Welcome to Litsy!

My planned reads for April:

Online book club: Being Mortal
IRL book club: The Cloisters
Kindle TBR: Lullaby
Physical TBR: The Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller
New: The Excitements

Life is completely normal for the world until a day when all adults receive a box. In the box is a string, all are different lengths for each person depending on how long you‘re going to live. The book goes through a handful of different characters stories whether they have a long string or a short string or even some that don‘t open the box at all. Was a great read but still left me pondering some at the end!

Out of nowhere every person on the planet over the age of 22 receives a small box containing a string, the length of which will tell you just how long your life will be. Some choose to look, others do not. But the world quickly arrives at all kinds of opinions, public policies, and judgements about short-stringers and long-stringers. It‘s a fascinating and timely exploration of what constitutes the quality and measure of a life.

4⭐️/5⭐️

This is definitely going to live in my brain for a long time.

#currentlyreading

A profoundly difficult read because it holds up a mirror to what we all will inevitably face - old age, disease, death. It is an extremely powerful work filled with information and language that we need to learn in order to contemplate the decisions that come with our mortality and those of our loved ones. It can be terribly depressing in many parts and the futility of our lives overwhelmed me at times, but it is necessary reading for everyone.

Loved this… such a surprise. There was a thread of hopefulness, humanity and even love, that ran through the novel that I really liked. It was perfect for my book club… lots of great discussion. Would you open the box? If you did, would it change how you lived? How would we react as a whole, individually, as nations… a speculative pick that really made us all think. #52bookclub24 #pop24 #morethan3POV #morethan4POV

My book club chose this. While I think it will probably provoke a good discussion, I felt like the author pushed an agenda at the expense of any substantial character development. I think I‘ll stick with Atwood and Orwell for speculative fiction.

“Our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer.”