Tag: Living alone

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Read: November 2024

A Mercy a Novel

by Toni Morrison

Today, I started reading “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison. The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner explores the complexities of slavery in this novel. Like “Beloved,” it tells the poignant story of a mother and her daughter—a mother who abandons her child to protect her and a daughter who struggles with that abandonment. “A Mercy” is also recognized as one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

In the 1680s, a tumultuous period in the Americas, the slave trade is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, navigates this harsh landscape with a small holding in the North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. She is Florens, a girl who can read and write and might be helpful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens embarks on a journey for love, first seeking it from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

Read: June 2021

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Bodily Harm

by Margaret Atwood

Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood is one of the books I picked up from our bookshelf in the first few months after Jan’s death. Being someone who has always fantasized about being a journalist, I found it very interesting.

A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.

Bodily Harm may be the bleakest book that Ms. Atwood has written. One of her common themes is “the violence that human beings inflict on one another and their isolation in an uncaring world. It holds out some hope in the form of compassion to be shared by those who are victims of bodily harm in any form. The novel suggests that every person falls into this category. All are victims. There is no exemption, no escape for anyone.”

I recommend this book.

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Read: October 2023

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Bright Young Women: A Novel

by Jessica Knoll

Today, I commenced reading Bright Young Women: A Novel by Jessica Knoll. Violent acts of the same man bring together two women from opposite sides of the country and become allies and sisters in arms as they pursue the justice that would otherwise elude them in one of the year’s most acclaimed, highly anticipated thrillers.

Masterfully blending psychological suspense and actual crime elements, Jessica Knoll—author of the bestselling novel Luckiest Girl Alive and the writer behind the Netflix adaption starring Mila Kunis—delivers a new and exhilarating thriller in Bright Young Women. The book opens on a Saturday night in 1978, hours before a soon-to-be-infamous murderer descends upon a Florida sorority house with deadly results.

The lives of those who survive, including sorority president and critical witness Pamela Schumacher, are forever changed. Across the country, Tina Cannon is convinced the man papers targeted her missing friend referred to as the All-American Sex Killer—and that he’s struck again. Determined to find justice, the two join forces as their search for answers leads to a final, shocking confrontation.

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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Read: March 2025

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The Amen Effect

by Sharon Brous

Sharon Brous, a prominent American rabbi, argues in The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Heal Our Hearts and Mend Our Broken World that the essential spiritual work of our time—though instinctual and often countercultural—focuses on connecting through celebration, sorrow and solidarity. We must support each other in times of joy and pain, embrace vulnerability and possibility, nurture relationships with shared purposes, and create communities centered on care.

From one of our country’s most prominent rabbis, this is an inspiring book about the power of community based on one of her most impactful sermons. What will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society in a time of loneliness, isolation, social rupture, and alienation?

Brous contends that honoring our most basic human instinct—the yearning for authentic connection—is the way to reawaken our shared humanity and begin to heal. This kind of sacred presence is captured by the word amen, a powerful ancient idea that we affirm the fullness of one another’s experience by demonstrating, in body and word: “I see you. You are not alone.”

An acclaimed preacher and storyteller, Brous pairs heart-driven anecdotes from her experience building and pastoring to a leading-edge faith community over the past two decades with ancient Jewish wisdom and contemporary science. The result is a clarion call: the sense of belonging engendered by our genuine presence is a social and biological need and a moral and spiritual necessity.

With original insights and practical tools, The Amen Effect translates foundational ideas into simple practices that connect us to our better angels, offering a blueprint for a more meaningful life and a more connected and caring world.

As she writes in the preface, after listing the joys and pains of life, weddings, births, and death,

It’s in these times that I feel the weight of the work, the privilege of being alive, the blessing of being so close to such raw beauty and pain. It’s there that I have learned the power of saying ‘Amen‘ to one another’s grief and joy, sorrow and celebration with our very presence. Of bearing witness to profound suffering and protesting injustice with our very presence. Of comforting and consoling, surviving and thriving with our very presence. What I’ve learned, during the years, is the meaning of sacred companionship. I have seen, in ways subtle and pronounced, a longing to connect with others who can help hold the pain, a need to share what we’ve learned in the trenches, and a desire to give, even when we ourselves have barely caught our breath. And I have seen how knowing that we’re not alone can both heighten our joy and help us endure unimaginable hardship.

Click here to read about my experience listening to Rabbi Brous at the Kol Tzedek Speakers Series at Temple Emanu-El in Westfield.

Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR, a leading-edge Jewish community based in Los Angeles, and the author of The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Heal Our Hearts and Mend Our Broken World, a national bestseller.

In 2013, Brous blessed President Obama, and Vice President Biden at the Inaugural National Prayer Service, and in 2021 returned to bless President Biden and Vice President Harris and then led the White House Passover Seder 2021 and the Hanukkah candle lighting with the Vice President and Second Gentleman in 2023. She was ranked as the number one most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She has also been recognized by The Forward and the Jerusalem Post as one of the most influential Jews alive today. Her work has appeared in prominent publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Additionally, her TED talk, “Reclaiming Religion,” has been viewed by over 1.5 million people.

Brous is in the inaugural cohort of Auburn Seminary’s Senior Fellows program, which unites top faith leaders working on the frontlines for justice. She sits on the faculty of REBOOT and serves on the International Council of the New Israel Fund and the national steering committee for the Poor People’s Campaign.

A Columbia University graduate (both undergraduate and M.A. in Human Rights), she was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

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Read: October 2023

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People Collide: A Novel

by Isle McElroy

Today, I started reading “People Collide” by Isle McElroy. The book is about a gender-bending, body-switching story that explores the themes of marriage, identity, and sex. “People Collide” is a profound exploration of ambition, sacrifice, desire, and loss. The book sheds a refreshing light on themes of love, sexuality, and the truth of who we are.

The protagonist, Eli, lives with his wife, Elizabeth, in a cramped apartment in Bulgaria. One day, Eli wakes up to find that he has switched bodies with Elizabeth, who has disappeared without a trace. The story follows Eli’s journey across Europe and America to find his missing wife while he learns to exist in her body.

As Eli comes closer to finding Elizabeth, he begins to question the effect of their metamorphosis on their relationship. He wonders how long he can keep up the illusion of living as someone else. Will their marriage wither away entirely in each other’s bodies? Or will this transformation be the key to making their marriage thrive?

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.

Read: October 2023

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Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel

by C Pam Zhang

Today, I commenced reading Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel by C Pam Zhang, the award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold; she returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world. With the arrival of forest fire smoke in my neighborhood, it seemed a timely book to read.

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global eliteZhan, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her body.

The chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion in this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence. Soon, she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, wild delight, and the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.

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.

Living alone

Please, Stay With Me!

Love is Our Only Salvation!