Welcome to Litsy!

Pic of the neighbourhood - this is Peggy, she lives in the house opposite and her and Sansa have staring matches 😁
Love where we live
Tagged - tie between this one and Once Upon a River
8pm onwards
Take away - It‘s Friday 🎉🎉 that‘s the law!
#friyayintro

Not really sure how to review, such an odd, wonderful little book. I know at 20 I would have thought this was pretentious, intellectual B.S. At 50+, I totally identified with the introspection, general malaise and WTF moments of the MC. I got lost down the rabbit hole of Buster Keaton and Delmore Schwartz.
Don‘t read if you want a plot and answers, read for beautiful writing.
Using for #booked2019 #genrebusting
Thanks @saresmoore 😘❤️💕

Loving the writing in this book. So wonderful ❤️

This slim book knows no genre. When I first cracked Tim Bowling‘s poetic middle-aged reflection, I was skeptical. Hints of magical realism reveal themselves from the start, just as the journey begins. The protagonist (named for the author) spends a single day wandering in and out of present reality, his experiences—real & imagined—mingling to highlight poignant reflections. 👇

“The curious truth is most people must work for a living, yet we live in a culture that celebrates only the escape from work. The way most of us spend our lives is scorned and dismissed. Is it any wonder, then, that we should rise as if from the dead to take up our toil?”

“Every day in North America, life is sold to us as trivial, passing entertainment, and death as a horror whose spiritual and emotional meanings are to be avoided at all costs.”

Here‘s my line-up for Winter of #Booked2019

1. Female Detective: The Anatomist‘s Wife
2. Fairy Tale Retelling: The Robber Bride
3. Happy Place: The Glass Town Game (My happy place is my childhood imagination.)
4. Related to a Podcast: The Heavy Bear (Thanks, @ReadingEnvy & @Lindy)
5. Irish Author: The Heart‘s Invisible Furies
6. New to You Author: Folk by Zoe Gilbert (♥️ @Moray_Reads)

*All choices are subject to my bailing whims! 😬

An inventive, introspective and thoroughly rewarding novel about a writer who spends a day wandering city streets in the company of an invisible bear and the ghost of Buster Keaton. Longer review here: https://lindypratch.blogspot.ca/2017/09/the-heavy-bear-by-tim-bowling.html?m=1
#canadianauthor 🇨🇦
This is one of books I talked about on the Reading Envy podcast (95). 😊
@ReadingEnvy @WolsakandWynn

The Heavy Bear received a star review in the Quill & Quire! "A brilliant novel that successfully reads as poetry combined with aspects of memoir and thought-provoking cultural critique, The Heavy Bear promises there is much that is redeemable in life's next stage." #novel #review #canadianauthor

The Annotated Bee & Me is a collection of poetry and bits of Bowling's family history, letterpress printed by Gaspereau Press: a lovely tactile object.
"My family wintered bees in their Edmonton cellar a century ago. That can't have been easy."
(The pictured title is not in the Litsy database, so I linked to his most recent work, which is another pleasing genre-blender.)

#insects #CanLit @RealLifeReading

We sleepwalked the ten minutes to MacEwan University, though I did note the large grey towers on the horizon, an architectural anomaly that always made me think of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. But I rarely felt a sense of magic or fantastic escape as I approached.

There's nothing very funny for long about a pool of blood around a banana peel tossed on the cold sidewalk of the human condition.

"A bank like this," I said quietly, "has sold for $7,000."
She whipped out her phone so quickly that I thought she might shoot me with it and run off with the toy. A very special kind of bank robbery. For all I knew, phones could shoot bullets now. Surely some American company had patented and manufactured that gem of an idea. Why not? I wouldn't put anything past this culture except the past.

"Fantasy's my favourite. When I was a kid, I read all the Harry Potter books. And Susan Cooper. You know, Darkness Rising, that whole series."
I didn't know. But it certainly didn't surprise me that the darkness beneath would rise. What else could it do?

[I'm reading an ARC. I hope Cooper's title is correct in the final edition.]

In the early vaudeville days, the comedians used a curious prop, a goat bladder stretched on a stick, in their acts. One comedian would hit another with it, accompanied by a loud noise, and the other would fall. Not exactly sophisticated, but the human race is not exactly sophisticated. The simplicity - even primitivism - of slapstick still has mass appeal. Just consider TV shows such as America's Funniest Home Videos.

Being a man who didn't own a cell phone (I couldn't shake the association with prison, and that movie moment when the unjustly-accused gets one call to a lawyer), I tended to lag behind the contemporary pace of change. Well, more than lag.

The little screens reduced their walking speed but did not divert their purpose. In fact, these people were doubly purposeful in the disturbing way of sleepwalkers, who inhabit two worlds at the same time - yes, like Keaton's projectionist in Sherlock Jr. Except here, on the avenue, these walkers had stepped out of their real lives without even leaving their real bodies. Perhaps they were watching videos of themselves walking somewhere else.

No, this man, this urban misfit, bum, panhandler, vagrant, down-and-outer, tramp, hobo, drifter, derelict - he wasn't me. I didn't know him from a hole in the ground. I didn't know him from Adam. I didn't know him from Adam standing in a hole in the ground.

I'm enjoying the blur between fiction and nonfiction in this novel. Including quotations from other sources, for example:
"Charlie's tramp was a bum with a bum's philosophy. Loveable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman and honest." -Keaton

I'd lost my taste for him over the years, just as I'd lost my taste for candy - Chaplin's sentimentality hurt the teeth of my spirit, you might say. But what it really boiled down to was the difference between manipulation and art - Chaplin could be phony where Keaton was never that.

I was going to wait until I'd finished some of my concurrent books, but then today's prompt made me open this ARC and now I want to keep going. #booknerdproblems
#firstlineofcurrentread

"Buster Keaton first entered my life in October 1964, when I was nine months old - nine months out after the nine months in."
@RealLifeReading

It's a rare day that I get #bookmail, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to read Bowling's newest. Thank you to @WolsakandWynn !

It's always so exciting when we have new ARCs in the office. #ARC #fiction #canadianauthor #alberta