Today, I began reading Sayaka Murata‘s Vanishing World, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. This novel, from the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, presents a surprising and highly imaginative story set in an alternate version of Japan where sexual relations between married couples have disappeared, and all children are conceived through artificial insemination.

Sayaka Murata has established herself as a remarkable observer of society’s peculiarities, delving into our contemporary world with bizarre and unsettling insights. Her portrayals of a contentedly unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman who believes she is an alien in Earthlings have resonated with millions of readers globally. In Vanishing World, Murata takes her vision to a bold new level, envisioning an alternative Japan where attitudes toward sex and procreation diverge significantly from our own.

As a girl, Amane is horrified to learn that her parents “copulated” to conceive her rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. She seeks to escape what she perceives as her mother’s indoctrination into this peculiar “system.” Despite her efforts, Amane’s attractions to both anime characters and real people carry an undeniable sexual weight.

As an adult in a suitably sexless marriage—where sex between married couples is regarded as taboo, akin to incest—Amane and her husband, Saku, decide to relocate to a mysterious new town called Experiment City, or Paradise-Eden. In this community, all children are raised collectively, and every person is considered a mother to all children. Men are beginning to experience pregnancy through artificial wombs that exist outside their bodies, resembling balloons, and children are nameless, referred to simply as “Kodomo-chan.” Will this new world finally cleanse Amane of her strangeness?

Sayaka Murata is the author of several books, including Convenience Store Woman, which won the Akutagawa Prize, Earthlings, and Life Ceremony. Freeman has recognized her as a “Future of New Writing” author, and Vogue Japan has honored her as a Woman of the Year.

Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated works from more than a dozen Japanese writers, including Ryu Murakami. She resides at the foot of a mountain in Eastern Japan.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

Today, I delved into There Is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone, a poignant exploration of America’s escalating homelessness crisis. Goldstone’s examination of the issue’s scale, root causes, and consequences is a wake-up call, passionately arguing that housing must be recognized as a fundamental human right. His compelling narrative demands our immediate attention and action.

The phrase “the working homeless” serves as a stark reminder of the urgency of America’s homelessness crisis. In a country where hard work and determination are expected to lead to success, it is scandalous that individuals with full-time jobs struggle to maintain stable housing. Rising rents, low wages, and insufficient tenant rights have contributed to this alarming trend. Families are facing homelessness not due to a failing economy but because of a thriving one.

In his compelling and thoroughly researched book, Brian Goldstone explores the lives of five families in Atlanta. Maurice and Natalia attempt to rebuild their lives in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of Washington, D.C. Kara aspires to become an entrepreneur while working at a public hospital. Britt has secured a much-coveted housing voucher. Michelle is studying to become a social worker. Celeste works tirelessly at her warehouse job while battling ovarian cancer. Each of these individuals strives to provide a decent life for their children. Yet, one by one, they find themselves among the nation’s working homeless, demonstrating their resilience and the system’s failures.

Through intimate, novelistic portrayals, Goldstone exposes the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their children as they sleep in cars or squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, then head to their jobs and schools the next day. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—people often omitted from official statistics—showing that overflowing shelters and street encampments represent only the most visible aspects of a much larger problem.

Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose long-form reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a PhD in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

Today, I dove into “Audition” by Katie Kitamura, and I’m already hooked! This gripping novel explores a woman’s journey as she navigates what could be the performance of her lifetime—and perhaps even two. It’s both exhilarating and disorienting, much like a Möbius strip that challenges our understanding of the people we cherish. I can’t wait to see where this story takes me!

The narrative begins with two people meeting for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She is an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere, while he is an attractive, troubled young man—young enough to be her son. What is his relationship to her, and how does she see him?

In this compulsively readable and brilliantly crafted novel, two competing narratives unfold, challenging our understanding of the roles we play in life – whether as partners, parents, creators, or muses – and revealing the truths that each performance conceals, particularly from those who believe they know us best.

Taut and hypnotic, “Audition” showcases Katie Kitamura‘s virtuosic writing at its finest.

Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

Today, I embarked on the journey of Heartwood by Amity Gaige. This novel unfolds a gripping narrative as a search and rescue team races against time to find an experienced hiker who mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. The suspense of the search for Valerie is palpable, drawing you into the story with great literary ambition and love at its core.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie’s emotional struggle is palpable as she pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother, battling the elements and struggling to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. What’s unique about this narrative is that a puzzle emerges between these compelling narratives, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning). It tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires more significant questions about how we get lost and how we are found.

