Amy Key uses Joni Mitchell's Blue, the album that taught her about romantic love, to examine living a life without it. She explores what home life, travel, soul connection mean in the absence of a partner. There's valuable feminist question at this book's core & it did get tiresome at times. Some essays worked better than others, in particular, the one about her complicated relationship with poet Roddy Lumsden. Overall, a soft pick. #netgalley.

Spotted some lupins this morning. Soon they will be everywhere! 💜
Undecided about tagged book. This is my second attempt at reading it. It has its charms but is also feels very close to trauma porn.

My new book bag in support of local library. (I almost love book bags as much as I love books!)

This is a solid novel version of a reliable B+ rom-com movie that imagines Liz Lemon falling in with a pop star. It is, at best, easy, undemanding, kinda forgettable & a bit cringy
It is also not very fresh? Or innovative? And maybe that's okay? Or maybe, to quote Liz Lemon, blergh!

On my Sittenfeld scale, not as dull as Sisterland but less engaging than American Wife. Very middling.
But maybe I'm grouchy! How will it fare at #camplitsy23?!

Well that just broke my heart into pieces! 😭 At first I thought the prose might teeter into cloying, but it won me over. Exquisite!

My #doublespin for May. Good so far! Also, I've been reading a lot of longer books lately. Nice to read something fairly short.

Took me a while but I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of Flaubert. Divided into three parts -- Romanticism, The Purge, Realism -- it charts Flaubert's development from an eccentric romantic youth to a serious artist exploiting bourgeois style to skewer the bourgeoisie. It helps that Flaubert is a truly entertaining (and inconsistent) character. Bios are not my usual cuppa but this one read like a good novel. Now to revisit Madame Bovary!

#currentlisten
Will I adore like I did Prep and American Wife?
Or find it sludge like Sisterland?
Or absolutely loathe it like Eligible?
Stayed tuned! 😜
#camplitsy23

Finished tagged book while blubbering and prepping a rhubarb dessert for mother's day. (My campaign to get my family to like rhubarb continues!)
Loved this book so much! Another 2023 5 ⭐read. Also, why can't I be as funny as Ingrid? Or have a sister that funny.

Look at this pretty! Even though it's not a Persephone edition, excited to join the #persephoneclub to read it in June. My first Penelope Mortimer.

Loving my #currentlisten.

I'm so excited my Literary Tarot deck finally arrived! I pledged support on Kickstarter nearly 3 years ago. I stopped thinking it would ever get made.
The cards are gorgeous! (Some literary references were easy to identify, others not so much.)
All proceeds go to the Brink Literacy Project.

Finished the second volume of In Search of Lost Time. It marks the end of his first love with Gilberte and the introduction to his new love Albertine. (And much, much more of course! Such a crude summary fails to capture Proustian expansiveness.) I'm still into, still entranced, although some of his descriptions of young women did make me 🙄🤢🙄🤢🙄🤢
Onward to Volume 3! #morningswithmarcel

A sweet, unflashy middle grade novel about a girl connecting with her roots. The plot was simple but I liked the way Irish history and folklore were woven into the story. An easy, enjoyable listen as I did yard work and garden prep.
Glad #IslandVibes gave me a reason to read it. 👍😄
#titlesandtunes @Cinfhen @BarbaraBB

Perfect example of #moodreading. Not sure why (after years of owning it), I decided I wanted to read this literary bio of Flaubert and his most famous character. And yet, here I am. (Perhaps I'm still in the mood for all things 🇫🇷.)
Considered one of the best examples of literary biography, it is proving an entertaining read so far. Plus, there is something to reading about a different time and realizing many of today's problems are not new.

This book is a gut punch. One Sunday, 43 year-old Valeria, wife, mother, office worker, buys a black notebook that she keeps hidden & writes in on the sly. Her clandestine entries make up the novel. They offer a story of self-discovery as well as the struggle of what to do with that knowledge. First published in Italy in 1952. A tale of the impossibility of women's lives & the danger of finding your writing voice. Sure to be a best of the year!

