Richard W. Brown February 13, 2022
Jan

Next Stop, New York City!

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 42 seconds

Celebrate JanFifty years ago today, I took the night train from Georgia to NYC to begin VISTA training.

I was not sure I was ready, but I was as prepared as possible.

As a VISTA in Williamsburg, where I arrived a week later, I found meaning and purpose.

But until I met Jan, I did not have Love, the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire.

I thought I had found Love, but the one I thought I loved had distanced herself from me. I could not accept that it was over until two months before meeting Jan.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

Go back to Stream

Share your thoughts and ideas

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund!

Donate Now!
Jan
×
Do You Remember Being Born?: A Novel

Read: September 2023

Get this book

Do You Remember Being Born?

by Sean Michaels

I started reading “Do You Remember Being Born?” by Sean Michaels, a writer who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel is about an aging poet named Marian Ffarmer, a legend in the world of poetry. However, despite her success, she struggles with financial issues and her son’s inability to buy a house. Marian has sacrificed her personal relationships and happiness to pursue her career but questions whether it is worth it.

One day, she receives an invitation from a Tech Company to travel to California and work with their poetry AI, Charlotte. The company wants her to co-author a poem with their bot in a historic partnership, which clashes with Marian’s beliefs about the individual pursuit of art. However, she decides to take this opportunity, even though it makes her feel like a sell-out and a skeptic. The encounter in California changes her life, work, and understanding of kinship.

The book explores the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community. It’s a response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time. The author, Sean Michaels, is a winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and his book is a love letter to and interrogation of the creative legacy. It’s a joyful recognition that belonging to one’s art must mean belonging to the world to survive meaningfully.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

×
Long Bright River

Read: December 2021

Get this book

Long Bright River

by Liz Moore

Long Bright River by Liz Moore was a 2020 NPR Books We Love Selection. It’s a contemporary novel about the opioid epidemic, it’s a novel about sisters and families, it’s a book about the police and how they fall short of the communities they serve, and it’s a well-plotted crime novel. Its main story revolves around Mickey, a patrol officer raising a young son in a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, and her missing sister, who’s addicted to drugs. Both women are the children of addicts, raised by a strict grandmother.

Despite Long Bright River being selected by NPR and others as one of the best books, I was not sure what to expect. My doubts evaporated on page one. Mickey’s narration, including her description of Kensignton, made this a page-turner.

Mickey and Kacey’s lives became so realistic that I could not put the book down. One night, I stayed up to finish reading for the first time in almost a decade.

As much as it focuses on the opioid epidemic and the shortcomings of policing, its proper focus is on sisters and families. My love of family has become more important to me than ever since the loss of Jan, the love of my life.

Ms. Moore brings it all together in the ending but leaves enough doubt as to the future relationship of the sisters that we can feel the harsh reality of life itself. Long Bright River is the first but not the last book by this author that I will read.

Goodreads has an overview if you need more convincing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit–and her sister–before it’s too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters’ childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.

I highly recommend this book.

×
Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories

Read: December 2022

Get this book

Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories

by Meng Jin

Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories by Meng Jin was written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming of age, and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships, and surprising moments of connection. I highly recommend Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories!

Each story speaks so clearly to the loneliness epidemic that confronts our world. I would read one short story and promise to stop and wait until another day to read the next one. Instead

One phrase that will always remain with me is: “The hallucinatory quality of grief.” As a widow, the phrase struck a chord that will forever resonate in my soul.

This is the seventy-third book I have read this year.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Jin turns her considerable talents into short fiction in ten thematically linked stories.

Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly unlimited access to knowledge, and little actual power.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

×
Never Forget Our People Were Always Free

Read: March 2024

Get this book

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free

by Ben Jealous

Today, I started reading “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing” by Ben Jealous, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. The book highlights how the path to healing America’s broken heart begins with each of us having the courage to heal ourselves. According to Mr. Jealous, it would be transformative if every American treated each other as cousins.

Ben Jealous is the son of parents who had to leave Maryland because their cross-racial marriage was illegal.

I briefly met Ben Jealous last May when I went to Washington with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism‘s Day of Action. When I saw Mr. Jealous speaking at Temple Emanu-El in neighboring Westfield, I immediately signed up to attend in person. He is an inspiration as an advocate for the environment, civil rights, and the healing of America’s broken heart.

His lively, courageous, and empathetic storytelling calls on every American to look past deeply cut divisions and recognize that we are all in the same boat now. Along the way, Jealous grapples with hidden American mysteries, including:

  • Why do white men die from suicide more often than black men die from murder?
  • How did racial profiling kill an American president?
  • What happens when a Ku Klux Klansman wrestles with what Jesus said?
  • How did Dave Chappelle know the DC Snipers were Black?
  • Why shouldn’t the civil rights movement give up on rednecks?
  • When is what we have collectively forgotten about race more important than what we know?
  • What do the most indecipherable things our elders say tell us about ourselves?

The book Never Forget Our People Were Always Free is told through parables. It features intimate glimpses of political and faith leaders such as Jack Kemp, Stacey Abrams, and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The book also highlights unlikely heroes such as a retired constable, a female pirate from Madagascar, a long-lost Irishman, a death row inmate, and a man with a Confederate flag over his heart.

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free offers readers hope that America’s oldest wounds can heal and her oldest divisions can be overcome.

Although I have only read a handful of pages of the book, I highly recommend it!

×
Writers and Lovers

Read: October 2021

Get this book

Writers and Lovers

by Lily King

Writers and Lovers by Lily King is a page-turner of a book. From page one, I was engaged with Casey and wanted to continue reading to find out how she resolved the crises of her life. The loss of her mother was a constant reminder of my loss. Although she mourned in a different way than I am, there was much we had in common. The big difference was she was writing a novel about her mother, and I am only doing journal entries and occasional posts.

Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey–a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist–in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

I very much recommend this book and this writer.

Lily King is a bestselling author on the New York Times list, known for her six novels, including Euphoria and Heart the Lover, as well as a collection of short stories titled Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her writing has garnered several prestigious awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. Her books are read worldwide in twenty-eight different languages. She resides in Portland, Maine.

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!

×
Conjure Women

Read: November 2021

Get this book

Conjure Women: A Novel

by Afia Atakora

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora is about a mother and her daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses — at the heart of this dazzling first novel. Conjure Women takes place before, during, and after the Civil War. The book is structured around three-time frames; Slaverytime, Freddomtime, and Wartime.

Having grown up in the South and heard far too many stories about the Lost Cause, it was a joy to read a book narrated by two African-American women. The third leading character is the daughter o the owner of the plantation. At the end of the war, she was hidden away for six years and was unaware the South had surrendered.

Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, and richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.

Since Jan died, I have read many books that I know she enjoyed. We both enjoyed Call the Midwife, and this book focused on birthing and mothering. Although conjuring was their medical care and not the type practiced in poplar by the Midwives, we would both have enjoyed the book.

Conjure Women also raises questions about the meaning of freedom. For example, Rue chooses not to leave the former plantation after the Klan attacks despite being free.

I recommend this book and look forward to reading more from Afia Atakora.

Subscribe

Contact Us

When you buy a book or product using a link on this page, I receive a commission. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×