Welcome to Litsy!

It‘s been an exhausting couple of weeks, but I‘m moved, unpacked, & mostly set up! I still need to get a few boxes of books out of storage, but happy to have my reading corner ready. 🥰

I‘ve been unable to read much, but have these 5 books pending! Christmas Pig, I‘m slowly but surely reading with bugga, I Killed the King is NetGalley (I know, I was supposed to stay away, but that cover!), Long Island is audio, & tagged is #RealLifeBookGroup… 😅

#CharacterCharm Day 24: Not exactly a sanctuary for #Voyager(s). Looking forward to reading this one soon.

This was excellent though it definitely reminded me of The School for Good Mothers. The author gets into a lot of random topics without disrupting the flow of the story.

#DoubeSpin @TheAromaofBooks

Scary but good.

5 Stars • The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a dystopian novel set in a future LA where surveillance is next-level creepy. Sara, a Moroccan American mom and historian, gets nabbed at the airport because her dreams—tracked by a brain implant—supposedly show she might hurt her husband. She‘s tossed into a shady detention center run by a corporation called Safe-X. ⬇️

Finally got around to this futuristic story where you can have a chip implanted in your brain to help you sleep. Who wouldn‘t want to sleep better? On the down side, however, the chip company can see your dreams and then determine if you are a threat to society. Narrator Sara is thus detained at LAX and sent to a retention center, a prison of sorts, where she will be under observation for three weeks to determine if she actually is a threat. ⬇️

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Imagine your dreams were government surveilled. Pretty horrifying! I loved this premise, but this dragged on for ages. Something about the execution just didn‘t work for me.

I'll rate it a pick for the scare value (the consequences of trading privacy and freedom for convenience under surveillance capitalism) and for daring to have a not especially sympathetic MC. But, oh, did it drag... right up until it got wind of the finish line, towards which it fairly galloped!

Maybe I've got the peri-menopausal rage-tinted spectacles on again, but isn't it also about how this economic culture depends on unpaid female labour?