UK Littens in need of Yellowface for #CampLitsy might want to check their nearest Sainsbury's! £9!!!

I gaze at my parents, and see that the world can be two people, occupying a space where they don't have to explain. Where they can be beautiful. Where they might feel free.

Small Worlds, big muffin, iced coffee in the sun.
I have recovered sufficiently to escape Plague Central and get some supplies for the weekend. (Clearly my immune system is superior. Alternative interpretation, I had a cold the others have man colds.) Kicking my #20in4 off with a treat before going home to the coughing and nose blowing 🤧🤒😷 😅

The house feels like plague central lately with the whole family coughing and sniffling. Fortunately next week is half-term break, and Monday is even a bank holiday, so it's the perfect weekend for a #readathon
No specific reading goals except at LEAST the 20 hours. I have (as always) a stack of library books to get through, and I might get started on Demon Copperhead as well.
#20in4

@Andrew65

I have Demon Copperhead coming up next, but I feel like my reading has been a bit harrowing this year. StoryGraph confirms it. While the books haven't been sad, they have been heavy. And I haven't read a single light-hearted book. So I'm inserting the tagged book for a bit of a breather before I tackle modern poverty, foster care, and the opioid crisis. 😬

I do have one more book to go from the #WomensPrize but currently this is my favourite. It took me longer to read than most books, because it has it's own rhythm and won't be rushed even as it has your pulse racing and you're holding your breath. I'm going to let it percolate through me and echo in my soul for a while, and then I'm going to listen to the audiobook. Yes, I now own this in multiple formats, it's that good.

The Little Mermaid, but make it a feminist revenge story. Mix it with The Island of Doctor Moreau and Lord of the Flies. Add one agender plague doctor. Make it gory. No, gorier. But with poetic language and a lot of words that people will have to look up.
I wish this was longer. I would have liked more world building and more time for things to play out. But brevity is a fairytale trait. My tolerance for gore was exceeded, but it fit the story.

My current library loans, with as many again on hold. I live in terror of them all coming in at once. 😅
Also, I'm close to the max number of renewals on some of these, whereas others are new and popular and likely to be quickly requested by others. A conundrum. 😆

#BookNerdProblems

The writing was compelling, the story wasn't. There were individual scenes where I was breathless, pulse racing, pages turning themselves. But the whole didn't excite me, and I was reluctant to pick the book back up after putting it down. I also disliked the ending.
This was my first O'Farrell, and I definitely want to read more of her work, but this particular book is not making it onto my personal #WomensPrize 2023 shortlist.

I'm halfway through and I hate to say it but I'm kinda bored. The writing is beautiful, but I'm not feeling invested. We know from the start that the poor girl is going to die, and while I'm curious whether it is her husband (and for what reason?) or something else, I'm not feeling 200+ more pages worth of curiosity. I swear if this book has an ambiguous ending, I'm gonna get mad.

#BookMail
The final volume of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation arrived. I ordered the special edition which includes several short stories. It also came with a notebook, bookmark, stickers, postcards, and two posters. 😍 Wonder what the Spouse will say if I stick them all over the bedroom wall like a teenager. 🤔😂

#UnpopularOpinion time. I feel a bit like Scrooge shouting Bah! Humbug! but this did not live up to its hype for me.
While I love the concept, I found the stories overly sentimental, some of the characters really irritating, and if the prose had been written in the present tense it would have read exactly like overly detailed stage directions. 🤷🏼‍♀️

#readathon snacks at the ready (sharing with my reading buddies) and about to start the tagged book. (Yes, I have a cup of coffee too.)

Taking a break from book award short- and long lists this weekend.
Tomorrow it's time for #Deweys 24-hour #readathon again, and I have compiled a #tbr of one seasonal read, three short books, a graphic novel, and lastly two page turners to keep me awake. Will I get through them all? Doubtful, but I will sure try! 😁 (And I have the bank holiday Monday too.)

It might not have made the #WomensPrize shortlist (as it should have), but for me this wins the "Book I Would Most Like to be Adapted to the Screen" Award. Thoroughly enjoyable black comedy.

I'm still in the middle of a few books, so I'm not ready to give my personal top 6, but the #WomensPrize #shortlist is announced in the morning, so I have taken a stab at guessing what the judges might have been thinking. 🤪 Which was not easy.
The red check marks I'm relatively sure of. Then I figure one of the blue dots and one of the pink. Although I might be way off with those.
(My personal shortlist will contain AT LEAST one unmarked book.)