Amity Gaige is the author of four previous novels: O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, Sea Wife, a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, and a Mark Twain American Voice Award finalist. Schroder was also a New York Times Notable Book and the best book of 2013 according to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and was shortlisted for the UK’s Folio Prize in 2014. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2018, Amity was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut, and teaches creative writing at Yale.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

My sixtieth book this year, The Rabbit Hutch, was a page-turner that I highly recommend. The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is a debut novel that won the 2022 National Book Award for fiction. It is a novel about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.

As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Ms. Gunty’s book focuses on that ultimate and higher goal. If you can read only one book this year, I recommend The Rabbit Hutch!

“This week is the ceremony for the National Book Award, and one of the finalists is Tess Gunty, whose debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a finalist in the fiction category,” said Kerry Nolan as she spoke with Ms. Gunty.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, several people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors a great fear. But C4 is of particular interest.

Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.

Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole is a novel where the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on a sinister new meaning.

Sydney Green is Brooklyn-born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. After all, their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become a conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

Having lived in Brooklyn and seen the impacts of gentrification, redlining, and other practices, I found this book one that I truly enjoyed. The book will provide a detailed history lesson if you are like Theo and have no thought of these issues.

I enjoyed the visit to Weeksville, as I have been there on several professional occasions. The history of that community needs to be told.

I recommend this book.

Subscribe

Contact Us

When you buy a book or product using a link on this page, I receive a commission. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories by Meng Jin was written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming of age, and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships, and surprising moments of connection. I highly recommend Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories!

Each story speaks so clearly to the loneliness epidemic that confronts our world. I would read one short story and promise to stop and wait until another day to read the next one. Instead

One phrase that will always remain with me is: “The hallucinatory quality of grief.” As a widow, the phrase struck a chord that will forever resonate in my soul.

This is the seventy-third book I have read this year.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Jin turns her considerable talents into short fiction in ten thematically linked stories.

Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly unlimited access to knowledge, and little actual power.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

Today I began reading “Study for Obedience” by Sarah Bernstein. With a robust and lyrical voice, Bernstein thoughtfully examines themes of complicity, power, displacement, and inheritance. “Study for Obedience” is a finely-tuned and unsettling novel that establishes Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

A woman moves to her forebears’ remote northern home to be a housekeeper for her brother, whose wife left him. After arriving, strange events occur bovine hysteria, a ewe’s death, a dog’s phantom pregnancy, and potato blight. Suspicion towards newcomers seems directed at her, and she feels threatened. The hostility grows, and she fears what might happen.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri is the perfect book to help us understand our failures at creating a multi-racial democracy in the nineteenth century and how this has weakened and divided our nation. Jeremi Suri chronicles the events after the civil war, from Lincoln’s assassination to Garfield’s, and how they were a continuation of the war by other means.

I purchased a signed copy and watched a video presentation by Dr. Suri due to my membership at One Day University. Civil War by Other Means is a vivid and unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. 

I highly recommend Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri.

In addition, the documentary, on Apple TV+, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power is a companion piece that illustrates the continued failure to create a multi-racial democracy. Jeremi Suri makes a convincing case that the eternal struggle for democracy continues in our time.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before.

In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point.

What emerges is a vivid and, at times, unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America by Louis P. Masur is a book I got through my membership at One Day University. Professor Masur is one of the best teaches that One Day University has. He is the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University.

Most concise histories leave out more than they include. I found the Sum of our Dreams to be an excellent book to read, and professor Masur conveyed the American experience concisely and clearly. The more recent history is complex as events like the Global War on Terror are still being analyzed and re-understood.

Evoking Barack Obama’s belief that America remains the “sum of its dreams,” Masur locates the origin of those dreams of freedom, equality, and opportunity and traces their progress chronologically, illuminating the nation’s struggle over time to articulate and fulfill their promise.

Masur lets the story of American tell itself. Inspired by James Baldwin’s observation that “American history is longer, larger, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it,” he expands our notion of that history while identifying its threads.

I recommend this book as well as any of Professor Masur’s lectures at One Day University.

Subscribe

Contact Us