Welcome to Litsy!

This is a sad but hopeful story of a woman moving forward from addiction and prison time. The language was beautiful. It‘s a novel you feel in your bones.

Ranita was mixed up with a bad crowd and started using heroin. She lost custody of her kids and was sent to prison. After finding love there, she starts to turn her life around, but can she survive all the pitfalls once she‘s released? I loved the flashbacks of her life before prison.

Well, that was such an entertaining read! I laughed a lot. Rather than a straightforward autobiography, it is more a series of anecdotes, told in roughly sequential order, from the life of a warm, witty, self deprecating and very charming man. He is upfront about his views on politics (unapologetically left wing) & on the people he has met (mostly positive) & while he shares stories about his famous friends he never gossips. 👇

A new stack! Just came in the post 🎉

I enjoyed this debut novel, as one family‘s secret history is revealed through a recording left by the matriarch when she dies.

Loved all of the characters; I thought they were really well drawn, and the places, including London, the Caribbean and California, were almost characters in themselves.

Just one niggle - I could have done without the environmental sub-plot. Rather clumsy and definitely superfluous, I skipped a lot of it.

Two friends from college meet at a departure gate. One saved a man from drowning just after college and begins to relate the story to his friend. What starts as a curiosity about the man he saved quickly becomes an obsession. He discovers the man he saved is not nice or honest, but he begins insinuating himself into his life both personally and professionally. Imagine Rachel Cusk with a suspenseful twist. Pick for sure! ⬇️

Look who just showed up on page 478 @jenniferw88 @TrishB our friend...Sir Alfred Russel Wallace 😁This book is absolutely exquisite- one of the best HF novels I‘ve read. I have about 40 pages left to go & I fear a #BookHangover approaching.

Wallace discovered the ‘origin of the species‘ independently of Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century - this small book contains extracts of his work.

The first chapter was all about him collecting orang-utan ‘specimens‘ and I rather naively worried that he was going to keep them in captivity. But no, he blasted them out of trees with his shotgun then skinned and dissected them. 😡 Nearly put me off the rest of it...

#readingasia2021 #indonesia

I know there‘s a lot of racists out there, but wowza, so many people have said breathtakingly stupid things to these women! (And, I‘m going to take a wild guess, anyone who is black.) I love that they present this with humor but don‘t diminish the racism in any way. I‘m now on hold for the ebook so I can see all the pictures, but the audio is also a lot of fun.

THIS BOOK SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING!!!! Frederick the author speaks directly to the reader in this book. Talking about how we should be an accomplice in anti-racism and not a bystander. Each chapter features at least one voice from an artist or an activist. This book was very eye opening!

#bookspinbingo free space