Welcome to Litsy!

I am SO out of practice with reviews. Time to snap out of it!

I really enjoyed this. It‘s your favourite @BookwormM - interconnected short stories 😁 - this time set in a Ukrainian apartment building before/after the fall of the USSR. I would say it‘s at the novel end of the ISS genre - we get to revisit the main characters, and grow to really feel for some of them - even the awful ones have heart. From a young orphan making her

Ukraine, sometime before the fall of the USSR. A New Years Eve visit to a baby house (children‘s home) by Grandfather Frost (definitely NOT St Nicholas), making swans 🦢 out of tyres 🛞. This is how he did it. In case you need to practise at home!

We‘ve already established that the solution to a vegetable canning issue is to grow triangular vegetables.

This book is bizarre. I like it.

Possibilities for #ReadAroundTheWorld #Ukraine this month.

I really enjoyed the surreal seagulls of Kurkov‘s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv earlier this year. But Good Citizens is really appealing at the moment. I do (usually) like a novel in short stories, if it‘s well done.

Highly unlikely to get through both this month, so Decisions will have to be made!

Daniil works in the Ministry of Food, before the Fall, engineering food packaging to Ministry standards. "The next day, Daniil found another memo on his desk, this one from Sergei Igorovich: To fill unfillable string-bean triangular void, engineer triangular vegetable. Due Friday."

I finished this excellent interconnected short story collection on a long, gloomy walk down the Rapid Transit path. The views were nothing special, but it hit 6° today! It felt so, so good to spend time outside without a heavy, mobility-destroying coat and mittens. The last couple of weeks of extreme cold warnings really did me in. Winter can piss off.

This story collection follows the residents of one apartment building in Ukraine and how their lives intertwine both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. Although the threat of betrayal shadows every relationship, a deep longing for human connection outshines the darkness in these stories, however fragile and fraught such connection may be. I love this book for its dark humor and its fierce optimism. A tribute to the human spirit.

My two favourite collections of short stories in 2020. #bestof2020

Everything I want in a book: sharp writing, dark themes, an enlarging perspective on history and characters... so may quotable passages... I could go on! Plus I‘ve long been interested in bone records and they play a significant role in the stories. Mesmerizing.

For me not as strong as How to Pronounce Knife, but they were humorous and quirky and I guess if they showed up on the Giller Longlist, I would be okay with it.

#ShadowGiller @Lindy

Next up for the #ShadowGiller project!

Even the most stubborn perpetrators succumbed when threatened with loss of employment or arrest. The goal these days was to re-educate without arrest because the Party was magnanimous and forgiving; furthermore, prisons could no longer accommodate every citizen who uttered a joke.

A collection of interconnected, darkly funny stories set in Ukraine, both before & after the fall of the USSR. The people are mostly residents in a poorly-built 10-storey apartment building. They navigate chronic shortages & bureaucracy, hustling however they can to survive. Heat not turned on because the address isn‘t on city hall‘s list. Black market music recorded on X-ray films. Wages paid in lamps or perfume. #CanLit #shadowgiller

Don‘t think.
If you think, don‘t speak.
If you think and speak, don‘t write.
If you think, speak and write, don‘t sign.
If you think, speak, write and sign, don‘t be surprised.

Short stories about life before and after the fall of the soviets. All centered around one building and the people who live there.

This month‘s pick in the #ReadWithMrBook Challenge was #DebutNovel. I have to admit, this isn‘t a proper novel but it‘s intertwined short stories that all play in an apartment-building in Ukraine - before and after the fall. I liked it, especially the different characters.

A fairly quick read, this series of vignettes were oddly uplifting despite the dark humor, but that could be due to the fact that I'm stuck at home while work is closed. #quarantinereads

This is at the top of my #MarchTBR: a collection of short stories set in a single apartment building between the twilight of the USSR and what comes just after its fall. #MarchMadness
@Eggs

Well, finally! After quite the dry spell, I won another book from Goodreads.

This novel-in-stories about the residents of a Soviet-era apartment building in 1980s Ukraine has been described as “bitingly funny” and I‘m very much looking forward to it. 👍🏻