Welcome to Litsy!

What's in a first line? A whole lot tbh. Come consider a few great ones with me and maybe find some great new reads for Pride month.

https://bookriot.com/compelling-first-lines-of-queer-books/

Bite-sized Book Chats: The 51st Episode

A playlist of all episodes in the Bite-sized Book Chat series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU-61cZp1pQdBH5V0Zb9q-2ujl4PY8nhf

Chat #1: with Soubhi from Austin

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

Chat #2: with Ange from Sunderland in the northeast of England

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
Adriana Hunter (Translator)

Mythic tragedy of Chinese immigrant family told through the story of orphaned siblings Lucy and Sam, set during the Gold Rush in the harsh deserts and mountains. The ending undid me.

May brought me some wonderful books! Among my favorites are the tagged, The Girl with the Louding Voice, The Ruthless Lady‘s Guide to Wizardry, Ten Steps to Nanette, and Gallant. Interesting that all 3 of these memoirs are (at least partially) about the author‘s relationships to their moms.

I feel strange saying I enjoyed this profoundly sad book, but I really did.

Lucy and Sam grow up with a gold prospecting father and a mom who came from Asia hoping for a better life. Theirs is an unstable unpredictable poverty, ever shifting.

They are followed by tragedy and hardship into separate adulthoods, and the juxtaposition between hope and the inevitability of luck.

I don‘t think I‘ve ever read anything quite like this before.

Hoping to finish this book today and start my classic of the month! Nothing better than reading on the porch listening to birds sing

#currentlyreading on this gorgeous Sunday afternoon

Two siblings set out to bury their Ba in the Old West in this historical fiction novel unlike any other. The story is told almost in reverse, beginning with their fathers death and moving back through their childhoods and how their Ma and Ba met before completing Lucy and Sam's story. It‘s beautifully and hauntingly written.

Sunday reading 📚

Loving all three of these books so far!

1. Black Water Sister, How Much of These Hills is Gold, and The Verifiers

2. Browsing!

3. Physical: How Much of These Hills is Gold

Ebook: A Marvellous Light

Audiobook: The Verifiers

#WeekendReads

Currently reading

Told through the eyes of Lucy, a girl living in the western territories during the gold rush. Of Asian ancestry, her family stands out from the flood of migrants from the east. I was captivated by the story and its eerie and melancholy voice, a striving for hope strained by desperation. Yet the reader sees Lucy‘s strengths and weaknesses just as Lucy sees those of her sibling Sam and their parents. Unforgettable story.

#bookspin

Read first 2 chapters then decided to listen to the audiobook instead as it wasn‘t gelling with me reading it. This book was interesting but odd, not sure if I am the intended audience. 3.5/5 Read for prompts for #PopSugarReadingChallenge2022 and 52BookClubReadingChallenge2022

✨First book of 2022✨

This was a great read about a Chinese-American family who are not just trying to survive in the Wild West, but are trying to belong in spite of how people don‘t really see them, but just stare and treat them like outsiders. Siblings Lucy and Sam later feel differently about where home is—but help each other along their journey.

Recommend.

13-17 Oct 2021 (audiobook)
An American Chinese family quest for gold in the American west.
I enjoyed the first two parts (the blend of myth and history, two young orphans trying to find a place to belong and Ba‘s retelling) but found the third problematic. Perhaps there were few options for girls like Lucy in the Wild West, but I did not welcome her ending. I would have preferred her to continue to reject Ma‘s lesson that beauty is its own weapon.

A different history, an honest history, not the romanticized history of the American West we are taught. This novel is a honest look at the greed that drove the exploitation and abuse of so many.

Really enjoyed this months selection from Books That Matter! A very different perspective on gold rush America, and an excellent choice for pride month! 🏳️‍🌈

Showing the vicious circumstances a family endures while trying to carve out a life in an Old West built of both history and myth, the story is one of heartache. Sometimes the poetry in the prose makes the specifics unclear, but the impact remains sharp as the characters wrangle with the ideas of home & land & self & inheritance.

Another amazing Asian author is C Pam Zhang.
https://cpamzhang.com/ check out all her amazing book on her website.

#ReadingAsia2021 #femaleauthor #chineseauthor #recommendedauthor #reading #booknerd #bookworm #poetry #currentlyreading #readothercultures #opentoreading

A tale of two orphaned Chinese American children coming of age in the California gold rush in the late 1800s. Loved this first parts of this, but it lost me in part four. It just didn‘t connect well with the rest of the book. I did enjoy lots of it though, and I appreciated getting to see a less known perspective of this slice of American history.

I part of this indie store Book Drop and this month I received this book. It‘s always a surprise, as you don‘t pick the book like others. This one looks rather interesting. Adding it to May‘s #bookspin

I‘ve had Zhang‘s book for over 6 months without cracking the cover, so I decided to watch her event in the LA Times Festival online. It worked! I‘m very much looking forward to starting it soon.

This was fabulous, nuanced, deep, and super layered. Story of two Asian-American children trying to make their way as well as their parents.