I love the cover design on this dust jacket so much, I really want a framed movie-poster sized one. ? But I am half wishing I had this book on audio instead. It's written mostly(?) in Jamaican patois so I need to "hear" it in my head as I'm reading to fully make sense of it. And it is a book with music, verses, dancing, it is written with a certain "riddim" to it.

My almost-teen has very specific but eclectic interests. 😂 These are his recent purchases. On the one hand he still loves Captain Underpants and Dog Man, and has read all the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books multiple times. On the other his bedtime reading lately has been geopolitical non-fiction. He's finished Prisoners of Geography, and is ready to move on to The Power of Geography.

#RaisingReaders

For the first 2/3s of the book the main and most interesting character is Northern Ireland itself. It's bleak and compelling. So I didn't mind that the plot wasn't all that. Then the final third is a rush of grief (but you already knew it wouldn't end well) and rage. There are a few characters there that I would like to bitch-slap in righteous anger, to put it mildly. I have a feeling this one will stay with me.

#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

Jeez, I'm 87% into this book and The Cranberries turn up in my playlist rotation. Ode to My Family. I am going to be sobbing on the floor in a minute. All I need is for Zombie to play next. 😭

I get why this has been longlisted for multiple awards. It's clever. razor sharp satire, funny then gradually darker. But the abundance of literary devices there to make it read like a fairytale get exhausting. There's a reason why fairytales aren't 400 pages long. Maybe once I have some distance I'll appreciate it more, but on reading it was too clever for me and it took me a good 150 pages to connect with the story.

#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

@AnneCecilie Lists. While this is an extreme example I swear I opened the book on a random page. 😆

The publishers have been pushing the African Animal Farm comparison pretty hard, but the book seems to warn us away from it. But in that case I wonder, why are all the characters farm animals? Is it just to make it funnier? Or to emphasise that they are an agrarian nation? A shortcut to show that the population is harmless and exploited and so domesticated it takes no predator to keep them down? I have 350p to go, so hopefully it'll become clear.

It took me 20-30 pages to get into but after that I couldn't put it down.
Imagine your city is suddenly under siege, by non-local members of your ethnic group who have decided to grab your newly independent nation. Your attitude is “No thanks, we're all coexisting harmoniously here!“ But now you're dodging sniper bullets and mortar shells on your way to work and food is scarce. Your art is all that keeps you going. It's Sarajevo in 1992.

I normally enjoy it when a book's title turns up in the text, especially if the title doesn't immediately make sense. This time I got chills. My heart hurts. 💔

#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

Three generations of women in Memphis, TN. Simultaneously a glorious homage to black womanhood and an exposition of structural violence. There were times when the structure frustrated me - four POVs jumping back and forth in time, events and their connections parceled out bit by bit - but it did all become clear in the end.

#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

My pic editing skills are a disgrace 🤣 but here are my nominations for #CampLitsy23
I want to pitch my tent with eco-warriors in Birnam Wood, go supernatural homesteading with Lone Women, dance my way between London and Ghana in Small Worlds, head to Ukraine to listen to Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, take Greek Lessons with a speechless woman in Seoul, and when the summer gets too hot let's visit eternal winter And Put Away Childish Things.

In the 1970s the Vietnamese Boat People became the first sizeable non-European immigration group in my home town. As a child I had a confused notion that they had sailed all the way to Norway. I had no notion of refugee camps or quotas. This book opens in my birth year and follow a family up until the present. It's short and quickly read, it's lyrical yet occasionally brutal, sad but hopeful, informative, layered, emotional but never overwrought.

There is a proper way to grieve in the eyes of others: not too little, not too much. But there is a part of grieving that occurs behind the curtains, a part that is just for us and the deceased. And I suspect it is in this private communion, away from the crowd and the judgement, that we can find solace.

This was a ride! The first half was riveting, then around 1/2 or 2/3 in there were some questionable plot devices before it became an absolute page turner to the (admittedly heavily foreshadowed) end. It didn't really feel like the 1830s, I got more of an 1890s vibe from it. But it's an alternate history/timeline with magic, so fair play.

This reminds me of a story my nan told me from the 1930s. Her older brothers were home on a break from uni and had brought a friend who was a med student. My nan was woken up at midnight because the stress had given the med student "delirium" and he was speaking alternately in Latin and German, and not responding to his native Norwegian. My nan was taking German in school and had to ask him to please come out from under the table and go to bed. ?

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

My planned reading schedule is interrupted, as someone else wants to borrow Babel from the library. Bad, because I have a lot of #longlist books to get through. Good because I'm finally reading this. 100 pages in and liking it a whole lot more than many of the Women's Prize books I've been reading. But I know this has mixed reviews, so we'll see how I get on.

