In a French village ravaged by WWII, the astonishing friendship between two girls generates a temporary farse in the literary world and separates their destinies by sending one of them to Paris and then to a British boarding school.

Although the writing and existential questions are beautiful, the ressemblance with my "My Brilliant Friend" is shocking, but Elena Ferrante's novel remains more remarkable, more powerful and overall exceptional.

This is a page turner, with an unreliable narrator walking the reader through his twisty storytelling. While the plot is not fully unpredictable, the novel still keeps you hooked until the end.
A famous retired cinema star invites her closest friends for a short vacation to her private Greek island where things go awry.

This is a beautiful philosophical study around the pursuit of happiness in Western societies, which has created an entire cult dedicated to assessing everything through a filter of pleasure and of the duty to be happy.
I just picked it at a wrong time and I hope I'll revisit it more seriously at a better time in the future.

An exquisite story about falling and failing in so many ways. Marta is part of a family of Czech descent living in the US. Their family is haunted for generations by a superstition related to defenestration, a deadly fall at a certain point in their life, as if it was written in their genes and as if the fall were calling to be accomplished.

"the two of us poised on a sweet precipice before falling blindly forward into the rest of our lives."

I thought the book would focus more on explaining how to find one's Ikigai, the Japanese concept referring to finding the reason to live, for a life of purpose and joy.
But it's rather about people observing some healthy lifestyle principles and nothing new. A good summary for those who haven't yet watched the documentary on the Blue Zones - those places around the world where the average life expectancy of inhabitants exceeds 100 years old.

Julia travels from New York to the small birth village of her father in Burma to try to find out what happened to him as he disappeared four years back. A mysterious local who seems to know her closely tells her the heart-breaking story of her father's youth, before he moved to the US. Although the story is a bit too "fairytalish", I still enjoyed the writing and the atmosphere created by the immersion in the Burmese life, culture and traditions.

This is a very touching depiction of how it feels to be an immigrant returning to your home country 20 or 30 years later. After the fall of communism in 1989 in Europe, Irena returns from Paris to Prague. She and others like her return led by nostalgia, but the ignorance, under all its forms, displayed by their relatives and former friends shows how absence can create a huge chasm between people, with no hope to reconnect with the past.

This is a nice vacation read. Grace Monroe seems to lead a good life in 1950s' London aristocracy. She receives an unexpected inheritance from a mysterious lady in Paris, whose identity Grace will be struggling to discover. The storylines of the two ladies unfold beautifully but are too convenient and predictable.

A wonderful collection of four short stories by one of my favorite authors; a bit dark but deeply heart-warming.

"There is a warm sadness and a cold sadness. The warm one is when you love. The cold one is when you don't love. In the warm one, there is someone. In the cold one, no one. When I suffer because Eva no longer lives, this makes her stand by my side. If I stopped suffering it means she would die again and vanish forever."

I enjoyed this historical fiction based on real events. In 1921 Lesley and Robert Hamlyn are a British couple living in the colony of the Federated Malay States. They are visited by famous writer Sommerset Maugham, who discovers a past connection between Lesley and Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, which proves more surprising and entertaining than he could have imagined. Love, friendship and sexuality at that time and place were complicated.

This book is rather a memoir with heart-wrenching personal stories and some pieces of advice here and there, but Cheryl Strayed definitely writes her answers beautifully, compasionately and with so much common sense and deep empathy.
I've noticed people complained that most of her recommendations were not easily applicable, but hey, these are not psychotherapy sessions, but simply an advice column and for that matter an exceptionally done one!

"Love at First Sight Stories", a lovely collection of short stories by five Romanian authors. The first four stories revolve more around the innocence with which the characters experience their first love and its tornado of thoughts and emotions, while in the last story a love at first sight strikes at an old age and just proves that it has the power to rejuvenate but also reignite passion for love in a life long stable relationship.

Nora finds her sister brutally murdered and sets on a personal quest to find the killer, while the police keeps investigating. This a good twisty crime thriller, but the novel is even better at showing the relationship between the two sisters and Nora's grieving after losing her sibling. Nora is apparently not a very reliable narrator which helps the tension building.

A very useful book; it explains in detail the functioning of our happy chemicals and how we can make the most out of them.

“When your happy chemicals droop, it feels like something is wrong with the world. It helps to know that your happy chemicals are meant to go up and down so you can focus on your next step toward happy chemicals instead of on the flaws of the world.“

A woman meets a man at the airport and discovers they travel to the same destination. They are irresistibly drawn to each other and start a passionate relationship. She feels something is not right and tries to escape several times, but he brings her back each time and gradually makes her entirely dependent on him. Her parents' breakup and the failure of her previous relations weigh on her but give her the strength to end this toxic relationship.

