Welcome to Litsy!

Reflective.

Mexican author, Mexican restaurant, Bangkok: Why not?

✨What a beautiful way of looking at language diversity✨

Journey across the Mexico-US border told as an epic quest. Makina “verses” out of one charged situation to the next in search of her brother. Rio Grande=River Styx. Monsters, sinkholes, wise women, guides through the underworld. Vibrant language that mixes colloquialisms & slang with a lyrical tone. Striking imagery. Immigration, language, identity, nativism, mythology, family. Lisa Dillman is an incredible translator. Tr. 2015

I'd like to get to these next year if my sporadic brain can keep some semblance of a plan together! Figure these 14 can be a good backbone to be filled out later.

#TBR21

Fellow Litsens,
I‘m loving my library in a whole new way right now. But it has totally changed the way I determine by TBR.
I can‘t read fast enough and if someone has a book on hold and I can‘t renew it. It‘s stressing me out!!

How have you approached this problem?

#stress #tbr #librarylove #2020challenge #grabandgo

A short book about a sister crossing the Mexico/US border to find her brother and deliver a message, this covered a lot of ground (physically and metaphorically) in less than 150 pages. It was a perfect finish for the non-spooky first half of #LatinxHeritageMonth reading...now onto the Brujxes! 😄🔮

#IntegrateYourShelf

This was short and interesting but if I had to read one more time how someone “versed”, I would scream. A different take on the immigration story with a strong female protagonist who is nobody‘s fool.

For all of its current relevance regarding immigration and xenophobia, at its heart, it‘s a story as old as storytelling itself. A hero sets out on an epic journey, overcomes many obstacles, relies on friends old and new, and then...well, I won‘t tell you how it ends. The epic feeling of this book is all the more impressive because it is all packed into about a hundred pages.

We are to blame for this destruction...

Powerful border novel.

They were getting married. Makina was so dazzled by the beauty of the ceremony that she didn‘t at first notice that the couples were either men or women but not men and women, and on realizing it she felt moved by how many tears were being shed, like flowers from their eyes, over how hard it had been to get there, and she wished that the people she‘d known in the same situation could have been that happy. #lgbtq

(Internet photo)

A brilliant allegory encompassing contemporary latinx experience on both sides of the border between Mexico and the US—or life and the afterworld—told simply, yet with such inventiveness (“he angloed” rather than “said in English”) that I felt frequent thrills deep within my language-loving core. My heart was with the badass heroine and her archetypal quest, echoing with ancient mythology. A tour-de-force novella #translated by Lisa Dillman.

The stadium loomed before them. So, what do they use that for?
They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are.

The city was an edgy arrangement of cement particles and yellow paint. Signs prohibiting things thronged the streets, leading citizens to see themselves as ever protected, safe, friendly, innocent, proud, and intermittently bewildered, blithe and buoyant; salt of the earth worth knowing.

First there was nothing. Then she made out two mountains colliding in the back of beyond: like they‘d come from who knows where and were headed to anyone‘s guess but had come together at that intense point in the nothingness and insisted on crashing noisily against each other, though the oblivious might think they simply stood there in silence.

Sneaking in another #NewYearWhoDis before the end of the month & I absolutely loved this! It was a read-in-one-sitting - I‘d be more than happy to start it again immediately. As suggested, I began with the translator‘s note, which helped.

Smart, savvy Makina is sent to the other side, to cross, to find her brother. Her quest takes her across the border, through a world that‘s almost dream-like, tilted on its axis a fraction.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

This has the qualities of an epic journey. Makina crosses from Mexico into the U.S. to find her brother. She is guided by various figures, overcoming obstacles on her quest: violence, racism, disillusionment. The novel is dreamlike, allegorical, and haunting.

The translator's note at the end was fascinating and very helpful for understanding the way Herrera uses language. I recommend reading it first. 4⭐

What an amazing book! The dangers the undocumented undergo in order to get into the United States and the myriad ways they can be taken advantage of once they arrive are explored in this novella about a girl who makes the crossing from Mexico to locate her brother who has gone missing after coming to the US to reclaim some mythical family land. Spare prose, gut punches, haunting situations, amazing use of language...this book is a jewel.

Only got about 1/2 of the reading done I‘d planned for this past week so going to be a little more realistic about what I can accomplish this week.

@rachelm your package arrived today!! Thanks for the yummy chocolate!!

Finished and heading your way @Carolyn11215 ! I liked this a lot but starting with the translator‘s note definitely helped.

