I began reading "The Bee Sting: A Novel" by Paul Murray today, the seventy-fifth book I have read this year, one more than last year. This exuberantly entertaining novel is a tour de force that portrays post-crash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
by Paul Murray
I began reading “The Bee Sting: A Novel” by Paul Murray today, the seventy-fifth book I have read this year, one more than last year. This exuberantly entertaining novel is a tour de force that portrays post-crash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
The Barnes family is in trouble, with Dickie’s once-lucrative car business going under. However, Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyperson. His wife, Imelda, sells off her jewelry on eBay while trying to avoid the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike. Meanwhile, their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
If you were to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? Or back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?
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.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
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by Audrey Blake
I did something I had not done in decades. After finishing the Big Library Read of 2022, The Girl in His Shadow, by Audrey Blake, I immediately started reading the sequel, The Surgeon’s Daughter. The protagonist, Nora Beady, was such a strong female lead that I could not wait to find out what happened next. In the sequel, Nora Beady, the only female student at a prestigious medical school in Bologna, is a rarity. Nora’s tenacity and passion reminded me of Jan, the love of my life.
In the 19th century, women were supposed to remain at home and raise children, so her unconventional, indelicate ambitions to become a licensed surgeon offended the men around her.
Ms. Blake has a split personality— because she is the creative alter ego of writing duo Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois, two authors who met as finalists of a writing contest and have been writing together happily ever since.
The pen name – Audrey Blake – was in response to the publishers recommending a more straightforward author’s name. Regina’s daughter is named Audrey, and Jaima’s son is Blake.
The Surgeon’s Daughter is the forty-fourth book I have read this year and the ninety-ninth since the beginning of 2019. My Goodreads goal for 2022 was twenty-two books.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
Under constant scrutiny, Nora’s successes are taken for granted; her mistakes used as proof that women aren’t suited to the field.
Everything changes when she allies herself with Magdalena Morenco, the sole female doctor on-staff. Together the two women develop new techniques to improve a groundbreaking surgery: the Cesarean section. It’s a highly dangerous procedure and the research is grueling, but even worse is the vitriolic response from men. Most don’t trust the findings of women, and many can choose to deny their wives medical care.
Already facing resistance on all sides, Nora is shaken when she meets a patient who will die without the surgery. If the procedure is successful, her work could change the world. But a failure could cost everything: precious lives, Nora’s career, and the role women will be allowed to play in medicine.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Martha Beck
Today, I started reading Martha Beck‘s “The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self,” a book recommended by my friend Mark. I always appreciate receiving book recommendations from friends and readers of my blog. In her self-help book, Ms. Beck asserts, “Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period.” This book will be invaluable during my early period of grief. I purchased the eBook from Bookshop and plan to do so.
Bestselling author, life coach, and sociologist Martha Beck explains why “integrity”—needed now more than ever in these tumultuous times—is the key to a meaningful and joyful life. As she writes,
This book, as you may have gleaned from the title, is all about integrity. But I don’t mean this in a moralizing sense. The word integrity has taken on a slightly prim, judgmental nuance in modern English, but the word comes from the Latin integer, meaning “intact.” To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided. When a plane is in integrity, all its millions of parts work together smoothly and cooperatively. If it loses integrity, it may stall, falter, or crash. There’s no judgment here. Just physics.
In The Way of Integrity, Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Many issues, such as people-pleasing, staying in stale relationships, and maintaining unhealthy habits, arise from a disconnection from what truly makes us feel complete.
Inspired by The Divine Comedy, Beck uses Dante’s classic hero’s journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read the internal signals that lead us toward our true path and recognize what we yearn for versus what our culture sells us.
With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach, and human being to help readers uncover what integrity looks like in their lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that will change the direction of our lives and bring us to a place of genuine happiness.
Other books I have read with a similar theme, which I also recommend, include Man’s Search for Meaning, Climbing the Second Mountain, and The Pursuit of Happiness.
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by Hillary Jordan
When She Woke, a fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future by Hillary Jordan, Bellwether Prize Winner. Hannah Payne, the protagonist, embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith. The premise of When She Woke seems to be happening as I read the novel. It is also the one hundred books I have read since the beginning of 2019 and the forty-fifth this year.
Hannah Payne, like Hester Prynne, is attacked for her actions by extreme religious beliefs. Instead of wearing a scarlet letter, Hannah’s chroming (i.e., having her skin altered) makes her skin red from head to toe. The chroming might have been a good theme for a science fiction novel. Still, Ms. Jordan has written a captivating book in which Hannah confronts who she is and, after questioning the values she once had, discovers that Hannah is more vital than she believed she could be.
