I recommend reading "North Woods: A Novel" by Daniel Mason today. It is the story of two young lovers who leave a Puritan colony and find shelter in a humble cabin in the woods. They are unaware this cabin will become home to a succession of extraordinary human and nonhuman characters. "North Woods" has been named one of the ten best books of 2023 by both the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post.
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by Daniel Mason
I recommend reading “North Woods: A Novel” by Daniel Mason today. It is the story of two young lovers who leave a Puritan colony and find shelter in a humble cabin in the woods. They are unaware this cabin will become home to a succession of extraordinary human and nonhuman characters. “North Woods” has been named one of the ten best books of 2023 by both the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post.
An English soldier who was destined for glory decides to abandon the battlefields of the New World to dedicate himself to growing apples. Meanwhile, a pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, dealing with envy and desire. A crime reporter discovers an ancient mass grave but soon realizes the earth refuses to give up its secrets. In the same town, a lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, and a lusty beetle are all present. As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they realize that the dark, raucous, and beautiful past is still alive.
This remarkable and highly imaginative novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason is full of love, insanity, humor, and optimism. North Woods follows the cycles of history, nature, and language to reveal the numerous, enchanting ways we are connected to our surroundings, history, and each other. It is not just a memorable story about secrets and fates but a perspective on the world that poses the timeless question: How can we continue living even after we are gone?
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 Carol Berkin
A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, focuses on four crises in the first decade. Most historians view these are part of the early partisan debates in America.
Professor Berkin takes a different perspective. She focuses on how the Whiskey Rebellion, the Genet Affair, the XYZ Affair, and the Alien and Sedition Acts helped build nationalism. Despite the partisan divisions, both sides could find solutions that helped America survive its first decade. The failure to resolve anyone of these could have doomed America to failure.
The Federalists – Washington, Hamilton, and Adams – were the leaders of that first decade and managed the successive crisis of sovereignty.
A Sovereign People is one of four books from my first One Day University class.
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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by Ann Napolitano
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano is a gorgeous, profoundly moving portrait of what’s possible when we choose to love someone, not despite who they are but because of it. Although several sources recommended Hello Beautiful, I chose the novel based on the title as it is how I always greeted Jan. I highly recommend this book as it is one of the best I have ever read.
Hello Beautiful is an exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women. Knowing it was not him, William Waters’s experience growing up as an only child was an engaging character in the early portion of the novel. However, my hero was Sylvie, the dreamer who pursued true love and found it in a place one would less expect to find it. The consequences of her love reverberate over decades in their families.
The following passage is one example of a well-written book.
“We’re separated from the world by our own edges,” Charlie Padavano says to Sylvie in “Hello Beautiful.” He continues, “We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.”
The interconnections of the characters make this novel one of the best I have read. If only more of us could learn the lessons that Charlie Padavano shared with Sylvie.
As a man on a lifetime grief journey, this exchange echoes my experience.
“When an old person dies,” Kent said, “even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They’re like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.”
Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household.
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?
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 Sally Rooney
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, a writer recommended to me, but I have always kept them on the to-read list, not the current reading. Does a beautiful word exist? Is it possible to live in a beautiful world despite the loss of the love of my life? Perhaps reading a Beautiful World, Where Are You will help me on my grief journey.
Ms. Rooney’s book was a page-turner, and I highly recommend it.
One of the quotes from the book echoed my dream of a beautiful world.
“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.” ― Beautiful World, Where Are You
It also helped remind me how unique and memorable was the love that Jan and I shared. We could quickly fall into a life lived separately as friends, or we might not have ever fallen in love and married.
As Beautiful World, Where Are You, wrote:
“If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.”
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, and they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, and they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
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 Robert A. Caro
Working by Robert A. Caro is a book of evocatively written essays on his life and work. Among the many valuable words of wisdom is his case that one needs to look at every piece of information, not just what we know when we begin. Far too often, people jump to conclusions without having learned all of the facts.
He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses and to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ‘s mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers’ community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books.
Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences–some previously published, some written expressly for this book–bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.
I found this one of the best books I have read and recommend it to all readers.
by Carol Berkin
Revolutionary Mothers by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, is one of four books I purchased after my first One Day University Class on February 9, 2019. It should be required reading!
The book explains how women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers, and fathers died.
It was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. She explains the mystery of Molly Pitcher (she was not a person but a group of women), camp followers, women who spied for their country, Loyalist women, and the impact on African American and Native women.
This intelligent and comprehensive history brings these forgotten stories to their rightful place in the struggle for American independence. Dr. Birkin also highlights how their efforts set the stage for the continuing campaign for gender equality.
