I've started reading "Salvage the Bones: A Novel" by Jesmyn Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner and author of "Sing, Unburied, Sing." The book delivers a gritty yet tender story about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Helene's devastation makes it the perfect time to read this book. The novel is among The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
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by Jesmyn Ward
I’ve started reading “Salvage the Bones: A Novel” by Jesmyn Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner and author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” The book delivers a gritty yet tender story about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Helene’s devastation makes it the perfect time to read this book. The novel is among The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
The story is set in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where a hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the city. Esch’s father is growing concerned, although he is often absent and a heavy drinker. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there is little to save. Esch, who is fourteen, is pregnant and struggling to keep down the little food she gets. Her brother Skeetah is trying to care for his pit bull’s new litter, which is dying one by one. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior struggle with family dynamics and lack parental guidance.
As the twelve days that make up the novel’s framework yield their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family – motherless children sacrificing for one another, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce – pulls itself up to face another day. The novel is a big-hearted story about familial love and community against all odds, offering a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty. “Salvage the Bones” is a revelatory, honest, and poignant exploration of social issues, filled with poetry and emotional depth.
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by Mohsin Hamid
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid is a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, Anders, the novel’s protagonist, wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first, he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land.
In Mohsin Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.
I highly recommend this book. It was a page-turner that kept me thinking about love, loss, and rediscovery. All three are subjects close to my heart since Jan’s death.
I decided to read the book after hearing an interview with the author on All of It on WNYC.
One morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance to see one another, face to face, anew.
Hamid’s The Last White Man invites us to envision a future – our future – that dares to reimagine who we think we are, and how we might yet be together.
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 Shane O'Mara
I recently received a book from my family that combines two interests: walking and reading. The book, “In Praise of Walking” by Shane O’Mara, celebrates the joys, health benefits, and mechanics of walking. It emphasizes the importance of getting out of our chairs and discovering a happier, healthier, more creative self.
One of the most important insights I gained from this book is that walking can lead to mind wandering, focusing on autobiographical memory rather than the immediate environment. This realization helped me accept and appreciate Jan’s love and move forward with her passion.
The book also explores the significance of walking to our human identity. Walking upright has given us many advantages, including the freedom of our hands and minds. Walking has enabled us to spread worldwide and has many benefits for our bodies and minds, such as protecting and repairing organs, aiding digestion, and sharpening our thinking.
Overall, “In Praise of Walking” inspires us to start walking again and recognize its many benefits to our lives and societies.
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 Susan Wels
An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder by Susan Wels is a true crime odyssey that explores a forgotten, astonishing chapter of American history, leading the reader from a free-love community in upstate New York to the shocking assassination of President James Garfield. I had read about this historical period in several other books, most recently Civil War by Other Means.
Susan Wels has written an excellent historical overview of a period we often overlook. I highly recommend An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder.
The Oneida Community, even though it was the most successful utopian community, is often overlooked. Ms. Wels connects the dots and places the experiment in the center of a transitional period. It is not merely the connection between Charles Julius Guitea and his assassination of President James Garfield, albeit a brutal crime, that shook America to its core, but all of the other linkages. These include “John Humphrey Noyes; his idol, the eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley (founder of the New Yorker and the New York Tribune).”
She also resurrects the importance of the Wormely Compromise and the African-American family that was an instrumental part of public society.
I have found fiction to be something I enjoy, but I knew it was time for a non-fiction book to balance my reading. The New York Times and other publications highly rated An Assassin in Utopia.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden.
Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts. The men and women of this strange outpost worked and slept together—without sin, they claimed.
From 1848 to 1881, a small utopian colony in upstate New York—the Oneida Community—was known for its shocking sexual practices, from open marriage and free love to the sexual training of young boys by older women. And in 1881, a one-time member of the Oneida Community—Charles Julius Guiteau—assassinated President James Garfield in a brutal crime that shook America to its core.
An Assassin in Utopia is the first book that weaves together these explosive stories in a tale of utopian experiments, political machinations, and murder. This deeply researched narrative—by bestselling author Susan Wels—tells the true, interlocking stories of the Oneida Community and its radical founder, John Humphrey Noyes; his idol, the eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley (founder of the New Yorker and the New York Tribune); and the gloomy, indecisive President James Garfield—who was assassinated after his first six months in office.
Juxtaposed to their stories is the odd tale of Garfield’s assassin, the demented Charles Julius Guiteau, who was connected to all of them in extraordinary, surprising ways.
Against a vivid backdrop of ambition, hucksterism, epidemics, and spectacle, the book’s interwoven stories fuse together in the climactic murder of President Garfield in 1881—at the same time as the Oneida Community collapsed.
Colorful and compelling, An Assassin in Utopia is a page-turning odyssey through America’s nineteenth-century cultural and political landscape.
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 Rebecca Kauffman
I began reading “I’ll Come to You: A Novel” by Rebecca Kauffman today. This sweeping and compact novel explores themes of intimacy, memory, loss, grief, and reconciliation. It delves into the wonder, terror, frustration, fear, and magic of confronting the unknowable in the world and within ourselves. The New York Times recommended it as one of six books to read this week.
I’ll Come to You is a modern and classic story of a family that follows intersecting lives throughout 1995, centered around the anticipation and arrival of a child. Through empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman delves into overlapping narratives: a couple struggling to conceive, which has both softened and hardened their relationship; a woman whose husband of forty years has left her without explaining why; and the man who is disastrously trying to win her affection. Additionally, there’s a couple in denial about an impending health crisis and their son, who is awkwardly navigating middle age while unable to stop lying.
Ultimately, these storylines build to a dramatic and harrowing climax. With heart, wit, and courage, the characters confront challenges that test and define their family bonds.
by Téa Obreht
Today, I started reading The Morningside: A Novel by Téa Obreht. The book tells the story of Silvia and her mother, who have been expelled from their home and have settled in a luxury tower called Island City, where Silvia’s aunt Ena is the superintendent. The Morningside is a place of magical possibilities, where Ena shares folktales with Silvia about her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit. This starkly contrasts Silvia’s current reality, where she feels unmoored and disconnected from her past.
Silvia is fascinated by Bezi Duras, an enigmatic woman who lives in the penthouse and is shrouded in mystery. Bezi has her elevator entrance and only leaves the building at night to walk her three massive hounds, returning in the early morning. Silvia becomes obsessed with unraveling the truth about Bezi’s life and haunted past, even if it comes at a significant cost to her.
The Morningside is an inventive and moving novel that explores the power of storytelling and how we use it to make sense of our lives and the world around us.