Starts off bleak and a bit gruesome but the author captures the intensity, the dreams, the family myths that build up in an immigrant family as they search for a place to call home. Zhang depicts the children‘s curiosity and romanticism of their parents‘ home country well and also the sense of being separate and disconnected from both old and new lands. I have mixed feelings about the end but didn‘t see them getting a happier ending....

Got some reading in at the hairdresser's. Can you see my favourite gold shoes? This was amazing but perplexing. I will be thinking about it for a while. Two sisters survive a host of calamities, racism, starvation etc.
Really interested to see what others think....

Just started and enjoying it but a little worried about how bleak it may get because the premise is pretty grim: 2 siblings, children of Chinese immigrants, on the run during the American Gold Rush. My daughter just studied the gold rush last year so will be interesting to see how it compares to another book we read about a Chinese immigrant searching for gold.

This book was incredibly unique. I have not read any Westerns before, and it was very interesting to read a Western with the central characters being Chinese American and all of the complexity that brought. The writing style wasn‘t personally my favorite, but it was very well written. I found myself more attached to the characters than I thought I would be! I‘m glad I gave it a try.

I wasn‘t sure if I‘d like this one (almost abandoned it 3 chapters in), but the character development early on paid off in the second half. Set in the Gold Rush, two siblings grow up under the weight of their family history. Excellent debut novel!

A beautiful golden cover holds a literary (at times too much so?) piece of historical fiction, which made many “best of” lists in 2020. I can certainly understand why; there were parts that were amazing for me. But ultimately it‘s not one of my “best of” books. A book I enjoyed but not sorry that it‘s over, if that makes any sense at all. Hard lives lived in the gold rush era.

Zhang takes the (depressing) stories of early Chinese gold prospectors in California and generates a heavy twist. It‘s an awkward book. The prose is poetic, but doesn‘t always work. Stasis is ok. Dialogue is terrific. But with plot this prose just feels forced, painfully so. Yuck. Not for me. The last two hours of listening were awful. (My 7th on the 2020 Booker Longlist)

This was beautiful and so sad. This family had so much difficulty belonging in the prospecting, mining and railway west. Even those who seemed to be kind, never were and these young kids learned over time how precarious their position was in this land not their home. The author addresses that they belonged as much as anybody but the world didn‘t accept that

When their father dies, leaving them orphans, siblings Lucy and Sam go on a cross-country journey to find a resting place for their father and a new home for themselves. Although their quest is far more difficult than they anticipated, the siblings realize everything in their past has made them stronger than they ever thought they could be. This story mesmerized me and then swallowed me whole—exquisitely raw, devastating, and indelible. 🖤🖤🖤

@Kaddele Many , many thanks for my lovely #jokabokaflodswap
I love everything... I‘ve just had a bit of Santa & he is delicious.. I love milk chocolate!
Thankyou , I look forward to seeing your posts .. a new Litsy friend. X
A very Happy Christmas to you & yours.
Looking forward to reading this book ❤️

And Happy Christmas & Thankyou @MaleficentBookDragon

A novel about two Chinese-American siblings in the Gold Rush west, and their attachment to the land. They are constantly wondering not just if they belong to the territory, but whether any of the land and its bounty could belong to them.

What an epigraph to start this book, about two Chinese-American siblings in the Gold Rush west. And so appropriate right before Thanksgiving!

‘What makes a home a home?‘ ‘Home‘ is always changing to Lucy and Sam, left orphaned by a Chinese immigrant father and a mother who were among the thousands of Chinese who came for a better life -some to prospect gold, others falsely lured to work in mines. Though born in America, the siblings were never treated like they belong, never treated equally. As they journey to find their place, we‘re told of the harsh landscape, and ⬇️

Can you imagine anything more difficult than trying to discover what “home” means when you‘re Chinese in mid-nineteenth century western America: The Gold Rush, the railroad, the bigotry.

This beautiful family story is told through the eyes of the daughters Lucy and Sam, their Ma and Ba, and those who impact their lives. I‘m not sure I‘ve ever encountered stronger female characters, or a better sense of place.

“Gold grass gold grass gold”

I liked this bleak and complex novel about families and where immigrants are allowed to belong. It was hard to read a lot of the time and while I don‘t usually enjoy books about early settlers in America but the writing made me like this even if it was cruel and difficult.

#scarathlon2020 #teamharkness @StayCurious +6 pts

Pur-lease....🐾

Just seen this today so won‘t get the book read in the next 24hrs - but definitely going to join in next month. Anyone else???

https://altaonline.com/alta-book-club/

I always feel bad about bailing on a book, but it‘s time to face it, that right know this book is not for me.

I don‘t connect with the writing and have read 100p the last week in a 270p book. I also don‘t want to pick it up to continue reading. Maybe if it makes it to the Booker Shortlist or even win, I will give it another go.

#3books #writtenbyapoc I am interested to read!

September is going to be a great reading month!!

This book! We can start by saying how important it is to finally have a novel about Asian immigrants during the gold rush. Zhang has a talent for giving just as much information as necessary to develop a full story and characters, to explore identity from a multitude of angles without doing any of them a disservice, and still manages to write a novel less than 300 pages. Beautifully minimal and moving.