Richard W. shared a post on February 12, 2024
Yet Another Sunday That Was Not Super

Yet Another Sunday That Was Not Super

Fifty-eight Missed Super Bowls and Counting

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 2 seconds

I hung out with some friends in January 1967 on a warm afternoon in Panama City, Florida. Even though the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, featuring the Packers and the Chiefs, was taking place in Los Angeles, we should have paid more attention to it. We stopped at the Lucille Moore Elementary School just before the game started to play football. We were part of the Students for LBJ group and weren’t part of the popular crowd.

I started college in the fall and skipped watching championship games. Even though I attended Game 5 of the 1973 World Series,  keeping up with sports other than baseball became less significant as I became a husband and father.

In 2015, my son Mike invited my wife Jan and me to his apartment to watch the Super Bowl XLIX with his future wife, Elyssa, and her parents. Being a dedicated fan of the New England Patriots, Mike was excited about the game, but Jan and I were more interested in getting to know Elyssa’s parents. We spent most of the afternoon chatting with Arlene about our shared love of books and recommending the series 11/22/63 based on Stephen King’s novel. Despite leaving early, we heard that the Patriots had won the next day, much to Mike’s delight.

Richard in 1973

Home Alone in the Burg

It no longer mattered why Jan invited me. All I can do is wait and see if she notices I am there. If the invite was not for me, there is nothing I can do.
Richard W. Brown August 14, 2022

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Yet Another Sunday That Was Not Super
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The Hunter: A Novel

Read: March 2024

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The Hunter: A Novel

by Tana French

Today, I began reading “The Hunter: A Novel” by Tana French, often called the Queen of Irish crime fiction. The story takes place in a small village in the West of Ireland during a hot summer. Two men arrive, one returning home and the other seeking riches. However, one of them is also seeking death.

Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago police officer who moved to rural Ireland for a peaceful life. He has built a relationship with a local woman named Lena and has been mentoring Trey Reddy, a troubled teenager on a better path. But when Trey’s long-lost father returns, accompanied by an English millionaire and a plan to find gold in the townland, everything they have built is threatened. Cal and Lena are willing to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey is not interested in protection. What she wants is revenge.

This novel, written by the acclaimed author described by The New York Times as “in a class by herself,” tells a nuanced and atmospheric tale about what we are willing to do for our loved ones, what we will do for revenge, and what we may have to sacrifice when the two collide.

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How Democracies Die

Read: January 2021

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How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt was on my reading list for almost a year. In late December of last year, I started reading it and was in the final chapter on January 6, 2021. Like many of us, I never in my life expected to see a day like that in our country.

This type of event is one the authors talk about in their book.

According to the overview in GoodReads,

Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang–in a revolution or military coup–but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.

Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die–and how ours can be saved.

Our democracy is too valuable for us to have it die. We all need to work to preserve and strengthen it. How Democracies Die is a book that everyone needs to read!

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Flight: A Novel

Read: January 2023

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Flight: A Novel

by Lynn Steger Strong

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a novel about family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, forming a decisive next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time. The book has been on my to-read list for a few months. A New Yorker Best Books of 2022, it seemed like a good start on my 2023 Goodreads Reading challenge. Flight is the first book I read in 2023. Last year I read seventy-four books, and each helped me with my grief journey.

I recommend this novel as it is a page-turner highlighting the difficulty families experience after a loss. As a culture, we are experiencing declining social connections, including within families. Flight is an excellent effort to define the crisis.

Although several possible resolutions to the conflict became clear by the middle of the novel, Ms. Strong told the story so that until the end, it was unclear how or if it would be resolved. In addition, enough unresolved issues remained so that.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.

With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps

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 Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Read: June 2023

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I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

by Lorrie Moore

Today, I started reading Lorrie Moore‘s latest novel; I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. It’s her first book since A Gate at the Stairs, and it’s a bold and contemplative exploration of love, death, passion, and grief. Moore examines what it means to be haunted by the past in terms of history and the human heart.

The story follows a teacher who visits his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the 19th century is stolen from a boarding house. There’s also a therapy clown and an assassin, who is presumed dead but may not be.

Moore’s unique wordplay, wry humor, and wisdom make for an enchanting read. She presents us with a magic box of surprises, exploring themes of love, rebirth, and the pull toward life. This novel is a poetic and imaginative portrait of lovers and siblings that questions the stories we’ve been told and whether they’re true.

With I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Moore takes us on a journey to a windswept, tragic, and comic landscape. It’s unmistakably her world and a journey you won’t forget.

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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Booth

Read: January 2023

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Booth: A Novel

by Karen Joy Fowler

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler was on my to-read list for several months. Booth is an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. I have always been fascinated by history, especially the Civil War. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make and break a family. It is the second book I have read this year.

Ms. Fowler struggled with how to write this novel without focusing on the cruelest member of the Booth family. She succeeded, but I sometimes felt confused about the type of book I was reading. Was it historical fiction or a textbook?

In the afterword, she admits that there is more of the story in the children of the siblings of John Wilkes Booth. I wish I knew more about that generation and how they responded to the notoriety. A family tree would have helped as there are many family members.

I recommend Booth as history is a dynamic lesson we must keep studying.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth–breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one–is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one, the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy.

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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Do You Remember Being Born?: A Novel

Read: September 2023

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Do You Remember Being Born?

by Sean Michaels

I started reading “Do You Remember Being Born?” by Sean Michaels, a writer who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel is about an aging poet named Marian Ffarmer, a legend in the world of poetry. However, despite her success, she struggles with financial issues and her son’s inability to buy a house. Marian has sacrificed her personal relationships and happiness to pursue her career but questions whether it is worth it.

One day, she receives an invitation from a Tech Company to travel to California and work with their poetry AI, Charlotte. The company wants her to co-author a poem with their bot in a historic partnership, which clashes with Marian’s beliefs about the individual pursuit of art. However, she decides to take this opportunity, even though it makes her feel like a sell-out and a skeptic. The encounter in California changes her life, work, and understanding of kinship.

The book explores the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community. It’s a response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time. The author, Sean Michaels, is a winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and his book is a love letter to and interrogation of the creative legacy. It’s a joyful recognition that belonging to one’s art must mean belonging to the world to survive meaningfully.

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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