Welcome to Litsy!

Oh. Ah well.

#notmyfavourite !

Just announced the winner of this year‘s Booker Prize

I‘m quite happy about this since I enjoyed it while I read it

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

This brief, surreal novella consists mostly of a few extraordinarily long run-on sentences, which makes for a strangely propulsive galloping pace. The narrator is a librarian named "herman melvill," obsessed with the author of the same name, as well as author Malcolm Lowry and architect Lebbeus Woods, and the idea of a Permanently Closed Library. His descent into madness is strangely compelling, although I couldn't tell you what it means.

I was hooked by the opening chapter where an older woman is seducing a young boy. This is almost like a reverse Bartleby the Scrivner as the main character passively agrees to almost anything.

The feeling when:

You take your eye off the library hold list for one minute and everything comes rushing in.

Full on Murphy's Law.

I finished it on the banks of the Kern River after coming through the Sequoia Monument and National Forest. I didn‘t like it as much as The Boy in a Suitcase, which was such a twisty ride. But I loved the window into Roma culture in Hungary, the discrimination and challenges they have long faced. And the window into the immigrant backlash in Scandinavia. Will read the whole series!

Nope.

#Booker2025

'It's okay,' she says. "There's no point talking about these things without honesty. About anything.'
He points out that quite a few of the pictures seem almost pornographic.
'That's true, she says.
She seems to think for a minute, and then she says, 'Most of the things here are either devotional objects, or more or less pornographic, or social trophies, or some combination of those things.

The owner of the winery takes the people who work in the warehouse and the office to see them doing it - he says he wants them to be aware of what actually happens on the land. The day they go up there the workers are burning the pruned stems in piles on the grass at the sides. The white smoke rises into the air. The sun shines through the rising smoke. There's the scent of the smoke and the quiet crackle of the burning stems.

#Booker2025