Ha, look!! Finished one! 😂😂😂😂

I‘ve been waiting for this series to continue for years. Thankfully it‘s been picked up by a new publishing house and book 4 was released just in time for me to buy it in Sydney. The series is a paranormal coming of age set in the NYC fashion industry. The Cobra Queen is a decent stand alone & would be great for feminist fans of Egyptian history but I‘d recommend reading the series in order for its full glory.

I‘m finding myself doing a lot of re-Reading but miss Litsy truth be told so even though it‘s a ramble... I‘m trying to read this. I‘m still Scandinavian obsessed with a Norwegian bent, broken arm notwithstanding so i was hoping to like this memoir / forest mushroom field guide but I‘m finding the narrator annoying and either her style or the translation, stilted (she‘s a Malaysian writing in Norwegian translated to English though so?). Ah well!

Hello lovely Littens. Thinking of you all so here‘s a sentiment for your day. I hope you can see the bits of good wherever you are in the world. ♥️

For your amusement and because there‘s no reading happening here at all: I‘m clearing out the storage unit we packed assuming this whole expat gig would be 2yrs, then home. 6yrs later.... I literally found a skeleton in my closet and we managed to donate a bottle of Ouzo (by accident, boxes got mixed up) to the extremely teetotal Salvation Army... 🤦🏻‍♀️😂🤦🏻‍♀️😂

Going really, really well.... 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

Horrendous photo but.... there are few things I need to send people who have babies but Possum Magic (and a glossary of Aussie recipes), is one.

Home for a funeral and trying to achieve all the things I‘ve let slip while I‘ve been overseas. It‘s chaos but I have two copies of Possum Magic here and they‘re heading to Poland and Germany. Spreading the possum love around the world!!! ♥️♥️♥️

How do you know you grew up in Australia? The phrase “She pokes fingers down mouse holes...” makes a portion of your brain screech “Nooooo...funnel web!!!!” 🤦🏻‍♀️😂🤦🏻‍♀️

At the hair dresser. Sometimes, life.... 😶. India was polluted. We got sick. Coughing in Singapore at the moment sends people into a panic so we stayed home until getting the news that a very close friend had died suddenly so I‘m heading unexpectedly home. Chaos. Sad chaos.

First completed book of 2020 (yeah 🤦🏻‍♀️). Lovely travelogue on the road of India thats also an insightful and razor sharp dive into a myriad of social issues of the subcontinent, as parsed through the eyes and lives of its truck drivers. I love India‘s painted trucks and this was a delight to read. More wonderfully for anyone who‘s followed me for a while, he translates the Hindi phrases!!! 🙌🙌🙌 Highly recommenced.

Fabulous book - part travelogue, part commentary on India. Perfect reading (from Singapore as we attempt to recover from our most recent exposure to the appalling pollution of the sub-continent).

William Dalrymple introducing the author in my favourite venue ♥️♥️♥️♥️

Random session - a stomach bug has swept through the presenters and this one seems to be an impromptu session to fill in for one of the handful of presenters currently projectile vomiting throughout Jaipur...

“Why waste time occupying Afghanistan when you‘ve got India in front of you”...? (Barbur on empire building 🤦🏻‍♀️)

A fantastic presentation and OMG Durbarh Hall...

😱😱😱 Jung Chang (author of Wild Swans!!!!!!) on her new non-fiction about the Soong Sisters.

Absolutely fantastic session with Peter Meech about his new release (actually early release! Rest of the World 7th Feb!) Billy (The Kid). Actually really excited to read this 😊😊😊 and apparently there may be a film in the world (helps that the author is also a film producer).

The crowd is chaos for this session but he‘s a Nobel laureate so... fascinating presentation. His team‘s research found no correlation between pricing and use so they thoroughly debunked the theory that people should be forced to pay for mosquito nets to keep their kids safe because then they‘d use them. Malaria deaths have dropped over 25% world wide as a result of the mindset shift that now gives out the nets). Vital, wonderful work.

😱 Standing room only for this session!

Not really a fair image of the audience - there‘s a huge late line behind me but I love the colours of the chairs and there‘s a Rose bush blooming there off to the right ♥️♥️♥️♥️

Brilliant session but I‘m thoroughly enchanted by the squirrels playing on this amazing handrail (it‘s the edge of a roof balcony and the upper part of the palace wall gateway). They‘re just bouncing away & it‘s so cute!!!

OMG 😱😱😱😱 I met Margaret Alva!!!!!!!! Lord she‘s a firebrand, she‘s just spent most of her speech (she‘s in her 70‘s BTW) shouting about the need for civil disobedience and calling out the current Indian government and the Citizenship Act.

