Welcome to Litsy!

Hot Damn! It's been a crazy 10 days, and I'm glad that things look to get back to a normal level of busy. This one went from a being a 2 month hold earlier this week to ready now just this morning.

I'm kicking off #MarvellousMarch with a lofty goal to finish:
1. Y/N 📖
2. 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster 📖
3. Korea Overview 📖
4. The Miserable Mill 📖
5. 30% of Wandering Stars 🎧
6. 75% of Wild Women and the Blues 🎧

@Andrew65

https://youtu.be/GH5kq3KuIsw?si=T4age7DqiC_E_uhG

Intro

Report on the James Morrison book launch

A special guest

Another special guest

Who Lies Inside by Timothy Ireland

Y/N by Esther Yi

The Rider by Tim Krabbé, Sam Garrett (Translator)

The Perfection of the Morning: A Woman's Awaking in Nature by Sharon Butala

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Lara Vergnaud (Translator)

Open City by Teju Cole

This was weird.

It's about a woman obsessed with a boy in a K-pop band.

I didn't get it.

Maybe it would have made more sense in print...as I couldn't tell which parts were really happening and which parts were the fan fiction.

I don't care enough to figure it out 😕

I was interested in a novel about celebrity and fandom in the twenty-first century, and that's what this is -- but I wanted something more grounded and less abstract. Didn't love the way this story was told.

This was exceedingly strange that only got weirder by the page.

Such a bizarre story, but I liked it! A unique take on the nature of relationships, loosely defined to include people we‘ve just met, people we‘ve known but who no longer know us, or people we‘ve never *actually* met. Combined with the element of how humans gravitate toward celebrity or curated versions of people, this made for an interesting read.

This was such a weird book, but I loved it. It‘s like the most literary fan fiction you‘ll ever read. It‘s about an unnamed woman who falls in love with Moon, a member of a KPop group and goes to find him after he retires suddenly. It‘s so poetic and smart and written in a dreamlike way. Like, if Murakami wrote fan fiction.

In this day and age where we feel like we are closer than ever to our celebrity loves, this book perfectly describes the infatuation that so many have for people they have never met and quite possibly never will. I also liked how Esther Yi incorporated the world of fanfiction into this story as well, since it continues to proliferate on the internet. This novel is philosophical and weird and an absolute delight.

Loving the art work for this cover ☺️

Side Note: I watched Swarm on Amazon Prime last weekend so when I saw this book on GoodReads new books of the week I knew I had read it.

This book about a women who becomes obsessed with a K-pop star is on a lot of lists of anticipated fiction for 2023. But it just made me feel old and cranky. There's ambition to what Yi's doing here but I just didn't get it. And eventually I didn't care either.
#netgalley