Welcome to Litsy!

I really enjoyed all the questions of humanity this book brought up. What does it mean to be human? Are you any less human if we can't feel all the emotions? Should humanity be able to choose to be happy all the time or not? This book brought up so many questions and points where I feel like I could defend either side. Very well written. I did feel it was a tad too long and too many side characters' POVs. 4.5/5

April wrap! Another great reading month in the books. Louise Erdrich's The Sentence definitely stood out last month.

Celebrating Indie Bookstore Day: purchased Blue Ruin for this year‘s Tournament of Favorites and they gave me the Supersonic. Posing in front of a pretty mural across the street from my next stop (which isn‘t open yet! 🤨) #ibd #indiebookstoreday

I never fully connected with this story, and I think that‘s largely due to the writing style. The storytelling felt disjointed and lacked a natural flow. The premise was intriguing, but if it hadn‘t been the library‘s book club pick, I probably wouldn‘t have finished it. Book #35 in 2025

Sunday morning reading, and I'm thoroughly enjoying this book!

This a good book and covers a large range of themes. I think I‘m just not a fan of her writing style

This book was especially hard to read due to the fact that it was written during a timeframe I and everyone else in the world would like to forget. I get it that the author needed to capitalize or get over her writing slump, but I could not fly by as quickly as I've done through her other novels because there is still a lot of pain and misinformation about COVID.

Part of why everyone here annoys me, I think, is no one appears to have real responsibilities, even as COVID hits. Rob and Alice have a daughter they ignore, Jay‘s life has mostly been wading through an art scene while being high, and the art anyone does finally do feels pretentious and light. They have disappeared into their art, a major theme. People return when they connect with others, and mostly everyone here is too selfish to do that.

I really loved this. It was an interesting look at memory and what we can see more clearly with the benefit of hindsight. It was also about personal responsibilities and perceptions of them. I loved the octopus content because they are facinating. There are a lot of flashbacks as the story is told. The ending answered some of the questions about what happened next but not all of them. Interestingly the author started this before the 2020 pandemic.

Claire Fuller is a hit-and-miss author for me.
It's not the book's fault I wasn't really in the mood for a pandemic story. However, it felt like three books cobbled together: a memoir of Neffy's earlier life, mostly in Greece; Station Eleven; and one of the recent crop of octopus books.
It had interesting things to say about grief, guilt and a desire to escape to the past rather than face present horrors. I'm not sure it succeeded in saying them.