Welcome to Litsy!

I just started this, my fourth book from the #Booker shortlist. I like the writing style, but damn that first chapter was uncomfortable! 🫤

White US male has mild midlife crisis and takes a roadtrip whilst re-evaluating his life and thinking a LOT about basketball. Everything is so mundane and unexceptional, it is both realistic and dreary. Very readable and I enjoyed all but the technical basketball talk. This is so American I would expect it to be a Pulitzer candidate (except Greer already won with a funnier version), but I am surprised to see it on the #Booker shortlist. Soft pick.

Very charmed with the audiobook version of this book. I have the song stuck in my mind now. It's not always a good idea when authors do their own narration, but here it could hardly have been otherwise. Readers of a text only version are missing out on both music and the sound of the ocean.

#BookerLonglist25 #Booker

I was so happy to have spent some time in the world of this book; I was a little sad to come to the end. I‘ll be thinking about these characters for awhile, and this book will definitely be on my list of favorites this year. Such an expertly woven story from start to finish. 🩵

Finished this a week ago & scenes come back to me randomly. It‘s epic in scope. Family trauma, family hopes, cultural shifts from North Korea to Japan to the US, misunderstandings, painful departures. It sounds so depressing but it‘s a journey I was willing to go on. If you‘ve read any memoirs by people who have escaped North Korea you‘ll know that parts of this book do not stray from the truth. Yes, it could be shorter but it‘s worth it. #booker

If now is everything, Pepper has chosen to use it for an afternoon snooze.

My 12th from the #Booker longlist is one to read slowly and carefully. Layered and indirect. Teresa returns to a coastal town in Greece to mourn and read Homer. And she instead spends a lot of time insinuating herself into the private lives of locals. The reader has to work out the actual story and what she‘s doing. Recommended, but know it‘s difficult.
#Booker2025

My 11th #Booker is one I really fell for and adore. Thomas Flett scrapes for shrimp at low tide with a horse and nets. He's feels old, but he‘s only 20. Then someone comes and gets him inspired.

That prose. We get excited when Tom gets excited, reserved when he's suspicious, won over when he's somehow won over, and we're steady and accepting when he is. And yet it's never too much.

I feel good recommending it to anyone.
#Booker2025

My 10th #Booker is an American roadway novel. Tom is dealing with, or not dealing with, male uncertainty. He is confronting his own promise - to leave his wife once his youngest child reaches 18 because she had an affair twelve years prior. (The title is a play on the marriage vows.)

I've kept thinking about this book. Initially I felt it didn't do enough, but slowly I came to realize how well it does what it intended.
#Booker2025

My 9th #Booker Prize longlist paces itself through the lives of two married couples whose marriages are strained during an historic winter blizzard in England in 1962/63.

Paced slow with building intensity, reader attachment and speed. The nature of these marriages is striking, maybe even disheartening, and also totally normal. Our real strains. I thought of Middlemarch. We get to know them, and then helplessly watch what happens. #Booker2025

My 8th from the #Booker Prize longlist was fun, clever, politically timely satire, if a little thin. Very interesting in light of recent assassination of rightwing Charlie Kirk, whose form of disguised racism is exactly in line with that of our main satirized character here, Lenny. Lenny is a highly confident self-interested pundit in need of a public reboot, who won't spend a moment in self-doubt about her terrible logic. #Booker2025