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Read: September 2022

Sea of Tranquility

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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Read: February 2022

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What’s Mine and Yours

by Naima Coster

What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster is one of the best books I have read in the last few years. At this moment in my life, family means more than ever. This book explores how families can collapse and find ways to reunite. Although my life circumstances are the polar opposite of the protagonists, the book’s central themes resonated with me.

The focus on integration in this Millenium is a subject that needs to be discussed openly and honestly. The racist response of some of the parents is told in a way that clarifies the pain that that can cause.

Even the parents who favor integration have their flaws, which are passed on to their children.

The children, especially Noelle and Gee, oppose their parent’s actions. The sins of their parents are sowed upon them as well.

I have placed this book on my list of novels for reading later this year or n 2023. Its themes are so strong that a second reading is required to engage with its multiple levels fully.

This is a Goodreads summary.

A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the primarily Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the next twenty years.

The debate is Jade, Gee’s steely, ambitious mother, on one side of the integration. In the aftermath of a severe loss, she is determined to give her son the tools he’ll need to survive in America as a sensitive, anxious, young Black man. On the other side is Noelle’s headstrong mother, Lacey May, a white woman who refuses to see her half-Latina daughters as anything but white. She strives to protect them as she couldn’t protect herself from the influence of their charming but unreliable father, Robbie.

When Gee and Noelle join the school play meant to bridge the divide between new and old students, their paths collide, and their two seemingly disconnected families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And their mothers-each determined to see her child inherit a better life-will make choices that will haunt them for decades to come.

As love is built and lost, and the past never too far behind, What’s Mine and Yours is an expansive, vibrant tapestry that moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Paris. It explores every family’s unique organism: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.

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Borscht Belt Boy: Recollections of a Hotel Brat

Read: January 2024

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Borscht Belt Boy

by Mark Kramer

I started reading Borscht Belt Boy: Recollections of a Hotel Brat by Mark Kramer today. The book is the story of a young man who grew up in the heyday of the Borscht Belt. The author sent me a copy when I shared my 2023 reading accomplishments. I found joy in reading his memoir as the author, and I are almost the same age.

The author, the son of a Catskills Mountain resort hotel owner, describes his experiences growing up when hotels, bungalow colonies, and sleep-away camps were booming. Learn about the characters that populated this world, from the kids who worked in the dining rooms, the handymen recruited from the Bowery, to the chefs and maitre d’s.

Enjoy the author’s humorous description of the different kinds of people who summered in the mountains. Read fascinating tales of entertainers, including Buddy Hackett and Lenny Bruce’s experiences at the family hotel. There is a brief history of Catskills’ institutions, how the influx of Jews changed the landscape, and how the resort trade influenced race, religion, and class.

This lighthearted memoir will return fond memories to those who visited the Borscht Belt in their youth and enlighten those not lucky enough to have shared this particular time and place in history.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Regarding gifts made this month, I will match dollar for dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: January 2023

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The Faraway World: Stories

by Patricia Engel

The Faraway World: Stories by Patricia Engel was released six days ago. The Faraway World is an exquisite collection of ten haunting, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise. I highly recommend this collection of short stories. All ten are ones I would read again. As Leigh Newman wrote in her review in the NYTimes, The Faraway World is “a collection about the Latin American diaspora.”

In addition, Leigh Newman described The Faraway World proves that Engel, like one of her characters, is capable of noticing “that between two people, a look reveals more than a fingerprint.” The first story in the collection, “Aida,” is about two twins, one of whom goes missing. Once I read this story, I could not stop until I had read all ten.

The stories are based in Cuba, Colombia, and the US. I know a few NJ settings that gave more meaning to these stories. I felt like I was in Cuba and Colombia, which I had never visited.

NPR interviewed Patricia Engel. She described how she wrote the stories.

They came to me at different points when I was thinking about other things. But of course, they are connected by this – the motivating force for change, desire, and the ever-changing conditions of identity and movements and changing geography and landscape and diaspora. Those are things that I explore in all my writing, and it’s something that I explore in my life. So, of course, it permeates my stories.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Two Colombian ex-pats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami to life-altering ends.

The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from The New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Country, Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” (The Washington Post). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of the community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love.

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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Read: April 2022

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My Evil Mother: A Short Story

by Margaret Atwood

My Evil Mother: A Short Story by Margaret Atwood was a free book with your Prime Reading membership. I have always enjoyed reading Ms. Atwood’s books. My Evil Mother was an enjoyable read and reminded me why she is a great author and why short stories are unique and special. As the NY Times described, My Evil Mother, is a bittersweet short story about mothers, daughters’ witches’ brew of love—and control. I highly recommend it as it is one of my best books this year.

Goodreads provides a concise overview.

Life is hard enough for a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia without having a mother who may—or may not—be a witch. A single mother at that. Sure, she fits in with her starched dresses, string of pearls, and floral aprons. Then there are the hushed and mystical consultations with neighborhood women in distress. The unsavory, mysterious plants in the flower beds. The divined warning to steer clear of a boyfriend whose fate is certainly doomed. But as the daughter of this bewitching homemaker comes of age and her mother’s claims become more and more outlandish, she begins to question everything she once took for granted.

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Read: December 2022

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Checkout 19: A Novel

by Claire-Louise Bennett

Checkout 19: A Novel by Claire-Louise Bennett, a New York Times Best Ten Best Books of 2022; the newspaper highlights the novel’s “unusual setting: the human mind — a brilliant, surprising, weird and very funny one. All the words one might use to describe this book — experimental, autofictional, surrealist — fail to convey the sheer pleasure of ‘Checkout 19.'” I fully agree with this description and found myself living in my mind.

Since Jan died in May of 2021, I have found myself with no one to talk to about the day-to-day events that consume so much of our lives. Checkout 19: A Novel reminded me that I have only been carrying those intimate conversations in my mind. Is it surreal? Yes. Yes, it is. Reading this novel helped me to accept the importance of those conversations. The new characters and scenarios I conjure are less creative than Ms. Claire-Louise Bennett’s.

Goodreads describes Checkout 19: A Novel as the adventures of a young woman discovering her genius through the people she meets–and dreams up–along the way. Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination, and the magic escapes those who master it open to us all.

I recommend this book.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, and slips her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses-and finds-herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration.

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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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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