Welcome to Litsy!

I haven‘t posted a #BookOutlet haul in a while. ðŸ˜� The top few are (mainly) for my 12 year-old, although I may read some of them before she gets around to it.

Excellent. I suspect I will be thinking about this one for a long time.

#Top23of23 Part 2

It's been years since I've read Virginia Woolf but, within sentences, The Forbidden Notebook brought me back to Mrs. Dalloway, to A Room of One's Own, and that impression never left. The first two-thirds of this novel are compulsively readable. Changing the last third is unthinkable; it would be a far less powerful text if it read any differently. Still, the task became grueling. You always want the best for your protagonist. Alas...

This was very engrossing. Such a great look into a middle aged European woman 70 years ago. She grabbles with her own rich emotions and opinions, while maintaining a strict societal code. She sees in her daughter a new freer generation - a freedom her son looks to thwart. She is relevant to all as a mother, wife, housekeeper, secretary, but seemingly not as an independent thinker. Recommend!

Very good. So glad this has been rediscovered and newly, brilliantly translated after being out of print for decades. Originally published as a serial in an Italian weekly magazine 1950-51, I kept thinking about how this must have spoke to the women reading it then. The diary format feels so intimate. Even today, it can be a radical act for a wife and mother to seek privacy, autonomy, time and space to write and reflect on life. Highly recommend!

“I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong.�

#FirstLineFridays

My Mother‘s Day presents. Kids know me so well 💕 I am super excited about the tagged one, that @batsy and @merelybookish wrote such fabulous reviews about! And I loved another book by Ben Winters and am eager to discover a new one!

This book is a gut punch. One Sunday, 43 year-old Valeria, wife, mother, office worker, buys a black notebook that she keeps hidden & writes in on the sly. Her clandestine entries make up the novel. They offer a story of self-discovery as well as the struggle of what to do with that knowledge. First published in Italy in 1952. A tale of the impossibility of women's lives & the danger of finding your writing voice. Sure to be a best of the year!

What happens when a working wife and mother finds a room of her own in the pages of a notebook and starts writing for the first time? This post-war Italian novel, translated by Ann Goldstein, is brilliant. The style is raw and intimate but expressed with such clarity of thought. The facts of a woman's life laid bare is one aspect, but the thing that disturbs and haunts me is what happens when someone starts writing and thinking about their life.