Yay! Got my book for #lmpbc #groupl today. Thanks @lele1432 ! I look forward to digging in.

Missed the post office yesterday before leaving town, so this will be sent to @rachelm first thing in the morning!

Wholly different from what I was expecting, this short novel proved to be an important work in its own right. Its strength was the use of surrealism to convey the truths & nuances of present-day issues on the topic of immigration; bridging cultures & languages. The translator's note was very informative! 4⭐️s #LMPBC #Round7 #GroupI

"To hell with it all, she thought, to hell with this guy and that one, to hell with all this shit, I‘m going to hang myself from a lamppost and let the wind whip me around like an old rag; I‘m going to start crying and then I‘m going to go to hell too."
Mood.

"Signs prohibiting things thronged the streets, leading citizens to see themselves as ever protected, safe, friendly, innocent, proud, and intermittently bewildered, blithe, and buoyant; salt of the only earth worth knowing."

"I‘m dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by."
Today in notable first sentences.

Okay#LMPBC #Round7 #GroupI today was crazy so I'm just now able to post my choices. I'll tag them in the comments as well. 4 contemporary and 2 classics. I'm kind of leaning towards the tagged book, Signs Preceding the End of the World, but let me know what you all prefer!

This week‘s NYT By the Book interview is with the legendary Patti Smith. I LOVE Yuri Herrera and love that she talks about Kingdom Cons, which she read and loved, and the blurbed book, that she is taking on tour with her. I am going to see her next week-ah, how I wish we could discuss these books together! https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/books/review/patti-smith...

Up next! #tbr #workintranslation #amreading

Loved this one! Very short, it only took me about 1.5 hours to read. The story of a woman who travels up to the US to find her brother. Beautifully written!

I dont think I know enough about Yuri Herrera's Mexico to understand what he was doing here. Embarrassing, but I suppose it just means I need to get educated on immigration and all the socio psychological elements that go along with it. Any recommendations to help me get started? #readdiversebooks

#24B429 update. I got 13.5 hours of reading in . I finished If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yri Herrera, got started on Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling and continued listening to Crown of Swords book7 of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Best of all I surpassed my Goodreads goal by 2 books!

#24B42019 This is likely more than I will finish but it's worth a try📚

This was a lyrical, short novella that was beautifully written and translated. It is especially relevant given the challenges that immigrants face when they arrive in the US. The translator's note in the back discusses the obstacles she faced trying to translated a dialect of Spanish that is spoken on the US/Mexican border. I found that part incredibly interesting.

3.25 ⭐️
Inside the story of a girl taking a note to her brother, Herrera exposes the problems facing Mexican immigrants to, and emigrants in the US; Underlying the sisters journey are the topics of the underworld of smuggling humans, cultural clashes, profiling, and linguistic issues. It‘s not a blow your socks off book but I enjoyed the surface story, and I appreciate that the subject is current and important in the U.S..

It's a short book that makes you cross a border. What becomes of you once you crossed that border? I think it's a book that is open to interpretation.
Here is mine: when you immigrate in a new country, your old self dies a little. The world in which you used to evolve goes on without you, and you do not evolve with it.
If you've read this book, what is your interpretation???

I loved the story and the main character but I had such a hard time understanding "the language". Most parts feel like reading poetry and I just didn't understand the images, the metaphors and symbols. I did not understand the ending. I'm very much looking forward to discussing this book.

@Faibka and @Lola all the books I ordered arrived today! I started with Yuri Herrera and love the first pages!

#uncannyoctober day 4 - Moon

I love how the publisher used the moon design on the cover to highlight the book‘s title! 🌙

Settling in at my library carrel with some of my thesis reading for this semester. (Ancillary Justice and After the Quake are for this week) #college #writing #libraries

#spinepoetry #24in48

Signs preceding the end of the world
Boundless
Anything is possible
Too much and not the mood
Becoming wise

Read on my kindle: Yuri Herrera novels are quickly becoming favorites. I have Kingdom Cons, but I almost don't want to read it because then I will be out of Yuri Herrera novels.

My latest #bookmail

I keep buying Jeff Vandermeer's books but I haven't read one yet. I should probably fix that soon.

Catching up on my photo challenges! I took this photo in Mexico when I was there for an archaeological dig several years ago. The only books I have read recently by #mexicanauthors are this one and Like Water for Chocolate, but I have several more on my TBR! It was such a beautiful place and I want to go back. #maybookflowers

“Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of new people. And then they speak. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it‘s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.”