Welcome to Litsy!

I think the sun is going down on my last summery day 😭 so I am sitting on my balcony reading about books and drinking a birthday bottle. I think the tagged book will be the one I take to the Sydney Writer‘s Festival this year to read. Turns out my parents will be in old Sydney town for dad‘s drs appointments to do with his accident not this January but the last so we will catch up for dinner both nights and they have booked the same hotel as me.

Not bad

3.75 ⭐️ very well written, but I think it should have been tightened up a bit more; felt it was too slow for my taste and I had to reread segments several times before moving on. I should have probably read it over a longer period of time to make more sense of it. #2025 #canadian #fiction #bookreview #contemporary #historical #literary

I really loved this. It was an interesting look at memory and what we can see more clearly with the benefit of hindsight. It was also about personal responsibilities and perceptions of them. I loved the octopus content because they are facinating. There are a lot of flashbacks as the story is told. The ending answered some of the questions about what happened next but not all of them. Interestingly the author started this before the 2020 pandemic.

Now I have read all her books. This was one dysfunctional family! Best part of the story was it took place in northern NJ where I spent most of my life. I knew all the towns…kind of like a visit home.
#Bookspin and this one #Doublespin read.
@TheAromaofBooks

I had to drive to the library and read the missing pages. 😳

It's the zombie apocalypse, but it's also a poetic allegory of grief, loss, depression, issues of memory, consumerism, probably a few things I missed. Somehow it works.
Passed it on to the Spouse and he loved it so much he already wants to read it again (and he almost never re-reads). Once I return it to the library I'm going to have to buy a copy to keep.

Reading the 2024 winner of the Ursula K Le Guin Prize. That's a strong opening!

Claire Fuller is a hit-and-miss author for me.
It's not the book's fault I wasn't really in the mood for a pandemic story. However, it felt like three books cobbled together: a memoir of Neffy's earlier life, mostly in Greece; Station Eleven; and one of the recent crop of octopus books.
It had interesting things to say about grief, guilt and a desire to escape to the past rather than face present horrors. I'm not sure it succeeded in saying them.