Richard W. shared a stream on March 11, 2024
Visiting Jan During COVID

Four Years of COVID

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 12 seconds

The COVID-19 shutdown began four years ago; Jan’s lymphoma diagnosis was seven months before COVID. We took all of the precautions. Eleven months after the shutdown, we received our COVID-19 booster shots, but unfortunately, Jan tested positive for COVID-19 just five days later.

Confident Jan

Second COVID Vaccine

Celebrate JanA year ago, Jan and I got our second COVID vaccine. Little did we know that she would test positive for the coronavirus five days later.

The first week of January had been the best week for Jan since she was diagnosed. We both thought she was cancer-free.

Richard W. Brown February 11, 2022

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Visiting Jan During COVID

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 12 seconds
Visiting Jan During COVID

Visiting Jan During COVID

We had survived COVID, the never-ending ER visit, but we were together and had hope.
Richard W. Brown March 18, 2022

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Absolution: A Novel

Read: November 2023

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Absolution: A Novel

by Alice McDermott

I started reading “Absolution: A Novel” by Alice McDermott today. The opening line immediately grabbed my attention: “You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean.” In most literature about the Vietnam War, American women, particularly wives, have been minor characters. However, in “Absolution,” they take center stage.

The book follows the story of two women, Tricia, a shy newlywed, and Charlene, a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three. They both found themselves in Saigon in 1963, forming a wary alliance. They balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter reaches out to Tricia after encountering an aging Vietnam vet. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, carefully considering that pivotal year and Charlene’s altruistic machinations. They discover how their lives as women on the periphery have been shaped and burdened by the same unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

This virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant and affecting writers, explores themes of folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.

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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The Secret Hours

Read: January 2024

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The Secret Hours

by Mick Herron

Today, I started reading “The Secret Hours” by Mick Herron, a gripping spy thriller about a disastrous MI5 mission in Cold War Berlin. This book is a must-read for fans of “Slow Horses.” “The Secret Hours” is a standalone spy thriller that is both unnerving and poignant yet also has laugh-out-loud moments. It is the breathtaking secret history that Slough House fans have been waiting for.

Two years ago, a hostile prime minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, which aimed to investigate “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service. Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, two civil servants seconded to the project, were given unfettered access to all confidential information in the Service archives to ferret any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer.

However, MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. The administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, and the investigation is a total bust. Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as the pounding London rain washes away their career prospects.

On the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin, which ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service 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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Black Sun

Read: November 2021

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Black Sun – Between the Earth and Sky

by Rebecca Roanhorse

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.  Black Sun is the first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

I have always enjoyed fantasy novels like Black Sun, and this is the first one set in the Pre-Columbian Americas.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year, it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as quickly as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

Will Serapio be harmless or a villain? The answer, my friend, will be known when you read this book or perhaps the second one in the trilogy.

Before meeting and falling forever in love with Jan, I had dreamed of the life of an American Studies professor. Thousands of students are relieved to know I did not pursue that life. If I had opened that door, an area of focus would have been on Pre-Columbian Americas.

I recommend this book and will read the next two in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy.

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Such a Fun Age

Read: October 2021

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Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. Although many reviewers highly rated this book, I was unsure it was the book for me. However, once I started reading, I could not stop. It is “a striking and surprising debut novel from a compelling new voice. Such a Fun Age is a big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young Black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store’s security guard, seeing a young Black woman out late with a White child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At 25, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Ageexplores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family”, and the complicated reality of being a grown-up. It is a searing debut for our times.

When race and privilege are paramount issues, this book is a first step to understanding the intersectionality of the issues and addressing them. I recommend this book with our reservation.

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Home: A Novel

Read: February 2022

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Home: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, the passing of the generations, love, death, and faith. Robinson’s most significant work is an unforgettable embodiment of the most profound and universal emotions. Although I have not read the other novels in this series, I plan to add them to my list. I highly recommend this book.

It is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, the passing of generations, love, death, and faith. With the loss of the love of my life ten months ago, these are topics that I have spent time thinking about. Ms. Robinson’s powerful writing weaved a story that I could not stop reading.

Again, I highly recommend this novel.

This is the Goodreads summary.

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather, and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, the passing of the generations, love, death, and faith. Robinson’s most significant work is an unforgettable embodiment of the most profound and universal emotions.

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Crow Lake

Read: January 2022

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Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson is set in northern Ontario’s rural “badlands.” The badlands are where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape of the farming Pye family. Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch-perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing – a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an author of immense talent.

Crow Lake was a page-turner for me once I read the prologue.

Two families dominate the story.

On the one hand, it is the Greek tragedy of the Pye family. On their farm, “the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur—offstage.”

Kate Morrison has left her two brothers and sister at the lake to become a zoologist. The four siblings lost their parents and struggled to remain together. Their “tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive.”

As Goodreads describes the novel,

In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, continually overturning one’s expectations right to the very end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, this deceptively simple masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leapt to the top of the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.

I highly recommend this novel and am looking forward to reading more from Mary Lawson.

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