The Power of Positive Thoughts

The Power of Positive Thoughts

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 8 seconds

Embracing Tomorrow with JanI have lived one day at a time most of my life, and since Jan died, living one hour at a time for the early part of my grief journey, I woke up not fully rested but very positive.

The arrival of the sandman has always been fleeting at best.

But I have always awakened to positive thoughts, albeit many of late have been dim and difficult to articulate.

Today my morning thoughts were decisive, specific, and effortless to implement.

With days left in the year, my thoughts as I lay in bed focused on what can I do to invest in the charities that mattered to Jan and me.

The short-term focus was on where to make the end-of-the-year donations.

In the long term, I focused on planning to distribute the modest estate Jan created.

Hopefully, these early morning dreams will resonate in the world and assist in repairing the globe.


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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Grief is a Great Teacher

As I pray every week at Temple Sha'arey Shalom, when we remember those we lost in this passage, one of our readings is: "Grief is a great teacher when it sends us back to serve and bless the living. We learn how to counsel and comfort those who, like ourselves, are bowed with sorrow. We learn when to keep silent in their presence and when a word will assure them of our love and concern."

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The Power of Positive Thoughts
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Three Summers

Read: February 2025

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Three Summers: A Novel

by Margarita Liberaki

Today, I began reading Margarita Liberaki‘s Three Summers, translated by Karen Van Dyck. This edition features a detailed introduction by Ms. Van Dyck, in which she shares her experiences meeting Ms. Liberaki and collaborating with her on the translation. The original novel, written in Greek, was titled The Straw Hats, but Ms. Van Dyck felt that this title would not resonate with foreign readers similarly.

Three Summers is the story of three sisters who grew up in the countryside near Athens before the outbreak of the Second World War. The sisters live in a large, old house surrounded by a beautiful garden. The oldest sister, Maria, is adventurous and eager to settle down and start her own family. The middle sister, Infanta, is gorgeous but emotionally distant. Katerina, the narrator, and the youngest sister is dreamy and rebellious.

Throughout three summers, the sisters share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, and try to understand their parents and other adult figures. They also observe the peculiar behaviors of friends and neighbors while worrying about and discovering their identities. Karen Van Dyck’s translation beautifully captures the light and warmth of this modern Greek classic.

Margarita Liberaki (1919-2001) was born in Athens and raised by her grandparents, who owned the Fexis bookstore and publishing house. In addition to her novel Three Summers, she authored The Other Alexander (1950) and The Mystery (1976). She also wrote several plays, including Candaules’ Wife (1955) and The Danaïds (1956), part of a cycle she called Mythical Theater. Furthermore, she contributed screenplays, such as Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) and Diaspora (1999), which focused on Greek intellectuals in exile in Paris during the junta. Her novel Three Summers is now a standard part of public education in Greece and Cyprus and was adapted into a television miniseries in 1995.

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Columbia University. Her research focuses on modern Greek literature, diaspora literature, gender studies, and translation. She has edited or co-edited several poetry anthologies, including A Century of Greek Poetry (2004), The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2010), and Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (2017) for NYRB Poets. Additionally, her translations have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, and The Baffler.



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All Fours: A Novel

Read: May 2024

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All Fours: A Novel

by Miranda July

Today, I started reading All Fours: A Novel by Miranda July. A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel, a testament to her unique approach to fiction, confirms the brilliance of her storytelling. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.



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!


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The Lion's Den

Read: January 2023

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The Lion’s Den

by Anthony Marra

Today, I read The Lion’s Den by Anthony Marra. After a four and one-half Zoom meeting, I was looking for a book I could finish tonight, and the third book in the Inheritance, a collection of five stories about secrets, unspoken desires, and dangerous revelations between loved ones, seemed like the book to read. The Lion’s Den is the story of Michael, a son, his father’s transgressions in a tell-all were the ethical, righteous—and profitable—thing to do. What’s left but to slink back home for a humbling face-to-face with the man whose secrets he sold?

