Welcome to Litsy!

There were sentences I appreciated, and moments when I could see Singer was a talented writer. But I can‘t say I enjoyed this book or learned anything from it. Full of misogyny and self-centered angst, and a nihilistic viewpoint. Balthazar is going to choose my next book. He says I need to read something happier.
#bookspin #littenkitten @TheAromaofBooks

“I was brought up on three dead languages- Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish (some consider the last not a language at all) - and in a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud.”
#firstlineFridays @ShyBookOwl

The Titanic sank in 1912, and Shulman threw the bomb in 1906. Are these dates intentionally off by a year? Or is this an editorial mistake?

“The owner of the boardinghouse lighted and blessed the first of the eight Hanukkah candles for his guests, but my mother and Moishe refused to accept another person performing so holy a ceremony for them.” #festivaloflights #seasonsreadings @vkois88 @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

"A person is literally a cemetery where multitudes of living corpses are buried."

There's practically no plot to this book, but the conversations are fantastic!

"The trouble is that the quiet, patient people are passive and those in power, the malefactors, are aggressive. If a decent majority would decide once and for all to take power in their hands, maybe there would be peace."
"They'll neither decide nor will they ever get power," I said. "Power and passivity don't mix."
"Is that your view?"
"It's the experience of generations."
"Then things are bitter."

Some things are universal. This is the nature of early morning commutes everywhere, at any time. 😕

"Man has to be granted the courage to reveal to himself and others what it is he truly desires. The real tyrants weren't those who repressed the body (which is confined anyhow) but those who confined the spirit. Alleged liberators, they have all been subjugators of the soul!"

While he has a point, I think I'll say like Winnie the Pooh - Yes, please. I'll have both. Freedom of the body and freedom of the mind/soul.

This book is populated with some fantastic characters. I feel like posting quotes from every other page. 😂 Some of them come very close to being caricatures, especially the Communists, but I don't doubt that there were people just like them. (And because it is Warsaw in the 1930s and they are all either Jews or political deviants, or both, I fear for them all. 😟)

I'm doing this 1978 thing, (my birth year) and Bashevis Singer was the Nobel Prize winner of literature that year. 1978 was also the year Shosha came out in English translation, making it my obvious choice. (And look at that cover! I want hair like that!) I don't actually know what the book is about, but I'm about to find out. Anyone familiar with the book or the author? Will I need tissues?

#Bookmail 😀Shosha's dust jacket is a bit faded and the cover has a bump, the pages ever so slightly faded but unmarked and intact. Overall in great shape for a book that's almost 40 years old. And smells great!
A Scanner Darkly is brand new. Not super keen on the cramped formatting, but it seems to be the only edition available.

#BooknerdProblems - When you spend half an hour agonising on Amazon because you're not sure you like the newer cover (top left), desperately don't want the one that looks like a movie tie-in even though there is no movie (bottom middle), you're on a limited budget but want a book that's in good condition. (I think I'll go for top right and cross my fingers. It's listed as "good".)