Welcome to Litsy!

I hate to see a long weekend go, but at least I got to spend this Sunday wrapped in a blanket reading this powerful, important novella. It is one of the few books about Stalin's Great Purge written during the actual events and centers on the experience of an everyday woman in Leningrad. It was written and hidden away by the author and a number of her friends, published first in France but not in Russia until nearly 50 years after it was written.

And just like that, it‘s Saturday again. 🤍

#dogsoflitsy #saturdaystandard

#BookNDinner! #RedLobster Edition! Accompaniment this cold and rainy evening: friend shrimp, shrimp scampi, lobster tail, crab legs, lobster langostino mashed potatoes, cheddar biscuits, and raspberry iced tea! MMMMmmm 😋! Happy reads & happy eats! 😎👌🏻

What I‘m hoping to get through for this weekend‘s #WinterStormReadathon 😁! Between all the shoveling 😆. Have you read any of these?

@BookBabe

The long weekend has given me (finally!) enough time to get some decent reading in including this slight but incredibly powerful look into the agony of motherhood under Stalin. It‘s a death by 1000 paper cuts of a read that‘ll break your heart. After it, The Handmaid‘s Tale and The Fireman, I need a book about happy people being kind to each other with a Lisa Frank-inspired cover. Suggestions?

I‘ve moved indoors to the library to continue reading and drinking tea #longweekend

This story was even better than I recalled. Sophia is a simple, good hearted, honest and trusting woman. She is our eyes during The Great Purge in Stalin's Russia. Is simple yet elegant prose we watch her struggle as her son becomes one of the accused even then she can't quite seem to believe in a world so corrupt. I love how different the women writers were from the men. You truly feel for Sophia and get a feel of the paranoia of the time.

So I'm done with breakfast and I'm done with The Argonauts. What next you might ask? Well tea, pie and Sophia Petrovna of course. It's a rough life. This is another one of the little gems from the women in Russian lit class I took some 20+ years ago. It warrants a revisit with more mature eyes.