Welcome to Litsy!

On the #Booker2023 longlist

I've been reading the longlists since 2019 and this was a really good year in that small window. I gave five stars to four different books. I really liked that there was a lot of value given to poetic prose, not purple, but poetic and rhythmic, often personal and always generating reflection. Many of the authors are also published poets, and it shows.

I finished last week. My personal rankings are in the comments

I found this to be a novel of wonderful rhythmic hypnotic prose. It took me a few sittings, but I found myself swept up in Gopi's world of grief and squash.

It‘s unassuming, on a grieving family of Jains in England. After Ma dies, dad gets his three daughters into squash, and one of them really takes to it, embracing the sounds and rhythms of the play and the game flow and its strategies.

This finishes the #Booker2023 longlist for me

My next book. I finished The Sound and the Fury tonight and started this. It‘s my last left from the #Booker2023 longlist.

I enjoyed this curiosity, found it wonderfully done, found the writing, which focuses so much on the sound, always interesting and terrific, with its own rhythm and life. And I say this even I didn't really get it. (I missed a lot, as I discovered afterwards reading online reviews) This maybe should have won the Booker (and I loved the winner, Prophet Song)

She‘s like, “yeah, right” 🙄 But it‘s my next read and I‘m looking forward to it. #booker2023

My 11th from the #booker2023 longlist is surprisingly humble. This search for a lost mother, who stepped out and was never seen again, is a life‘s work. Hughes has been reworking this story since she was a teenager, and it‘s her 1st and only novel. It reads like a memoir, and it feels real. It‘s just that deeply thought through. It seems to do everything Hughes wanted it to do. Recommended.

This one was rough up front. Advertised as Korean magical realism, instead it‘s satirical weird disturbing stuff, told with a humorous tone. But…if you can hang in there, it gives a scope of 20th-century Korean history, and a scathing view on South Korean capitalism and autocracy. This was published in 2004, translated only in 2023, and made the International #Booker2023 shortlist.

My 10th from the Booker longlist was wonderful! I came in with no expectations and was rewarded with an inspiring story. A novel about an autistic boy who misses the mother he never knew, working out a device for perpetual motion; and a school teacher in a bad marriage exhausted by her dysfunctional all-boys school, yet fully committed to it. A novel of the children of missing parents, some grown, stumbling through life. Recommended! #booker2023

People love this book. I just didn‘t take to his 3rd-person interior monologues (or whatever the correct term is). I mean, it wasn‘t hard listening to, but it was hard to rationalize anyone could have this little going in inside their heads. Where is the mystery, or multiple perspectives we all have on everything? Having said all that, it makes for decent listening and he does some very interesting things structurally and thematically.

I got a little buzz from the #Booker2023 award, and ordered these five the same night. They just arrived.