It was the perfect novel to read this evening. In the opening paragraph, when Michael’s father describes the automated customer service computer voice.” Siri’s dimwitted stepsister,” I knew I could enjoy this book.

Michael’s last-minute invitation to be the Ethics Symposium speaker at his parochial school was written in a way that was both bluntly honest and humorous.

Michael’s visits with his father to the lion’s den at the National Zoo were profoundly moving, and when the wheelchair was left there after his father’s death brought tears to my eyes.

I highly recommend The Lion’s Den, part of Inheritance, a collection of five stories about secrets, unspoken desires, and dangerous revelations between loved ones. Each Inheritance piece can be read or listened to in a single setting. By yourself, behind closed doors, or shared with someone you trust. This is the third one in the series I have read. The previous two were Everything My Mother Taught Me and Can You Feel This?

I have enjoyed all three and look forward to reading the final two.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Exposing his father’s transgressions in a tell-all was the ethical, righteous—and profitable—thing to do. What’s left but to slink back home for a humbling face-to-face with the man whose secrets he sold?

He was a notorious government whistle-blower. Depending on whom you ask, he’s a treasonous felon, a folk hero, a validated patriot, or a national disgrace. To his son, Michael, he’s the father who threw his family into upheaval. Now, having moved back home at thirty-four, Michael is getting to know him as a man and getting nearer to understanding his motivations that have remained a mystery in this darkly humorous short story of sacrifice and betrayal by New York Times bestselling author Anthony Marra.


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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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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Kala: A Novel

Read: June 2024

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Kala: A Novel

by Colin Walsh

Today, I started reading “Kala: A Novel” by Colin Walsh, a gripping literary page-turner from a rising Irish talent. Former friends, estranged for twenty years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives. Three old friends are reunited in the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, for the first time in years.

Helen, Joe, and Mush were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot center. Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.

Now it’s fifteen years later:

  • Helen has reluctantly returned to Ireland for her father’s wedding.
  • Joe is a world-famous musician who is newly back in town.
  • Mush has never left, too scared to venture beyond the counter of his mother’s café.

But human remains are discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing. As past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their involvement in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance.

Against the backdrop of a town suffocating on its secrets, in a story that builds from a smolder to a stunning climax, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging and the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.

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I Have Some Questions for You:

Read: February 2023

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I Have Some Questions for You

by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai is a book that, from page one, pulled me into the story and made me believe I was embedded with Bodie Kane as she returned to her boarding school and worked with students to review the murder of her roommate twenty-three years ago. I Have Some Questions for You was more than a page-turner as I was an unnamed participant. I highly recommend this book and, as Ms. Makkai does, buy it at an independent bookstore.

I had not heard of the book until I read a review in The New Yorker by Katty Waldman, who writes, “The new book, a murder mystery set at an élite boarding school, is being marketed as an irresistible whodunnit. But it also joins a growing number of critiques of true crime.” Once I finished the review, I ordered the book and did not put it down until I finished the novel.

Do not “read this book if you”are looking for a whodunnit. It is a critique of true crime and an assessment of the “me too” era. How do we judge the past by the standards of the present?

Every book I have read since Jan died is one I wanted to discuss with her. But I Have Some Questions is one that would have been helpful for both of us to read simultaneously and share our thoughts. Jan’s work with the YWCA of Union County’s Domestic Violence program would have given her a unique perspective. But my lifetime efforts to free me from male blindness would have been a good counterpoint.

Please read this book, share it, and discuss it.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s murder and the conviction of the school’s trainer, Omar Evans, are online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. As she falls down the rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t an outsider at Granby as she’d thought, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there?

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation, timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.


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.


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Lila: A Novel

Read: April 2022

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Lila: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

Lila: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson is an unusual but believable love story. Although different than how I met Jan, this novel is about love and romance that, on the surface, should never have happened. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church – the only available shelter from the rain- ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.

Lila is the third novel in the Gilead series. Previously I read Home, the second in the series, and Jack, the fourth. I highly recommend all three books.

Hopefully, one day I will read the Gilead and complete the series.

The Goodreads summary of the book provides an excellent overview.

Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

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