Welcome to Litsy!

Catherine is grieving her father + beloved stepmother. Her birth mother, susannah, died when C was a baby but left a box with a curious mix of objects. C feels little for her mother, but as she chooses to search the meaning in the objects, she learns more about a woman connected to her but unknown but more about herself. This is a reflective book with no dramatic reveal, but the writing is compelling with no word wasted, + I was completely hooked.

It‘s another female detective series with a fairly straightforward story—I had it figured out before the halfway point. Still, the plot and writing style are good.

I found this surprisingly riveting at times, though some parts are slow. It charts both the census itself and the things it recorded, touching on things like industrialisation, the Highland Clearances, the Potato Famine, emigration, immigration, WWI, WWII... all kinds of things which affected the population of the UK. Also there's a bit on the wider “British Empire“.

Today's reading is getting me off to a good start with #BookSpinBingo!

Lent to me by a friend. Delightful. A well written , eloquent love story. Actually a few love stories or maybe better , stories of love. Set in France and England. Took me a while to read but I did enjoy it.

I‘ve been listening to Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexie Sayle and I‘m absolutely loving it. I like non-fiction that is not text book like. Alexie writes sometimes like he‘s setting up a literary game of Jenga. He builds this tower, with his artistry and excellent descriptive powers and then knocks it down with precise, well observed humour and self-depreciation. It‘s as if he‘s like a supreme comedian who‘s been doing it for decades

From the first chapter I felt connected to our main character Nell. She is in her forties, a past full of misadventure and failed relationships and is now renting a room from Edward.
There's a lot of humor here, and compassion too. I loved her friendships with both her immediate friendship group but also her developing friendship with Cricket, a woman in her eighties, recently widowed.
There's fun, there's trauma, there's grief, there's community

Free stuff from a while back.

#ShowandTellTuesday with #LitsyCrafters and @Catsandbooks

I‘m working on a planned pooling project! You have to count the stitches per colour of a variegated yarn and put in the number of stitch repeats into plannedpooling.com and determine how many stitches per row to do to get a cool kind of plaid pattern. Keeping the number of stitches the same is hard and requires varying tension and frogging a lot. This has taken me ages but I love it!

#NewInternationalist #555 has an article on the police & justice system in #Nigeria, in which is mentioned its execrable ranking at 122 of 125 countries surveyed for the 2023 World Internal Security and Police Index. #Denmark tops the survey, having the most effective and least corrupt police force (as measured), #Venezuela props up the list at the bottom. #UK is 23rd, & #USA at 32nd is reasonable, but not in the top tier for equitable justice.
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My first taste of William Boyd, and I rather enjoyed it. The main character is, for the most part, a likeable character - apart from when he seem to go a bit mad and out of character, turning into a mad stalker for an entire chapter. Do all of Boyd‘s books have a disturbing obsession with sex filtering through?

Book 59/80 #Read2025 @DieAReader