Richard W. Brown February 28, 2022
Jan and Richard at YWCA Gala

February Dreams

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 44 seconds

Celebrate JanFifty years ago was my second week as a VISTA volunteer in Williamsburg.

My life was beginning to find meaning and purpose.

My journal entries indicated that I was confident I would regain the love I had lost by the spring.

A year ago, I was a full-time caregiver for Jan, the love of my life. Despite our best efforts, she remained very fragile. I prayed March would bring a full recovery.

Daytime dreams are the ones we can make real. But those two dreams failed.

However, a year and a half later, I met Jan, and the love we shared will never die.

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Jan and Richard at YWCA Gala
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Being Mortal

Read: August 2019

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Being Mortal

by Atul Gawande

Before departing for Toronto to celebrate our 44th Wedding Anniversary, I went through the e-library. Everything on my list that I wanted to read was not available except for this book. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is the book I read on our vacation before Jan’s diagnosis of non-Hodgkins Large B cell Lymphoma.

Selecting Being Mortal might seem an accidental choice to some, and I believe it was a divine intervention. It prepared me to be a caregiver to my wife over the nineteen months of her fight with cancer. It helped me focus on the good life that my wife lived and not the pain and suffering.

Atul Gawande describes his book as “riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life – all the way to the very end.”

When I read the book, I wondered what I could have done to help my mother in her final years. The book provides an excellent overview of how nursing homes and assisted living have not been able to meet the needs of the residents.

Dr. Gawande provides an extensive overview of the benefits of hospice. Although I knew of this option, reading this book helped me understand that I was ready for hospice when my wife came home for the last time.

He reminds us that “when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.” As he writes in the book, the current system does not work and, in many cases, actually shortens life.

This book has had a lasting impact on my life. It allowed me to be a loving caregiver to my wife when she needed it more than anything else. I read it when it would be most beneficial to me.

I highly recommend this book.

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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Interpreter of Maladies

Read: June 2022

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Interpreter of Maladies

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is an incredible book. Each short story is a page-turner that I will re-read many times. As Ms. Lahiri writes, “The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children.”

Since 2000, Interpreter of Maladies has been on my reading list. For what is a writer, if not an interpreter of maladies? Perhaps, I waited until now so that I would have grief to help guide me thru this collection of short stories. I highly recommend Interpreter of Maladies.

The Goodreads summary provides a concise overview.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth. At the same time, their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.

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Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

Read: February 2024

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Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

by Isabel Waidner

Today, I began reading “Corey Fah Does Social Mobility: A Novel” by Isabel Waidner. The book is about Corey Fah, a writer whose novel has just won the Fictionalization of Social Evils prize. Despite this achievement, the trophy and funds with the award still need to be in reach. The novel celebrates radical queer survival and challenges false notions of success.

Corey, their partner Drew, and their pet spider, Bambi Pavok, embark on a quest to find an elusive trophy with neon-beige color and UFO-like qualities. This journey takes them back to their childhood in the forest and includes a stint on a reality TV show. While facing the horrors of wormholes and time loops, Corey discovers the difference between a prize and a gift in a complex way.

Following the Goldsmiths Prize–winning Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner’s bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one’s own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.

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The Days of Abandonment

Read: July 2024

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The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

I’ve just started reading The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante after finishing My Brilliant Friend. This book is among the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I chose to read it after watching An Undoing, a documentary about healing from an abusive 20-year marriage using unstitching wedding garments, one stitch at a time.

The film was part of the first night of the International Women’s Film Festival in Cranford. Although, except for one brief moment, I have never been in the same situation as the woman in the short video or Olga, the protagonist in the novel, I choose this as my next book to read. Of course, Ferrante’s writing is known for rich character development and powerful prose.

The Days of Abandonment follows the gripping story of an Italian woman named Olga, whose husband suddenly leaves after fifteen years of marriage. With two young children to care for, Olga finds it increasingly difficult to maintain her previous lifestyle of keeping a spotless house, cooking creative meals, and controlling her temper. After encountering her husband with his much younger lover in public, she even resorts to physically assaulting him.

In a “raging, torrential voice,” according to The New York Times, Olga describes her journey from denial to devastating emptiness. Trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she confronts her ghosts, the potential loss of her identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.

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The Bully Pulpit

Read: October 2019

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The Bully Pulpit

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin is a history of the first decade of the Progressive era told by focusing on the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Although I had read many books about Theodore Roosevelt, I had limited knowledge about Taft until I read this book. Reading about their friendship and its eventual collapse helped me to understand both of these presidents and the times in which they lived in a way I had not understood previously.

The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S. S. McClure.

Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men.

I recommend this book without reservations.

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Orbital

Read: December 2023

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Orbital: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

Today, I started reading “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey. “Orbital” is a slender novel with epic power that captures a single day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space. The author’s prose is poetic and impossible to put aside. Watching the Earth through the eyes of space travelers is refreshing. If I finish reading it by Sunday, it will be the 78th book I’ve read this year or the first one of 2024.

They are not going towards the moon or the vast unknown but are orbiting our planet. These astronauts and cosmonauts come from various countries, including America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan. They are selected for one of the last space station missions before the program is dismantled. They have left their lives behind to travel over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.

Throughout the book, we catch glimpses of their earthly lives through brief communications with their families, photos, and talismans. We watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent their muscles from atrophying. We also witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most importantly, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are breathtakingly beautiful and surprisingly intimate. Additionally, we get to see the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.

It is a profound, contemplative, and gorgeous book that eloquently meditates on space. Moreover, it is a moving elegy reflecting our humanity, environment, and planet.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. For 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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