Minimalist prose with snappy dialogue and ever so many cocktails. The Thin Man is narrated from Nick's POV, so it is in some ways different to the movie, but every bit as much fun. Return of the Thin Man is literally the movie scripts for film 2&3, so it doesn't read as well. The notes on the text were interesting though.

#EasterCrime

More fun on the telly.

Good prose, ridiculously contrived murder(s), and everybody's awful including Morse. And some parts really haven't aged very well.

#EasterCrime

I have to admit, that up until just now I thought for some reason that The Rape of the Lock was about the vandalism of a canal lock. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️😂

Taking a break from the #WomensPrize to read some culturally mandated #EasterCrime

I'll probably start with the tagged book and its sequel even though they won't be much of a mystery as the movie adaptations are faves I have watched numerous times.

My #longlist reviews will recommence sometime next week.

I am wary of Greek mythology retellings, but this was solid. Did I agree with every choice Haynes made in this rendition? No. But it was well researched, well written, and highly entertaining. I was a bit concerned when I saw the book described as funny, since Medusa's story is a tragedy. But Haynes pokes mild fun of gods and heroes, and neither diminishes nor exploits the sufferings of their mortal victims.

#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

While there were some good aspects to this book, the overall reading experience was thoroughly unpleasant. The message was as subtle as a mallet, the level of violence unwarranted.

#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

40% into this and seriously considering bailing, or skipping to the final chapter or two just to see how it plays out. This book is bleak. But also boring. And I just can't with all the dolphin gang rape. 😵

Where are the poor? The answer is: Everywhere. They hide themselves behind their own multitude. (...)They mostly work. That is the best way of hiding themselves. No one notices that they are unable to buy food to satisfy their hunger, because they never come into the shops to buy anything. (...) Adulterated food and too little of it, infected dwellings, repression of the natural instincts, all that takes a long time to destroy a man.

The characters are horrid, the plot is a combination of cringe and completely outside of my area of interest. But the rage against patriarchy, Capitalism, and white hegemony is magnificent. Would 💯% read an essay collection by this author. It took a lot of thought and reading reviews for me to work out why the book's protagonist is made so unlikeable, but in short I figure it's so she doesn't get the role of victim, and to show that while ⤵️

The prose was good, but the story was so vague and boooring until the last 15-20 pages of what was fortunately a short book. The reader is trapped in the fantasy/memory of what is clearly an unreliable narrator with a singular focus/obsession and no intention of explaining herself clearly. The prose, vague as it was, kept me going, and the end reveal made it almost worth it.
#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

A strange book. Prose was alright, but not spectacular. The plot was grim but barely there. The characters were really strange but distant. Even the MC/narrator is still mostly unknown to the reader at the end of the book. Full of movie references, many of which I probably didn't get. But I just can't quite stop thinking about it. So it's a pick, kinda. Would love to discuss it with a film buff.
#WomensPrize 2023 #longlist

Oh my heart. That was gorgeous. And it made me cry a little bit. The audiobook is beautifully read by the author herself, but there is a lot of art history in there that I would have found it easier to keep track of in print. Now I want to visit Florence.

Reading a KSR novel is a bit like reading non-fiction. He writes science heavy Sci-Fi. This horrific yet hopeful near-future vision reads almost like a documentary, following a UN ministry but also giving voice to refugees, aid workers, farmers, glaciologists, environmental terrorist/activist groups, economists etc. It's slow, and there's not much plot beyond "trying to save the planet". It should be compulsory reading for policy makers everywhere

Revolutions don't involve guillotines anymore. Alas.
You think revolutions are less visible now?
Exactly. Invisible revolutions, technical revolutions, legal revolutions. Quite possibly one could claim the benefits of a revolution without having to go through one.

This was the world's current reigning religion, it had to be admitted: growth. It was a kind of existential assumption, as if civilization were a kind of cancer and them all therefore committed to growth as their particular deadly form of life.

Had four library holds come in at the same time, and they add up to over 2000 pages 😬😅 I really should pay attention to such things as page numbers before I place a reckless number of holds. (I don't think I want to tally up the pages of the other books I already have out from the library.) And here I was planning on reading more books that I actually own already this year. 🤪 #bookjunkie #sendhelp #bookwormproblems

I actually have a positive-ish message today. Not sure I really believe it will turn out all right, but I still think it's the only way to live authentically.

#InQuotes #belief
@eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks