Welcome to Litsy!

Even though it's not my favorite book by Tokarczuk, it is still a very takarzuk-y book. It has all her elements: complicated characters, nature, history, magic, intertwined stories. Those stories show us that we all belong together somehow, that we all are connected. Even if it's only a tiny string. It's a slow book, like a fresh rainy afternoon in the summer. Actually, you can hear the rain hitting the leaves.

#BacklistReadathon @Clwojick

#PoetryMatters @TheSpineView
#Twice

I'm going with 2 classics and one newer selection today:

1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (my husband loves it, and we read it every Christmas)
2. “The Tell-Tale Heart“ by Edgar Allan Poe (it's just so good!)
3. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (It's too hard to pick a single story from this one)

#tlt #threelistthursday

Reportage from around the 1960s. Gives a view of Poland post Stalin. There is a general sense of decay in all the pieces and each piece has hidden depths.
A book to be dipped into and read when the mood fits.
#1962

Just a little tiny book haul today, because I definitely needed more books…

Popped into the library to pick up some ‘possibles‘ for the Women‘s Prize for fiction (and no I‘m not telling you how many library books I now have on loan!) and they had a book sale on, so I had to support, of course, by buying 5 books.

Young Queens is on the NF long list and came out today, and Mongrel because it‘s also rumoured for the Fiction Prize and sounds fab.

Dense, reflective, philosophical. Longer and shorter personal and fictional stories and a brief history on plastination; an unnerving and haunting dissection of the human body and of human paroxysmal emotions.

"This always happens when she flies: she gets a bird‘s eye view of her whole life, of particular moments that you‘d think on the ground had been completely forgotten. The banal mechanism of the flashback, mechanical reminiscence."

The stories in this book seem to be set between time and place. Olga Tokarczuk travels and writes about the people she meets, whom she talks to or only observes. But she also dives back in time and presents us the early days of anatomical studies. It may sound weird but I feel like I travelled with Tokarczuk and finishing the book feels like the arrival afterwards long flight.
It‘s an intense experience even though I didn‘t enjoy all stories.

…and let‘s see if we can start the year as we mean to go on, by actually writing the odd review!

Set in rural 1980s Poland, these vignettes of a young girl growing up are beautifully evocative and well-written. There‘s humour, there are several dark episodes, and there‘s wonderful detail of time and place.

But they are very much vignettes. I don‘t mind not-

I love this image at the bottom left corner by Abbey Lossing from a Conde Nast article about women travlers.
This book makes me think of traveling, and searching, and of people sitting around a fire telling stories.

The book is filled with storeis, some interlocking, some we keep coming back to, some we just get a glance at. I can see how some didn't like it - it can feel a bit disjointed, but if you are a traveler who dips in and out of areas

#ReadAroundtheWorld #Poland Not a holiday read, but a good one. Our Mrs Seidenman is not so much the main character as the pivot point around which a dozen or so players are introduced to us as the Warsaw ghetto crumbles in 1943. We see the impact on them now, but then the author shows us their whole life‘s trajectory and sometimes their death. In this way we are shown the threads of everyday people‘s lives in the web of historic moments.