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.
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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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by Chetna Maroo
Western Lane: A Novel by Chetna Maroo is a taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself. Western Lane is about three sisters who have lost their mother. Their father is encouraged to provide structure in raising his daughters. Gopi, the narrator, is a squash player, and her father imposes a brutal training regimen. I highly recommend this novel!
The following passage explains the importance of squash to Gopi and how she views the world.
In the court, your mind is not only on the shot you’re about to play and the shot with which your opponent might reply, but on the shots that will follow two, three, four moves ahead. You’re watching your opponent’s position and the game he or she is playing, making calculations. This is how you choose which way to go. Though your mind is following several paths at once, it’s not a splitting but expansion forwards and backward in time, and it happens so quickly that it feels like instinct. Sometimes, you don’t even know you are thinking.
In the first few pages, I wondered what I would have done if I had been a single parent when my sons were young. I do not believe I would have imposed on my sons what Gopi’s father did to her. However, I have found reading and art to be powerful tools to help me cope with grief. I have focused on rituals, structure, and purpose.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot, and its echo.
But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we know ourselves and each other.
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 Octavia E. Butler
This morning, I completed reading Octavia E. Butler‘s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower and immediately started reading its sequel, Parable of the Talents, initially published in 1998. This second book is even more relevant today than it was back then. The novel’s timely message of hope and resistance in the face of fanaticism is shockingly prescient.
In 2032, Lauren Olamina survived the destruction of her home and family. She envisioned a peaceful community in Northern California, which she established based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed. This new settlement provides a haven for outcasts who face persecution following the election of an ultra-conservative president. The new president pledges to “make America great again,” but the country becomes increasingly divided and dangerous. Lauren’s subversive colony, a minority religious faction led by a young black woman, becomes a target for President Jarret’s oppressive regime characterized by terror and discrimination.
In the future, Asha Vere discovers the journals of her mother, Lauren Olamina, whom she never met. As she delves into her mother’s writings, she grapples with the conflict between Lauren’s responsibilities to her chosen family and her mission to guide humanity toward a brighter tomorrow.
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 Amor Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is a transporting novel about a man sentenced by the government to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. In 1922, a Bolshevik tribunal deemed Count Alexander Rostov an unrepentant aristocrat. His house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.
During my grief journey, I have on occasion felt as if I was a prisoner in my apartment, so I found this novel to be one that provided me an alternative to understanding what it would have been like to be under house arrest as Count Rostov was.
A Gentleman in Moscow was a page-turner. The plot captures a unique historical time and how Count Rostov makes the best of a bad situation. I highly recommend this novel.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
With his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late 1930s Manhattan to life with a splendid atmosphere and an excellent command of style. As NPR commented, readers and critics were enchanted, “Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.”
A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day. He must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates to the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
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 Jeff Goodell
I recently started reading “The Heat Will Kill You First” by Jeff Goodell, which delves into the extreme ways our planet is already changing. The book explores how spring is arriving earlier and fall is arriving later and how this will impact our food supply and disease outbreaks. As I have stated in my Action Alert: EPA’s Carbon Rule, the time to act is now.
The book also predicts the consequences of summer days in cities like Chicago and Boston, reaching temperatures as high as 110°F. Goodell explains that heat waves are used only to affect the most vulnerable people, but as they become more intense and familiar, they will affect everyone.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the world is facing a new reality. In California, wildfires are now seasonal, while the Northeast is experiencing less and less snow each winter. Meanwhile, the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are melting alarmingly. Heat is the primary threat that is driving all other impacts of the climate crisis. As temperatures rise, it exposes weaknesses in our governments, politics, economy, and values.
The basic science is straightforward: If we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the global temperature will also stop rising. However, if we wait for 50 years to stop burning them, the temperature will continue to rise, making parts of our planet uninhabitable. The responsibility to act is in our hands. The hotter it gets, the more our underlying issues will surface and expand.
Jeff Goodell has been an award-winning journalist in the field of environmental reporting for several decades. His latest book explains how extreme heat will cause significant changes in the world. The book is an excellent blend of scientific insights and on-the-ground storytelling, and Goodell explores some of the most significant questions surrounding the topic. He reveals that extreme heat is a force we have yet to comprehend fully.
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 Tana French
Today, I started reading Tana French‘s The Searcher: A Novel. Last week, I read The Hunter by the same author. I should have read The Searcher first, as it is the prequel to The Hunter, but reading in reverse order helped my enjoyment. Despite knowing some of the suspenseful twists and turns the story would take, I found it a page-turner.
The story follows Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago police officer who seeks a fresh start in a tranquil Irish village. However, when a local boy approaches him to investigate his missing brother, Cal discovers that the town has its share of dark secrets. The book raises thought-provoking questions about distinguishing right from wrong in a complicated world and what we risk when making that decision.
Tana French is a highly acclaimed crime novelist who skillfully creates a captivating and suspenseful atmosphere throughout the book.
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.
