Welcome to Litsy!

Maryse Condé died last week. To honour her memory, I read one of her novels I hadn't yet read. It tells the story of Rosélie, a Black Guadeloupean woman living in Cape Town, and whose white husband was mysteriously killed while on an errand in the middle of the night. Moving & insightful but requires close reading to get the most of it.

Pic of Cape Town's Malay Quarter (Octagon via Wikimedia), only mentioned in passing in the book, but so pretty

Day to myself, obviously spending it reading and book shopping 😆

Very insightful. Comedian and TV host Trevor Noah tells the story of his childhood and youth in South Africa at the end of the apartheid and the tumultuous years that followed. As a person of color with an African mother and a Swiss father, he tries to make sense of where he belongs, in a society torn by the absurdities of racism and the political system. His brilliant mother sets the education premises which help him navigate towards success.

This was really fascinating. On one hand, it‘s hard to@believe this stuff happened. On the other hand, we still do this kind of stuff today and do what the Europeans did, call it art. 😞

Described by PW as “neo-gothic fiction,“ which explains a lot. I feel like the djinn. I am the metaphor.

Really enjoyed my second #roll100 read for March! A scarily prescient dystopian novel worth an eclectic bunch of characters. Short, far paced, and lots of interesting thoughts on phones, connectedness, robots, nanotechnology and corpocracy.

This was very good. It's really historical fiction with dual timelines that also happens to have a djinn and some ghosts. I thought it was really well executed.

#BookSpinBingo @TheAromaofBooks

Sana and her father move in to this old mansion turned into apartments. There, she meets a number of entertaining tenants and discovers the sad story of the original owners 🧞‍♂️
#Aardvark

The timeline was very hard to follow, however thr timeline was not the purpose of the book. The purpose was to point out how illogical and wrong racism and the systems that uphold racism are. I also learned a lot about Trevor Noah that I didn't know. Definitely recommend.

"Surely, love was not a thing that always left?"

Oh, to be young, naive, and 15 again. (Or maybe I'm just jaded).?
Part 2 - Chapter 3 of this book...
SLAPPED and ATTACKED.

So far, a good one. ~40% in.