Brilliant and very original collection of short stories. There is such a smooth and flawless transition from reality to fantasy and back to reality and a formidable imagination for building exquisite and unexpected fictional worlds in a relatively short number of pages.

“The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?”

“Her chest feels very tight, as if she‘s suddenly full of poison. You have to keep it all inside. Like throwing yourself on a bomb to save everyone else. Except you‘re the bomb.”

“Everyone who is alive has a ghost inside them, don‘t they?”

🙈😂

"Happiness! Misery! If you were one, bet on it the other was on the way. That was what everyone liked to see. It was what the whole thing was about. The demon lover has a pair of gold cuff links, those faces. Meggie gave them to him. You know the ones I mean."

"Modern Fables" is a sublime collection of short stories, that bring a tear to the eye and warmth to the heart.
The author's writing is heartfelt, tender and compassionate. She can see the exceptional in ordinary people she interacts with, and she has an incredible talent to highlight the fragility and the mightiness of the human being.

Happy World Book Day!

"He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?"

A very powerful novel about mental illness, childhood trauma and women's condition.
Further to repetitive nightmares, Yeong-hye turns vegetarian. This triggers immense pressure from her family, which determines her to stop eating completely. This original, unsettling and expressive story is organized in three chapters, each showing the drama of her deteriorating condition.

A very entertaining and believable story. Another book which would make a nice movie.

Evelyn Hugo's character is such a glamorous, spectacular and unforgettable presence and her love stories are unique and unexpected.

I spent three hours reading this nice mystery novel with a great premise: what if the world and our life are just a simulation?

A time travel agent from 2400 is sent to several periods in the past (1912, 2020, 2200 etc.) in an attempt to investigate an anomaly in the time continuum.

On her deathbed, at 100 years old, Violeta keeps journaling her life for her grandson. She is born in 1920 during the Spanish flu and dies during the coronavirus pandemic. Violeta's autobiography explores a century of an unnamed South American country's turbulent history, her long and intense life, loves, achievements and losses.
Overall enjoyable but easily forgettable read.

A bit too long but nicely written story of three inseparable childhood friends. The novel has it all: mystery, plot twists, dual timelines, beautifully built characters and the complexity of a lifelong friendship.

I enjoyed "Fresh Water for Flowers" more for its emotional impact, but this one is a page turner as well and has its heartwrenching moments.

I loved it. This is definitely not just a light funny book. It portrays wonderfully how difficult it is today to find a partner with whom to build a serious relationship and a family. The story bits about dating apps raise some interesting questions on how viable this option really is, and more importantly about who raised all these boys (maybe entire generations?) who become immature men uncapable to comit to anything and behave manly.

"Pen, Sword, Camisole" was written in 1978. Using satire and comic farce, the plot is set at the beginning of the 1940s in Brazil, at a time when the country had close connections to Germany and places the relationship between politics and art at the center of the story. The Chief of National Security of the regime has the ambition to be elected as a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters to replace a great national poet who died.

I've read this one with a pen in my hand. Extremely useful and insightful for women of all ages, but equally for men! Raising awareness about menopause symptoms and treatments helps women feel less lonely and misunderstood during this new stage, and regain their normal life.

Heart wrenching but necessary account of the civil war in Syria through the eyes of a future refugee. After having lost her family, still a teenager, she continues to experience the horrors first hand while working in a hospital and coping with her traumas.

"When I leave, it won‘t be easy. It‘s going to shred my heart to ribbons and all the pieces will be scattered along Syria‘s shore, with the cries of my people haunting me till the day I die."

Very insightful. Comedian and TV host Trevor Noah tells the story of his childhood and youth in South Africa at the end of the apartheid and the tumultuous years that followed. As a person of color with an African mother and a Swiss father, he tries to make sense of where he belongs, in a society torn by the absurdities of racism and the political system. His brilliant mother sets the education premises which help him navigate towards success.

Loved this one far more than I initially thought I would.
Although it is non-fiction, this book is incredibly well written and engrossing. It is striking how thoroughly and honestly women's complex emotions are illustrated through the stories of just three women. In a way, this novel can be enlightening both for men and women regarding the state of womanhood and sex in the American society and not only.

A lovely short story collection written by an architect who's lived in all the cities where her characters love, live, die, mourn and suffer: Stockholm, Bucharest, New York, Oradea, Barcelona, from the '50s to the present day. With a touch of magic realism, the stories are imbued with signs, mysterious messages and premonitions born in dreams and alternate realities, while the last story ends with a shocking twist like a wake up call to reality.

