Welcome to Litsy!

Starting early w/ Englebert des Collines (tagged is a different book by same author) for #FoodandLit #Rwanda b/c it's a library book & I don't like to keep them longer than necessary. Englebert, a Tutsi genocide survivor roaming the streets of Nyamata looking for drinks & conversation, told his story to Hatzfeld, a French journalist/novelist whose parents were Holocaust survivors.
@Catsandbooks @Texreader
Pic of daffs for something less depressing

It is impossible to judge a memoir of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Mukasonga had escaped through Burundi, married a French man and was living in France when 27 of her family members were murdered. She is a survivor, and with that comes guilt and a desire to tell her story.
I think it is helpful to know about this time and place before going in, she does not attempt to explain the politics or landscape (I had a map open while reading)
4/5⭐

Reading about how the Rwandan regime made the Tutsi people dig up food to plant coffee plants that the government would sell and keep the money from as I sit drinking coffee halfway across the world and 60 years later.
This is not a pleasant book but so important, especially today and thinking that I had believed that the '96 Genocide happened pretty much overnight but learning it was a 40 year battle.

Continuing the countdown of my books, from 1st to 25th, THE JACKAL‘S MISTRESS. Today it‘s my 15th, THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS (2012), a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide. As a grandson of two survivors, this is a profoundly important book to me.

What do the living owe the dead? How do we deal with victims of mass killings? Families need closure and people deserve to be buried/put to rest with their names in places their loved ones can visit. We are human because we have rituals to honor the dead. All of these topics come up while Hagerty describes her profession of handling bones in Argentina, uncovering mass graves of victims of the genocide there. Sobering work but important.

“Apparently some quirk of human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.“

It was true in the Japanese massacre of Nanking, it was true in the Jewish Holocaust, in the genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, in #Palestine, and so many others unnamed. Why are we like this?

To honor my #Chinese roots during this years' #SpringFestival, I read this very important and very sobering, devastating book. Although extremely well-written, it is a horrifyingly captivating and very challenging read to get through because of the atrocities that the Japanese performed against the Chinese in the 1930s and #WWIi and the subsequent coverups by the Japanese government through the present day. (Continued in comments) ⬇️

On #Holocaust Remembrance Day as well as the week that Lunar New Year begins, I am starting this very important book by Iris Chang which details the massacre of Nanking by Japanese forces during #WWII. Much less well-known than the genocide in Europe, but no less horrifying.

Do you like historical fiction? Look what‘s on sale for $1.99, my love story set in the midst of the ArmenianGenocide !