Welcome to Litsy!

I don't know if this book isn't for me, or if it's just not for me right now. I read 2 chapters, and while I appreciate the descriptions of the architecture in the story, it just seemed wordy. I was going to give it one more chapter, but I'd rather read a book that makes me want to pick it up and keep reading it.

📚 This is my first #Donate for #ReadorDonate @julieclair, and a dnf for this month's #BookSpin @TheAromaofBooks.

Thursday morning #coffeeandabook ☕️📚

An interesting read focused on London at a moment when property boomed and the financial sector built glass palaces in the east. London‘s multiple temporalities are revealed through flashbacks but also London demonstrates time‘s complexity. London is different now post Grenfell and the cladding scandal, post Covid and with global property ownership leaving vast swathes empty but the novel reminds us of the constant process of reinvention.

For this is the city, in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday,nor tomorrow, merely weather, and decay,and construction. And the passage of hoofs , wheels and feet, the path of fire, the blast of bombs. The city digests itself, and regurgitates it melts away, and rears up once more in another form. People die, and die, and die again and from the graveyard float forth reminders and warnings and recommendations.

Here is a strange one found in my stocking! It appears to be a celebration of London in the booming 1990s told from the perspective of Matthew, an architect involved in developing the docklands area of east London. We shall see but Penelope Lively does not write duds!