Welcome to Litsy!

Shoot. I really wanted the tagged book to be on the short list. #Booker2025

Glad Flashlight made it, but of the others I've only read Audition which was not a winner for me!

#Booker2025

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

Take away the balconies, and the bombed building looks just like my cousins'. Lop it down to five stories, and it could be my grandfather's Khrushchev-era apartment building in Kherson, another city under siege. Cruel, how Soviet apartment blocks look alike. I've been watching the same building get bombed, resurrected, bombed, over and over on my phone, laptop, on the TV screen at the corner store.

#Booker2025

In front of us, someone was saying to their relative, 'You know who causes most of the traffic problems? Foreigners or returning immigrants like you. You stop when you're supposed to, give the other cars the right-of-way, allow crowds of pedestrians to cross the street.'

'We follow the rules, you mean?'

'Exactly. It causes confusion.'

The visiting immigrant became silent. He was finally home, he realised.

#Booker2025

Houses don't have a back step here in England, which is a real shame. It's the ideal place for children to sit. You're out of the way of all the hot oil and sharp knives, but you hear all kinds of gossip not meant for children's ears: who's horning who; who's infertile, or impo-tent; who's been to visit obeah because of too many miscarriages; who's never gotten over a father's early death.

#Booker2025