Welcome to Litsy!

I am posting one book per day from my extensive to-be-read collection. No description and providing no reason for wanting to read it, I just do. Some will be old, some will be new. Don‘t judge me - I have a lot of books. Join in if you want!

#ABookADay2023

I'm not 100% sure what I read, but I didn't hate it. I really liked exploring the interconnectedness of humanity. I also liked tagging along on the narrator's meandering thought trains, even if he is a bit self-centered. At one point, he has to make a...deposit of his, um, genetic material at a specific bank. That whole scene is just hilarious. 229/1,001 #1001Books #52BookClub Time in the Title; January #TBRTarot Whose Title Starts with a Number

#2021Book52
The parts of this novel that explored the narrator's relationships with the people around him were great. I would be willing to read a whole series expanding on those sections. But too much of the novel revolved around the narrator's inner monologue, which was just way too pretentious for my taste.

Even though it‘s a bit meta, I enjoyed this book a lot. The MC is a writer/poet, wandering the streets of Brooklyn thinking of fatherhood, a fatal disease, The Challenger, Back to the Future and writing. Especially the first half of the book is so good and I adored the concept of the 24/7 Clocks movie which I wish would be for real.

#1001books #ReadYourSign ♏️ #Black

(Pic: Face masks are obliged for now, in public transport only)

#WeeklyForecast 25/20

For this week I hope to read these three books: the tagged one for #1001books, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet for #ATY2020 and America for Beginners for #Booked2020. Especially looking forward to Hotel, which I am starting right now!

A book that you are more likely to admire than love; however, I find the writing exceptionally sharp and, at times, revelatory. Lerner has a true gift for language, but what I find most extraordinary is the overall meta conceit. We all know writers graft bits from their life to form a believable narrative, but this story illustrates the symbiotic relationship between fact and fiction more effectively than any book I‘ve read.

I wasn‘t crazy about Lerner‘s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, but I liked his writing enough to try this one. His characterization of the narrator is excellent, but some of the secondary characters seem rather interchangeable. The structure is a little too Writing Workshop, but his sentences are interesting. Overall, I enjoyed the novel even if I didn‘t like the characters or the structure. It gave me something to think about.

A summary of this novel might sound too familiar - a white, male, mildly successful writer living in Brooklyn rambles around the city ruminating on life. But this novelist is a published poet and the work seems unpolished, more of a collage than a coherent story. It is also very meta with the narrator including his novel, a variation on his life that we have already seen. I was distracted by the writerly analysis of real places that I know well.

Unnamed narrator's first novel was published to critical acclaim, but sold practically nothing. Based upon a short story he sold to a literary magazine, a big house picks up his second novel, which does not yet exist, for an exorbitant advance. The short story is about an unnamed narrator whose first novel is published to critical acclaim, but has sold practically nothing. Poetic & beautiful & meta as hell. Loved it.

Deliberate, self-aware metafiction, but I mean that in the best possible way. This is meticulously crafted, and for the most part, brilliantly so. There are parts that feel like they are trying too hard, but this is nothing if not ambitious, and most of it succeeds.

This is weird...one minute the writing feels profound and unique the next it's irritating and pompous like he's swallowed a thesaurus and wants to show off! 🙄 Plus it's so hard to follow what's going on as it skip back and forwards all over the place! 🤷‍♀️

So I was supposed to review this book, but I ended up writing a review about another book instead. A book, ironically, about a reader who writes book reviews for his author friends because it makes him feel important. Almost like he himself was an author, which he'd wanted to be for as long as he could remember. But he never ended up writing anything except these reviews. And now he finds himself regretting the past and wistful for the future.

Ok, so I actually enjoyed the experience of reading this, but the more I think about it, I just can't help feeling like it's not actually a very interesting book. A bit too postmodern in the tired sense, and not as clever as it thinks it is.

Finally gonna get to it.