My #bookspin stack for May. Mostly recent purchases that have been cluttering my nightstand. (Rodham has replaced The Sea, The Sea as the book that will not go away.😆) There are 15 here. The remaining five will be #netgalley titles. @TheAromaofBooks

I was excited to read about a woman "approaching the watershed of her fiftieth birthday" until I realized it was about how she'd lost her beauty and was no longer desirable to any of her suitors. The wrinkles, crevices, haggardness. ? What will become of her? (Spoiler, she ends up with a blind man who, thankfully, never has to look upon her ravaged visage. ?) Throw in some racism and antisemitism, and well, it sucked. Such a disappointment!

#islandvibes #titlesandtunes @Cinfhen @BarbaraBB
This month's theme is good excuse to read this stacked middle-grade novel about a troubled girl who gets sent to Ireland to live with her grandfather for a summer. Paired it with The Blower's Daughter from Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice's 2006 incredible album O. https://open.spotify.com/track/4B2lJinAkeNLSJjcq3dg8Q?si=UlCnaWiiSaWOKDG73rDWHw

Potentially #unpopularopinion but I had to bail on this one. Maybe there's a great story here, but I knew I couldn't manage 400+ pages of such clunky, didactic prose. (e.g. referring to Pesach as "Jewish Easter"?). I feel @shawnmooney would approve. ?
Thanks to #netgalley for the #arc.

Reader, interrupted. 🐱

I tend to complain that no one every gifts me a book, but then today my husband gave me this out of the blue. So that was a fun surprise!

Took me nearly a month but finally finished this beloved novel. I liked its gentleness, & how it always landed on the side of good. Reading this book overlapped with Moon Tiger Stylistically, very! different & yet, the similarities are striking. Both published in 1987 and they feature older women protagonists, strained relationships with adult children, memories of a wartime romance & a reckoning with the past. Both excellent in their own way.

Love a hotel bookshelf. Oddly enough, this one has 2 copies of Phil Collins's memoir. Is he popular with the French? 🤔
Fly home tomorrow.

I just read two memoirs back to back. One was flat (Stash), one was brilliant. 👆 What was the difference? Smith writes about the pain of her marriage's end, her journey to heal, her new sense of self. She's a poet, so that helps & she's aware of (and constantly questioning) HOW she tells this story. How it develops a plot, symbols, foreshadowing. And she plays with that while never sacrificing the emotional quality of her pain or growth. 👇

Mini birthday #bookhaul from Shakespeare & Company. Thanks for all bday wishes everyone!! 🥰

While my husband was resting I explored this English-language used bookstore in the Latin Quarter. Owned by a 🇨🇦 guy. NOT for the claustrophobic.

The peak of Robbins's addiction to Ambien coincides with the dissolution of her marriage. Getting sober becomes a priority as she faces a potentially ugly divorce and custody battle. She gives a detailed account of her history with drugs, her stint in rehab, and the fallout. I found it kinda boring & lacking in insight. Might have worked better as an essay (maybe not every story of addiction merits a memoir). And maybe it was written too soon 👇

Oh Claudia, you had me gripped from the start with your history of the world which was also a history of "a myriad of Claudias." Such breadth and depth all rendered in a tight little masterpiece.
Finished in the Toronto airport. Paris in the morning!
#192025 @Librarybelle

It's a two-kitty, stay in bed, and read a fabulous book kind of day.

'Fester' -- that word is used more than once in these stories, & it captures an important theme of this collection. (See also 'feral'). We are all walking wounded (from grief, loneliness, rejection) and those wounds fester. Healing (through connection, escape, resilience, love) is often flawed, sometimes transitory, occasionally transcendent. The writing is beautiful as one would expect from a poet but Slaughter knows how to spin a story too. 👇

Funny where mood reading can take you.

It's Pokemon tournament day and so am stuck reading some Alice Munro at the gaming store. I can't stand Pokemon 😑 but I really do love Munro.