Many of these essays resonated with me and the funny potrayal of the type-A personality was so honest and relatable. She reminds us how beautiful, scary and brave it is to be a child, a young adult, a parent...

I found ingenious her longing for a time machine allowing us to go back and forth in time and relive our life at different ages and maybe avoid or overcome our mid-life crisis by staying connected with older versions of ourselves.

While I enjoyed "Three Apples Fell From the Sky", I simply loved this one! Her prose is mesmerizing.

In a small town in Armenia, Simon's funeral is attended by all the women who loved him and whom he saved with his love from their disturbingly traumatic destinies:

A fast read but I was not impressed by the plot. It is common, predictable and very unrealistic.

Dense, reflective, philosophical. Longer and shorter personal and fictional stories and a brief history on plastination; an unnerving and haunting dissection of the human body and of human paroxysmal emotions.

"This always happens when she flies: she gets a bird‘s eye view of her whole life, of particular moments that you‘d think on the ground had been completely forgotten. The banal mechanism of the flashback, mechanical reminiscence."

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

I enjoyed this discussion between famous naturalist Jane Goodall and author Douglas Abrams on the power of hope, how we reconquer it along with trust in our intellect and our capacity for action to create a sustainable world for all species.

This was such a wonderful read!
I particularly loved how the character of the octopus Marcellus was developed; he is a great and exquisite narrator, giving more depth and meaning to the story. His lines are funny, yet he appears for the heart-wrenching reality. Overall, really heart-warming!

I almost can't believe I've read this one; it's called 'Love Without Tears". It looks exactly like a book produced with generative AI or some similar software. But, it's a very useful and well-done summary of famous self-help books on love and relationships published by well-known authors such as Gary Chapman, John and Julie Gottman, Esther Perel etc.

I raced through this book, just couldn't put it down!

Ema, Sofia and David grow with an extremely abusive father. Their mother is helpless and a victim herself. He dies when they are almost teenagers, they are relieved and they try to build lives and families of their own. But they remain haunted by their past and every bit of happiness they seem to achieve collapses under the immense weight of their childhood trauma.

I loved, loved this book! Written using stream of consciousness, this novel depicts Ophanim's life journey marked by his relationship with his mother. With an unusual name of biblical sonority, his story is common yet human and heart-warming, he sees life through a magical lens.

"Earlier a bird has flown through my heart. A small bird, but it's that kind of bird, when it passes, it takes your wonders and even your fears under its wings."

I enjoyed this novel; very informative on the recent painful history of civil war-torn Sri Lanka. Maali Almeida, a photographer who has just died, is trying to solve the mystery of his own death by communicating with his loved ones and helping them publish his photos to expose the atrocities of the war. In the afterlife his mission is guided by two opposed forces, Dr. Ranee and Mahakali, each symbolizing a dimension of his country and of its past.

This book is basically based on the presentation of 8 actual case studies of families with a large diversity of multi-generational common issues and traumas.
While each and every one of these family stories is interesting and insightful in its own way, I couldn't seize any real and useful conclusion which could be applicable beyond these particular cases, except for some well-known and common sense advice on how to improve family dynamics.

I read two collections of short stories, all revolving around love. I enjoyed some of them more than others and I found particularly poignant those on love outside of marriage and on failure in love. It is interesting to see how the course of love and relationships were dictated by women's condition and status at the end of the 19th century, a different world indeed.

It's my Litsyversary 🎉🥂📖📚 Wow, 5 years already!
Such a great place to be!

I found this one as an ebook and as I haven't seen the movie, I thought I should give it a try. It turned out to be just as captivating as a film. The prose is soft and beautiful and produces so many different emotions. In 19th century traditional French countryside, we see how women's lack of choice led to the decline of an aristocratic lady who can't but remain passive while her life progressively worsens.

I enjoyed this collection of soul-stirring short stories. They focus more on characters and emotions than on the plot itself, but they are beautifully written and carry the unspoken burden of a poignant reality.

Such remarkable depiction of the atmosphere governing New York‘s high society at the end of the 19th century, of its etiquette and social conventions at a time when appearances mattered enormously and the wealthy were expected to conduct themselves by these norms, even if it implied acting against their true feelings. The love triangle does not impress much throughout the story but the ending, which is truly brilliant, makes it sparkle.

"It isn‘t about changing the mechanics of economics. It is about changing the ideas, the dogmas that have driven economics for centuries: debt and fear, insufficiency, divide and conquer. It is about revolution. The transition from a death economy to a life economy is truly about a change in consciousness — a consciousness revolution."