Welcome to Litsy!

Brought up some interesting questions about the futility of life and how ”to live is an act of violence”. But overall this book felt half baked, hollow and translated with zero emotions.

Does this book deserve the Booker Prize? Honestly, I didn‘t feel so. But, to each their own.

A woman has become mute. She has lost her husband, teaching job, and custody of her 8-yr-old son. Lost herself, she takes a course in Ancient Greek taught by an instructor about her age who is losing his sight. Somehow a gentle warm story comes out of this, layered onto of darker histories and life pains, and terrific interesting prose. This completes my two week run through Han‘s four English-translated novels. (Another is due out in January)

Starting the next book - more from Nobel winner Han Kang

This reads like a collection of prose poetry. A series of white things, with a theme on an older sister who only lived a couple hours. Each topic gets a page or so. A blizzard is characterized by "this oppressive weight of beauty", a handkerchief is falling "like a soul tentatively sounding out the place it might alight". Very interesting, if generally mystifying to me.

150 pages with maybe 80 pages of actual text, the rest white space. It reads like a series of prose poems on white things. Although not poetic in rhythm, the feelings they left me with are very similar that of Emily Dickinson‘s poetry that I‘m currently reading. Han writes of about an older sister who lived for 2 hours in Korea, while looking out at snowy Warsaw, Poland.

Book shopping!

Not sure how this one escaped my radar in 2022, but I just read about it the other day and then read all the wonderful Litsy reviews and just had to have it.

Grabbed #18 in the Dragon Masters series for my 8 year old - anyone else's kids love this series? He's whipping through them, and we can't keep them on the shelves at the library! #RaisingReaders

I fell into a serious reading slump...years of nothing finished, I think; I just finished this beautiful book!! I got a little lost sometimes timeline-wise, but wow, I fell in love with the characters and the way the world felt alive around them. My favorite quote: "I came to the realization that life was merely the forward motion of going from one's first hospital room to one's last." Def recommend!

^^ 361 “Let‘s stop here. All truth has vanished.”

365 “Chunhui was about to ask Jumbo something else, but before they could happen, they vanished. Only their voices were left behind in the vast outer space, faint.
Goodbye, little lady.
Goodbye to you too, elephant.”

Playful, sensual, sometimes childlike, sometimes cunning, sometimes cruel.

Talking elephants. Whale-shaped cinema. Coffee. Twins. Daisy fleabane. The Red Brick Queen. Determination, loyalty, cruelty, devotion. A magical-realist saga. One-eyed bee woman. Shamans. Geumbok & Chunhui. Beautiful translation. Love the old-fashioned direct address to reader. 2023

137 “But first, another interesting event awaits us.”

353 “Dear reader, the story continues.”

353 “the lonelier she got, the more perfect her bricks became.”

"Where'd the company vanish to after laying everyone off? The Philippines. They went looking for a country with cheaper, more-docile workers with even less power than us, and moved their entire operation over there. They just started, and already dozens of Filipino workers have been injured or killed.'