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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Tell Me Everything: A Novel

Read: January 2025

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Tell Me Everything: A Novel

by Elizabeth Strout

Today, I dived into “Tell Me Everything: A Novel” by Elizabeth Strout, and I’m already captivated. This book made it onto NPR’s best books list for 2024 and caught the eye of Oprah’s Book Club—no small feat! Strout writes with such empathy and emotional depth that it reflects her incredible talent. Lucy beautifully captures this sentiment by stating, “Love comes in many different forms, but it is always love.”

With her profound understanding of the human condition and silences that convey deep emotions, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, reuniting with her beloved characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and others—as they confront a shocking crime, navigate love while choosing to remain apart, and ponder the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer, Bob Burgess, finds himself entangled in a murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also developed a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William.

Lucy and Bob take walks and discuss their lives, fears, regrets, and what could have been. Meanwhile, Lucy is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, who now resides in a retirement community on the outskirts of town. They spend afternoons in Olive’s apartment, sharing stories about people they have known—what Olive calls “unrecorded lives,” which reanimate their experiences and imbue their lives with meaning.



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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Atonement: A Novel

Read: August 2024

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Atonement: A Novel

by Ian McEwan

Today, I started reading “Atonement: A Novel” by Ian McEwan, an acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author. This symphonic novel explores complex themes such as love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness. It has been recognized as one of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, making it a must-read for those interested in these profound themes.

The story is set on a scorching summer day in 1935, where thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment of flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. Briony’s incomplete understanding of adult motives and her literary gifts lead to a crime that significantly impacts their lives, taking them on an emotional journey of love, guilt, and forgiveness.

The narrative tracks the repercussions of this crime through the chaos and carnage of World War II, a vivid historical backdrop that immerses the reader into the twentieth century’s close. “Atonement” has been acclaimed for engaging readers on multiple levels, marking it a genuine masterpiece from the Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Ian McEwan.

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Sun City

Read: February 2025

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Sun City by Tove Jansson

by Tove Jansson

Today, I began reading “Sun City” by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal. I found this book mentioned in Maya Chung‘s review in The Atlantic’s Book Briefings, and as an older man, it seemed like the perfect choice for me. In “The Summer Book” and “The True Deceiver,” as well as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson consistently explores the everyday lives of older adults.

She portrays them not as a separate group but as fully fleshed individuals who experience the same jealousies, desires, and joys as any other demographic. It’s no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s, she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American institution, the retirement home, where older people lived in their tightly knit worlds.

In Sun City, Jansson depicts these worlds in a group portrait of residents and employees at the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the narrative moves from character to character, the characters move through an America riven by cultural divides, facing the death of its dream. The Berkeley Arms’s newest resident finds a place among the rocking chairs and endless chatter on the veranda while other residents long for past glories, mourning their losses and killing time. Meanwhile, one of their attendants, Bounty Joe, is eagerly awaiting a letter, or even just a postcard, alerting him to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Nobody’s normal anymore,” the bartender says, “not the old geezers and not the newborn kids.”



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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Dream Count

Read: March 2025

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Dream Count: A Novel

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today, I dove into “Dream Count” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I couldn’t be more excited! A decade in the making, this novel promises to be a captivating journey. Known for her bestselling works like “Americanah” and “We Should All Be Feminists,” Adichie brings her trademark brilliance to this story of four women exploring their loves, longings, and desires. I can’t wait to see how their lives unfold!

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. During the pandemic, feeling alone, she reflects on her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Her best friend Zikora, a successful lawyer, faces betrayal and heartbreak, leading her to turn to the person she thought she needed the least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold and outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she truly knows herself. Meanwhile, Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, proudly raises her daughter in America yet must confront an unimaginable hardship that threatens everything she has worked to achieve.

In “Dream Count,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie focuses on these women’s lives in a captivating and profound novel that explores the very nature of love. Is true happiness ever attainable, or is it merely a fleeting state? How honest must we be with ourselves to love and be loved? The story profoundly reflects on our choices and those made for us, mothers and daughters, and our interconnected world. “Dream Count” resonates with emotional urgency and provides poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, all conveyed in beautifully powerful language. This work reaffirms Adichie’s status as one of contemporary literature’s most exciting and dynamic writers.


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels “Purple Hibiscus,” which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; “Half of a Yellow Sun,” which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection “The Thing Around Your Neck” and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book by Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.



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 Passing Storm

Read: May 2022

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The Passing Storm

by Christine Nolfi

The Passing Storm by Christine Nolfi is a gripping, openhearted novel about family, reconciliation, and bringing closure to the secrets of the past. From the first chapter, it was a pageturner and a book that engaged me when I needed to focus on life’s challenges. I was looking for something different from my most recent books.

I very much enjoyed this novel. It is focused on losses, including one parent and a daughter. I had not anticipated that but found that Ms. Nolfi handled that in an empathic way that did not trigger my grief but helped me understand my grief. The primary characters Rae, Quinn, Connor, and Griffin are brought to life by the writer. It left me wanting to know what happens to them now that they have survived the early stages of grief.

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview.

Early into the turbulent decade of her thirties, Rae Langdon struggles to work through grief she never anticipated. With her father, Connor, she tends to their Ohio farm, a forty-acre spread that has enjoyed better days. As memories sweep through her, some too precious to bear, Rae gives shelter from a brutal winter to a teenager named Quinn Galecki.

His parents have thrown out Quinn, a couple too troubled to help steer the misunderstood boy through his losses. Now Quinn has found a temporary home with the Langdons—and an unexpected kinship because Rae, Quinn, and Connor share a past and understand one another’s pain. But its depths—and all its revelations and secrets—have yet to come to light. To finally move forward, Rae must confront them and fight for Quinn, whose parents have other plans for their son.

There might be hope for a new season with forgiveness, love, and the spring thaw—a second chance Rae believed in her heart was gone forever.


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The Rabbit Hutch

Read: October 2022

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The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

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.

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