Welcome to Litsy!

Work day did finish with too many things not working out so i' m settling in the sofa with a blanket and a book...

Saw a documentary about Marco Polo today featuring the author Francis Wood and realized I got her book and have read it. 😎😎😎

I resisted buying this book in Venice, having seen the day before where the Polos are said to have lived there. But I knew I‘d find a cheaper and lighter copy here rather than lug a copy with questionable translation home. And tonight‘s trip to HPB paid off! Looking forward to this one.

Onto another adventure with book 4 in the Sigma Force series and some mulberry tea made with leaves and berries from our mulberry tree in our back yard.

No idea how to review this, or who I‘d recommend it to, but I loved it.

Marco Polo & Kublai Khan are talking. In short vignettes Polo describes the myriad of cities he‘s visited. Or does he? Memory, desire, signs and the dead - all touching how we experience a place. Maybe that‘s it. If you have a fascination with sense of place you could do a lot worse than read this.

If you‘d like a bit of plot/character development, give a very wide berth!

This is a great book for those interested in the structure and veracity of Marco Polo‘s “Travels” and/or the Mongol Empire under Kublia Khan.

Though each vignette is different, by the end of the collection the cities all blur together. This may be the intention, symbolically, but it makes finishing the book a challenge.

Heading home with this little volume, which apparently I‘ve been reading for 2 months.

I love it! It‘s dream-like, interesting, challenging, beautiful, grey-matter-tickling… But a page-turner it is not.

Pic is Hawarden Station earlier. After (another) hairy start to the journey (first connection 8 minutes; first train delayed by 10 minutes), I can relax for a couple of hours - and I think a coffee trolley just got on!

Happy Monday, folks.

The author recreated Marco Polo‘s trek from the Vatican to Xanadu. His own trek through tyrannical Iran and communist China was likely as perilous as Polo‘s. It‘s an interesting travelogue but not as well written as Bernard Ollivier‘s books about walking the Silk Road. The narrator spoke so softly & fast I had to slow the audiobook down & hike the volume. There also were odd musical interludes that just didn‘t work. #letterX #litsyatoz

This was the longest of the texts I needed to read cover to cover for my first term of masters work and I got it done on my last day of my holiday. I loved reading it and I‘m excited to go to grad school classes prepared and with some time to mull it over.

Also excited to be done with medieval travel narratives and back to cosy mysteries for the flight home tbh… I‘ve timed this well.