Welcome to Litsy!

I might‘ve gone a little crazy at the library yesterday looking for some holiday weekend reading material! I have the tagged and Homebodies from the #CampLitsy23 longlist, a couple of graphic memoirs, a Le Guin for June #AuthorAMonth, and three others just because!

Can anyone tell me why it is that I always forget my tote on days I checkout more than 4 books?? 🤣

Physical manifestations of stress & grief & loneliness in a woman losing ability to speak, man losing eyesight. Switch between 1st person, 3rd person narratives a bit jarring, unintegrated. Language & silence. Solace. Deprivations: sensory & communicative, forced & self-inflicted. Distanced and withholding. Trans 2023.

53 “Sometimes she thinks of herself as more like some form of substance, a moving solid or liquid, than like a person.”

This is my least favorite Han Kang book. I absolutely love her first three (English translated) books, and she is an auto buy author of mine. But this book was so slow, mixed with my general reading slump I had a hard time caring about the characters. A book that should have taken me an afternoon to read took me over a week
As always I LOVE Kang's use of language, her translators do such a great job. I might try to read this again later this year.

Another book that was on the #camplitsy23 long list. It did reasonably well in the voting and, actually, would have made for some great discussions. It‘s a very opaque book; I‘m not really sure what was going on most of the time and, personally, I don‘t like that in a book.

The book switched between two viewpoints, one first-person and one third-person and it wasn‘t clear at the start that there were two MCs so I was very confused. ⬇️

In my defence... I'm preparing for #camplitsy23 🥳 Got all the books ready now! Looking forward to reading the new Han Kang too.

This book wouldn‘t go into my brain. I started it twice yesterday but was super distracted and thought that might be why. So I restarted it again today when I could really focus and it still didn‘t work. There‘s nothing wrong with the audio, so that‘s not it. It‘s all about language and communication and facing the loss of those things. I should have loved it, but I‘m clearly the wrong reader for this book. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Love that this email came because I 💯 forgot I pre-ordered this book!! I had planned on going to the bookstore after work tomorrow to get it 😂

I‘m not sure what to write about this. It feels almost irreverent to review it. I wanted to read every sentence aloud. This combination of Han Kang and her translators has resulted in something that is so moving and beautiful that I want to just sit in silence with it for a while. It‘s fiction. It‘s poetry. It‘s raw humanity.