Welcome to Litsy!

I saw this graphic on Facebook and wrote this about it. I had to get up early this morning because my mom wanted me to let in the guy that changes our water filters at our house every year. After he left, I went back to bed and slept the rest of the day but I don‘t think it made me feel better because I feel groggy. I feel like crap but I needed my rest. I didn‘t get enough sleep last night.

#haiku #haikuhive

Well this is a bummer. I am going to Prague for the first time next week and I was hoping to get some history under the belt before I left. This book looked promising it is all about the year 1913 and the lead up to WWI. Unfortunately the format is just not working for me. It is like reading tweets from the year. You have to know everyone already (I know must but still) and you just get these tiny tidbits about what 300 people did each month

A "I am going to Prague" book haul, trying to get a lot of history from the library as I realized I do not know much about the area.

This book tells the history of the US national anthem. The highlight is the story behind the song and Francis Scott Key‘s retelling of the attack on Fort McHenry. It was also interesting to learn about how the song evolved to include verses being added/subtracted to attempts to standardize it. The problem was the book never found a happy medium. The first half was too exhaustively detailed at times while the latter half had too much filler.

I think we all think about the end of the world or ourselves, if only briefly, at least once a day. We imagine how it will happen—quick, painful? With warning, time to prepare and make final rounds? We consume film, literature, and headlines that talk about it—because we love it. We think we will get the time off from work, lose our worries, lose our financial debts, our jury duties. If we lose these things, will we also lose our sense of⬇️

“My first encounter with the originality of Canadian French-speaking cultures came at an early age, when living in Ottawa during the 1950s. It was immediately apparent that the French taught in English- language public schools belonged to a world apart from the everyday French spoken in the streets.” #FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

A conversation with the author about his latest book.

Link to listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-book-club/id1158913265?i=1000652169412

“Everybody dies, everything ends—but not now. Not now.”

This book covers the end of the world as we know it, or at least the end of humanity, and how that may come to pass. Chapters feature ways we‘ll go out like pandemics, nuclear weapons, climate change, overpopulation, war, cosmic events and more. Far from depressing, this was a fun look at the way humans have thought about the end of times over many years, through books, movies, etc.

A deep dive (no pun intended, I swear) into swimming's history - both its modern incarnation as a recreational activity during the early 19th-century, and the Classical era from which those 19th-century Romantics drew their inspiration, when swimming was infused with heroic, and even divine, qualities. I love to swim, and I also love books where an obsessive examines the subject of their passion in detail, so this one was perfect for me.