I highly recommend this novel.
As Ms. Jordan describes the book,
Hannah Payne’s life has been devoted to church and family. But after she’s convicted of murder, she awakens to a nightmare: she finds herself lying on a table in a solitary confinement cell, her skin turned bright red. Cameras are broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for whom observing newly made “Chromes”—criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to reflect their crime—is a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red, a murderess. The victim, says the state of Texas, was her unborn child, and she’s determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.
A powerful reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, When She Woke is a timely fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate a dystopian America. In this not-too-distant future, the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned, but “chromed” and released back into the population to survive as best they can.
As she seeks a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith and love.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
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.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Julia Heaberlin
We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin is a novel I highly recommend and wish I had read earlier. The title summarizes the reality of all humans, that in the dark we are all the same. Disabilities do not define us, just as being a widow does not define who I am. In this twisty psychological thriller, Julia Heaberlin paints two unforgettable portraits of a woman and a girl who redefine perceptions of physical beauty and strength. Her novel has helped me redefine my grief.
I have been a widow for almost twenty-one months. After a trauma of that magnitude, it is easier to let the widowed state define me. But I am more than just a widow! But I am a father, grandfather, friend, neighbor, advocate, and more. Reading We Are All the Same in the Dark helped me embrace myself and not wallow in widowhood.
The novel begins with the discovery of a girl abandoned by the side of the road who threatens to unearth the long-buried secrets of a Texas town’s legendary cold case. In the first section, I was still determining if I wanted to continue. Once I read about Odette Tucker and Angel, it became a page-turner.
This line from Odette given to Angelica, aka Angel, summarizes the characteristics that each of us should live by.
Tender. Resilient. Strong. Resourceful. Kind. Empathetic.—Six words Marshall Tucker wrote on a piece of paper to describe his daughter, Odette.
As a mensch-in-training, I will strive to live by those six words.
We are truly all the same in the dark.
We Are All the Same in the Dark is the ninth book I read this year.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
It’s been a decade since Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Her pretty face still hangs like a watchful queen on the posters on the walls of the town’s Baptist church, the police station, and the high school. They all promise the same thing: We will find you. Meanwhile, her brother, Wyatt, lives as a pariah in the desolation of the old family house, cleared of wrongdoing by the police but tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion and a new documentary about the crime.
When Wyatt finds a lost girl dumped in a field of dandelions, making silent wishes, he believes she is a sign. The town’s youngest cop, Odette Tucker, believes she is a catalyst that will ignite a seething town still waiting for its missing girl to come home. But Odette can’t look away. She shares a wound that won’t close with the mute, one-eyed mystery girl. And she is haunted by her history with the missing Tru.
Desperate to solve both cases, Odette fights to save the lost girl in the present and to dig up the shocking truth about a fateful night in the past–the night her friend disappeared. This night inspired her to become a cop, the night that wrote them all a role in the town’s dark, violent mythology.
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.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Jeff Goodell
I recently started reading “The Heat Will Kill You First” by Jeff Goodell, which delves into the extreme ways our planet is already changing. The book explores how spring is arriving earlier and fall is arriving later and how this will impact our food supply and disease outbreaks. As I have stated in my Action Alert: EPA’s Carbon Rule, the time to act is now.
The book also predicts the consequences of summer days in cities like Chicago and Boston, reaching temperatures as high as 110°F. Goodell explains that heat waves are used only to affect the most vulnerable people, but as they become more intense and familiar, they will affect everyone.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the world is facing a new reality. In California, wildfires are now seasonal, while the Northeast is experiencing less and less snow each winter. Meanwhile, the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are melting alarmingly. Heat is the primary threat that is driving all other impacts of the climate crisis. As temperatures rise, it exposes weaknesses in our governments, politics, economy, and values.
The basic science is straightforward: If we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the global temperature will also stop rising. However, if we wait for 50 years to stop burning them, the temperature will continue to rise, making parts of our planet uninhabitable. The responsibility to act is in our hands. The hotter it gets, the more our underlying issues will surface and expand.
Jeff Goodell has been an award-winning journalist in the field of environmental reporting for several decades. His latest book explains how extreme heat will cause significant changes in the world. The book is an excellent blend of scientific insights and on-the-ground storytelling, and Goodell explores some of the most significant questions surrounding the topic. He reveals that extreme heat is a force we have yet to comprehend fully.
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.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
