Welcome to Litsy!

I admit the beginning was confusing, but once I got a bit further in, I was hooked! My favorite parts are the letters from Red to Blue and vice versa - the enemies to lovers trope in a whole different and unique way. I strive to have someone write to me the way they write to each other (swoon). My only small complaint - I would‘ve liked a little more backstory on how the war started, more origin story. The beautiful writing is just 🔥

Is this a perfect match or is this a perfect match? Currently reading and enjoying this one, should finish today! #pantone2023 #ALSpine @Sapphire @monalyisha @Clwojick

Two agents fighting a war through time and space begin exchanging letters and fall in love. 4⭐️

Finished up this epistolary novella about time-traveling female spies/assassins on different sides who fall in love during a war. I saw it on someone‘s best of 2023 on TikTok & was intrigued & my library had the e-book available last week. Beautiful writing & imagery & apparently much smarter than me as I am not sure I understood everything that happened in their somewhat cat-and-mouse relationship 🤷🏻‍♀️ but the evocative writing engaged me.

November was by and far my slowest month of the year. I was in a major reading slump.

#roundup #bookreport #nov2022 #2022 #audio #manga #romance #scifi #memoir #queer #libby #librarybooks #library

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you."

(If you're interested in sapphic, spy enemies to lovers, epistolary romance, with a dash of time travel, this is the book for you.)

Beautifully lyrical, romantic and intricate. This epistolary love story, tells of two female time-traveling spies, communicating through letters as the ongoing war ravages their opposing sides. As I often do with this genre( very outside my comfort-zone) I find the world-building sci-fi bits more distracting than anything else. But the human connection shines here. The writing is really gorgeous, and in such a brief novella, so much is said.

This #audiobook is delightful. And it's epistolary. ❤

#BookSpinBingo @TheAromaofBooks

I hated the writing for this. It was purple prose to the extreme and unnecessarily confusing. It was hard to be enthusiastic about this book when from page one I was rolling my eyes

I don‘t have enough words to actually describe what I‘m feeling right now after finishing this book. It was that bloody brilliant. I am literally at a loss of words. My face may look unaffected but there is a war raging inside of me. This book, the author, I‘m in love. This book is a gem. I recommend it to EVERYONE!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.

I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.

I want to meet you in every place I have loved.

Flowers grow far away on a planet they‘ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we‘ve shaped together.

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

Some days blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

I was not expecting to feel the things I felt during this holy rollercoaster ride of a book. I don‘t normally like books written primarily in letter format, but damn. I laughed, I cried and I very nearly threw my iPad in outrage. This book is worth every word I read, and is easily in the top like 10 of the books I‘ve read thus far this year. Well done.

A new favorite book. Love the epistolary romance, the enemy spies to lovers and the time travel 😍😍

Oh, romance 😍😍😍

I guess I forgot to review this a few weeks ago. It's highly poetic, and was an interesting way to tell a story. I enjoyed imagining all of the ways these women "wrote" to one another, and loved seeing their relationship development. I had a brief worry that this might have a reveal where it's two women in a creative writing class writing emails back and forth or something. #LGBTQ
It was hard for me to follow along as I listened.

Trying to enjoy the fresh air before I'm chased away by the rain.☺

2nd Read on Audible. Beautiful narration. Liked that one of Organizations is known as Garden. And all the gardening refrences.
"We‘re grown, I think you know—seeds planted, roots combing through time, until Garden repots us in different soil.....Garden goes to seed, blows us away, and we burrow into the braidedness of time and mesh with it. There is no scouring hedge to pass through; we are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals."

2X Reading. This time audiobook.

I'll be honest half the time I had no clue what I was reading. But it was really good! Time Traveling Spies who fall in love by letters sent across the Universe?

Definitely going to need a 2nd read to understand. I'm thinking audiobook next time.

There's no doubt 'This Is How You Lose the Time War' was my favorite read of the month.