A 1942 bestseller that's being republished in May. An ambitious saga about three young women and their search for love, acceptance, and success. At 800+ pages, it's ridiculously long, and yet, it kept my attention. I grew to respect Hale for believing the experiences of women deserve such serious treatment. Set in the 1920s & 30s, but not much has changed. Men can be brutes, women's sexuality is punished, and every choice comes at a cost.👇

This is nothing but a shameless me, me, me post but today I received in the mail a copy of the book I co-wrote! It's a very niche, kind of academic-y book about a children's publisher in my little part of the world, but I'm really proud of it!
And I'm so happy to finally have a hard copy!
Shockingly, it's not in the Litsy database. 😉

Welp, this book was not for me. It aims to re-imagine the year Jackie O (then Jacqueline Bouvier) spent as a student in post-war Paris. There is a lot of re-imagining and very little Jackie O. There are Communists and Facists and spy rings, oh my! There's also a lot of lip biting and eyelash batting. I read it for a book club and hoped the Paris setting would sustain me. It helped but couldn't salvage painfully overwrought prose or a dumb plot.

Currently reading reading this 1942 novel set to be republished this spring. It's 842 pages long.
It's pretty good, but not sure it's 842-pages-long good. 🤨
Has anyone read it? Apparently it was a big hit back in the day.
#netgalley

In Portland, Maine for an overnight and just happened to find a used bookstore around the corner from the hotel. The lighting was terrible but still managed to find a few things. 😅

On to volume 2...

"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience . . . The memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."
Thus ends Volume 1. I am in love. ?

Spent my Saturday puttering away at a puzzle and house hold chores while listening to this beautiful honest heartbreaking book about friends facing (or not facing) death and dying. It's short but packs a wallop. A reminder to hug your friends, even when they're pissing you off.

Finished my 10th (and probably final) #tob23 book. I went in with low expectations (not sure why since I loved Station Eleven) & was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it. A time travel book about a pandemic. Clearly Mandel had some fun with this. I enjoyed how all the pieces came together even if I'm unclear on the meaning. But there's no question that Mandel can write. There's a confidence to her prose that's reassuring. Pic of Obie who 👇

#Bookmail. (A blame it on @JenniferP purchase. 😉)

A compelling mother/daughter story. Yevgenia is a sexy, brash, tough-as-nails Russian immigrant. Lara is her Black teenage daughter who lives in her mother's shadow. Together they have a unstable, transient life, moving whenever Yevgenia's restlessness sets in. The book begins as they land in a trailer park in a CA desert town. Old family patterns are hard to break but Lara begins to build relationships with people in the trailer park & beyond👇

Friday Night reads.

Had to wait until after work to open my #muglove23 parcel. But it was worth the wait!
Thank you Renee for the heartwarming gifts. I absolutely love that you personalized my mug. ❤️ And the book looks like the perfect cozy read. ☕ @StayCurious
Thanks for a great swap @Cinfhen @TheKidUpstairs

Reading up on "archive moles" and the recent flurry of publishing projects dedicated to bringing forgotten and/or neglected books back into print. Tagged book is mentioned.
https://pocketmags.com/ca/prospect-magazine/march-2023/articles/1266350/meet-the...

The paper dolls LM Montgomery mug is from the last #muglove swap. Excited to open my #muglove23 parcel tomorrow!

I bought this book on a whim. I was curious about the audiobook platform Spiracle & an upcoming trip to Paris has me into French lit.
Then I saw it was psychological thriller/crime/horror & it's 14 hours long. I thought, oh shit.
But it's fantastic.
Marion is turning 40. Her farmer husband Patrice & daughter Ida have planned a party. Neighbor Christine is baking a cake. And then some unexpected visitors show up to their isolated rural home. 👇

Zipporah, Jethro's's daughter -- a small detail from Botticelli's "The Trials of Moses."
I looked up this painting (like many Proust readers before me) because Swann believes Odette resembles this portrait, which helps him fall in love with her.
(It would seem that is not a great reason to fall in love with someone, or might not lead to lasting happiness.)
I'm about halfway through Volume 1. Still enjoying my #morningswithMarcel

My #doublespin for February. A tale about a passionate friendship between two girls in post WW I France. Not unlike Book of Goose, also a tale about a passionate friendship between two girls in part WW II France. 🤔 Makes me wonder if Li was inspired by de Beauvoir.
Wallace is suspicious. 😼