that engrossed me at that moment. When I reached the last page, I wanted the story to continue.
The details about childbirth, life, and death were riveting. All three of the main characters are ones that I could have imagined in an episode of Call the Midwife. That Dr. Lynn was a natural person underscores the depth of Ms. Donoghue’s research and writing skills.
Julie and Bridie’s characters were so real it was difficult to believe that they were not also based on natural persons.
I strongly recommend The Pull of the Stars.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
In an Ireland ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumored Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers somehow do their impossible work. In the darkness and intensity of this minor ward, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways over three days. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic but shepherd new life into a fearful world.
In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.
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by Ian McEwan
Today, I started reading “Atonement: A Novel” by Ian McEwan, an acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author. This symphonic novel explores complex themes, including love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness. It has been recognized as one of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, making it a must-read for those interested in these profound themes.
The story begins on a scorching summer day in 1935, when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment of flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. Briony’s incomplete understanding of adult motives and her literary gifts lead to a crime that significantly impacts their lives, taking them on an emotional journey of love, guilt, and forgiveness.
The narrative tracks the repercussions of this crime through the chaos and carnage of World War II, a vivid historical backdrop that immerses the reader into the twentieth century’s close. “Atonement” has been acclaimed for engaging readers on multiple levels, marking it a genuine masterpiece from the Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Ian McEwan.
Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author known for his nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories titled “First Love, Last Rites,” won the Somerset Maugham Award.
His notable novels include “The Child in Time,” which won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 1987; “The Cement Garden“; “Enduring Love;” “Amsterdam;” which won the Booker Prize in 1998; “Atonement;” “Saturday;” “On Chesil Beach;” “Solar;” “Sweet Tooth;” “The Children Act;” “Nutshell;” and “Machines Like Me,” which became a number-one bestseller.
Several of his works, including “Atonement,” “Enduring Love,” “The Children Act;,” and “On Chesil Beach,” have been adapted into films.
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by Diane Frank
Diane Frank, a poet and author of “Prayer to the Invisible,” was a childhood friend of my wife, Jan, in Springfield, NJ. Both were gifted and talented young women who excelled as students and were also musicians, dreamers, and diarists. I met Diane at a poetry reading in NYC, where Jan insisted that we meet her brilliant friend. Diane often referred to Jan as her “Angel.”
In her luminous 9th collection, Prayer to the Invisible, poet Diane Frank fully unmasks her wild and loving imagination. With a river-deep range in subject matter and voice, Frank guides us through terrains both difficult and joyous – her Jewish mother’s love of Christmas carols, a grace-filled visitation from a victim of ethnic violence, a ballerina-in-disguise on public transit, and many transcendent visions from dreams. According to Prartho Sereno, Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, California. Author of Starfall in the Temple, “Diane Frank is the wise and wonder-struck, barefoot-dancing companion we all long for in these precarious times.”
Each poem was thought-provoking and a blessing for these uncertain times. The title poem, “Prayer to the Invisible,” was written in memory of Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, who died during the attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. He was a fellow alumnus of Jonathan Dayton Regional High School, as were Diane and my wife. The poem is a moving tribute to Dr. Rabinowitz as its words brought tears to my eyes.
The poem is a moving tribute that brought tears to my eyes for Dr. Rabinowitz, and one stanza echoed how I felt when my wife died.
I carry your spirit on my shoulders
as I walk into the synagogue
where we played music for you,
as I follow an eclipse north
as I walk into a dream.
I write your name in the sky after midnight
in the Leonid meteor showers,
in the penumbra of an eclipse
of the wolf moon.
Diane Frank is a poet and musician, author of nine books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400-mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. She is the editor of three bestselling anthologies: River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-First Century; Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here; and Pandemic Puzzle Poems. Her first novel, Blackberries in the Dream House, was nominated for the Pulitzer 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 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!
by Toni Morrison
Today, I started reading “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison. The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner explores the complexities of slavery in this novel. Like “Beloved,” it tells the poignant story of a mother and her daughter—a mother who abandons her child to protect her and a daughter who struggles with that abandonment. “A Mercy” is also recognized as one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
In the 1680s, a tumultuous period in the Americas, the slave trade is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, navigates this harsh landscape with a small holding in the North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. She is Florens, a girl who can read and write and might be helpful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens embarks on a journey for love, first seeking it from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
by Clint Smith
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. This book was a gift from my son Jon. The New York Times selected How the Word is Passed as one of the best books published this year. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.
How the Word is Passed is one of the best books I have read in 2021. I had read an excerpt in The Atlantic on the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. Like most of us, I had placed the book on my to-read list, where it remained lost in the cobwebs. Fortunately, my son Jon purchased the book for me.
Secondly, the book rekindled my long-lost dream of being an American Studies professor. As soon as Jan and I met, I dropped plans to leave Brooklyn and start graduate school in the fall of 1974. I made that decision primarily because of how much I loved Jan. But it was also partly that I did not have a clear vision of what my life would be like as a professor. The book provided clear examples of people like Yvonne Holden at The Whitney Plantation redefining history to be more accurate and inclusive. I probably could not have done as well as she did, but I can now see that it might have resulted in a career for me that could have been impactful.
Goodreads provides this overview for those who still need to be convinced to read this book.
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola Prison in Louisiana, a former plantation named for the country from which most of its enslaved people arrived and which has since become one of the most gruesome maximum-security prisons in the world. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.
In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.
Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in understanding our country.
How the Word is Passed is one of the best books I have read this year and many prior ones. I encourage you to read it and share your comments.
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