Welcome to Litsy!

This is Elsa, who‘s come home to Santa Monica to visit her best friend, Charly, both #Californiagurls. #heatinjuly

Elsa here is trying to #getmovin while she is #wasted. Because Elsa cannot handle life she spends most of the book under the influence of pills and/or alcohol. She was a train wreck waiting to happen and I could not look away.

When you see a book on the library shelf and remember it‘s a @Reggie pick - so you get it. Giant Days is for my daughter but I may read it.

My #bookfest haul! Most excited about the tagged book! (How have I not heard of it before today?! Flawed characters are so my wheelhouse!)

The Julian Barnes was an impulse purchase after hearing him interviewed on NPR this morning.

#latimes #festivalofbooks

Elsa, just having been canned from her job in NYC will move back home. Struggling with the realization that her affair with who she thought the love of her life was is over, she cannot seem to reach that point in life where one resigns oneself or settles. Instead, while heavily self medicating, she‘ll visit her old friends, including an ex husband back in California for a trip to Catalina. It is a total disaster and I loved every vivid sentence.

I don't know what it is about these kinds of books that captivates me so thoroughly, but reading about unlikeable, self-destructive women is such a shamefully guilty pleasure of mine. Elsa, the main character in this one, is horrible. Her friends are horrible. Everyone in this book is horrible, and I couldn't look away. Exploring the apathy and selfishness of the privileged class always seems to elicit both my schadenfreude and my sympathy.

My latest staff pick

Lunch reading. 🌴📚🌴

This one grabbed me out of the blue and I loved it. The subject's rather bleak but the writing is so gorgeous — I've said it before and I'll say it a million more times: a brilliant writer can make me read anything they want me to read. Check this out when it's released in November.