Thanks to @chasjjlee for the template. #ReadingBracket2022
#favorite #reading #march #books #myfavorite

Thanks for the tag! @EadieB 😊 @eggs

1. Wordle
That game is addictive! 😂
2. To be surrounded by nature and hug some trees. They fill you up with their energy. They are wise! 😉 💞🌲
3. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone BEAUTIFUL book.

A lyrical futuristic romance, like Romeo and Juliet if the parents were different societies. The writing and plot movement is complex to the point of confusing, but especially in audio, the language is so smooth and sharp that you want to keep listening. Recommended for anyone looking for a beautiful political romance that will leave you thinking long after you close the book.

Quotes from the book. ❤ ❤ ❤
My highlights!

The photo of the painting they mention in the book. It helped me understand the why & the meaning of the chapter/scene.
The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis, painted in 1856 & now part of the collection of London‘s Tate Britain art gallery. It shows a young man lying dead in an attic room, having taken a dose of arsenic to end his life at the age of 17.
Below a link with information about the painting, in case you want to dig into it.

Book 37
The 52 Book Club's Challenge
✅ Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover! - This Is How You Lose the Time War | Amal El-Mohtar ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
New Author

This is my favorite read of the year. It'll be hard to beat.
No words! This is a heart-wrenching beautiful book.
THANK YOU 🙏 @everlocalwest for recommending me this book! LOVED IT! ❤

My Review is posted in the comments. My apologies for it being so long!

Amelia ❤️
A sketch I did for the other character in #WiredToBeTouched 🌙 She's the #human from my new #kindlevella story.
What do you think guys? 😃

💥 If you wanna read the first Free Episode, click on the link below.
https://amzn.to/363FIBy
🙏 If you do, please follow, scroll down & like. 😘
New Adult/Strong Language.

#Amelia #digitalpainting #drawing #sketch #pencildrawing #audible #ThisIsHowYouLosetheTimeWar #audiobook #WiredToBeTouched

This is a strange little book. Sci-fi/Time travel/Queer love story with beautiful prose. I‘m glad it was short because longer would have become pretentious. At this length I was intrigued though I didn‘t love it. 3.5⭐️ ok #audiobook - I think I would have preferred reading physically.
#bookspinbingo another bingo!
#NoShameReadathon22 - Speculative

I loved this. Perfectly crafted and I was in just the right headspace to read it. I was deeply invested in these characters and thought we got just the right amount of their story.

MMD features this on a list of time travel books. I ordered 3 and this is the first. The first part, I thought this is SO NOT my type of book. But I valued that it stretched my Brain to work out the clues of the worlds being built so I kept on. By the second half I was fully committed to the characters and the arc of the plot. Glad to have read it. #dogsoflitsy

“I want to be a context for you, and you for me”.

An epistolary time-traveling spy-vs-spy love story. A fascinating universe and a quick read.

#doublespin

“I want to meet you in every place I have loved”
An enemies to lovers love story that focuses on the relationship between two women fighting on opposite sides of a futuristic war, and very little on building a world or a backstory for either individual woman, which feels like the right choice for this because then you don‘t have to take a side. You get to pine for the love and celebrate the cleverness of each. ❤️💙

Here are my top 11-ish books of 2021!

It was a really interesting premise, but I felt like I was lacking a lot of development in the background details that would have helped me connect more with the characters and their conflict.

Good start to the weekend. Really liked this one - writing was lovely, poetic, and it felt like a really original story. Can't claim to understand all the details of the world they inhabit, but I kind of get the feeling that we aren't meant to understand, but just go along with the ride.

In position for the weekend #gladstonerds @julesG @squirrelbrain @trishb @Leniverse @scripturient @CGainor3 @jenniferw88

4.75🌟 I absolutely loved this book. It is very poetic, and definitely requires a reader to just enjoy the ride and not try to figure everything out, but I found it to be quite lovely and fascinating. So much so, that I'm going to find a copy to add to my own library, since I borrowed this from my local library to read.

I have a lot of work to do today, but first I'm going to enjoy this crisp fall morning by watching the day wake up and enjoying a good breakfast, a steaming cup of coffee, and a good book. Mornings like this are why fall is my favorite time if year.