Now this was a rare and special privilege. ♥️♥️♥️

#jaipur #zeejaipurlitfest2020

This is going to be tough but amazing - Caste, class and gender. Yashica Dutt talking about her amazing blog (now book) calling out caste discrimination in India, “passing” as a higher caste and then writing a blog about the myth of a caste-less India.

Fascinating dive into generic drugs .... (getting cold though).

If your literary festival doesn‘t have monkeys, is it even a literary festival?
#Jaipur #LitFest

Fascinating... they have the Maharani of Jaipur launching the book (on the Cartier family and business). 😱😱😱 Unfortunately I‘ve got a bunch of guys shouting behind me so hearing is an issue. Still.... Maharani!

Water session. Mind boggling - apparently whole cities here are on wells and ground water so they‘re drilling deeper so they‘ve got water and the neighborhood apartments with shorter wells... don‘t.

Shashi Tharoor who I love listening to (literally, he had a great voice, isn‘t afraid of his vocabulary and speaks exceedingly well) and Namita Gokale talking about her new book, a fiction about an elderly aspiring writer based in and around the LitFest.

Early morning start for the #Jaipur #LitFest ... love this venue (entry is chaos and I‘m slightly grouchy because of wrist pain but still deeply in love).

Part Two first: I went most of the last three months without reading because I broke my arm at the wrist extremely badly. I couldn‘t hold a book, phone or eReader and the tendon pain made it difficult to concentrate once I could physically move again. So... there‘s that.
Part One: I read because I‘m voraciously curious about virtually everything and I adore the written word. Likewise, physical books make me happy even if I‘m not reading them.

Good morning and happy new year Litsy! Sorry for the total absence, when I realised I literally couldn‘t hold a book because of the arm and the pain screwed up my concentration for months ... I admit it, I moped for most of Q4 and then felt silly and sheepish. Trying to be less of a hermit in 2020 AND it‘s LitFest that I love sharing with Litsy and I missed you guys so: Hi from Ranthambore!! Any Littens going to #Jaipur let me know! 😊

😂😂😂 I *love* this author!!! (And the nonsense of book people deliberately or wilful misquoting Kondo drives me *crazy*).

There is no power on earth that‘s going to convince me that storing your books spine side in is anything less than insanity!

@ljuliel asked Littens to share a book that touched them emotionally so here goes (you don‘t need to explain but ... 😊). I haven‘t been a teenager in quite some time and it had been years since I‘d read YA but something made me pick this series up at a horrific time while struggling in Mumbai. It reminded me how much of an escape and a joy reading could be & bought me back to myself. It was also one of the first books I posted to Litsy 😊♥️😊

Slight bandwagon but I figure one can‘t complain if one isn‘t willing to step up and try and help fix those issues!!
1. Interacting with other passionate readers and being part of a generally lovely community.
2. Popularity contests, bullying and photo contests (that ones gonna be controversial, I know 😂🤦🏻‍♀️😂)
3. Actual conversation about actual books
4. Patchily, tbh I got sick of my timeline drowning under swaps
5. Yes BUT I think they ⬇️

I‘m taking a leaf out of @thegreensofa ‘s book and tagging in Dini & his snuggle kitty for my #BFCr4 check in that I forgot 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ #BFC

Week wasn‘t bad! All OT done including scar massage, three more books read but a tad light on for outdoor exercise and journaling (can‘t hold a pen yet... this week!!!).

Lovely book (also my #Booked2019 #Fall #2019release book!! 😊😊😊) by illustrator and author Megan Hess about her top 10 French Fashion houses. I admit to having to google a bunch of these & learnt that I love brands I‘d never heard of (Lanvin Blue, where have you been all my life??) & that I‘m never going to view a handbag as a monetary investment piece. 😂 Still, short & enjoyable and the book itself is a delight of gilded edges & thick pages.

Great message but not for me. Written as a plea to society at large, the author highlights just how much of a difference you can make with a small garden, especially to birds & insects & offers proof of how possible it is to effect change but she‘s so angsty & depressing that the message is all but lost. It‘s also an odd straddle of genres, part gardening & part very self facing memoir of her mothers stroke. #borrownotbuy as @Cinfhen would say 😂

Okay! This weeks #BFCr4 update!

Books read this week: 3 so I‘m on target for the 12!

Fitness: OMFG scar massage. I‘ve done it, I‘ve sworn a lot, the scar is less horrible than it was so 🤞🏻. I‘ve done the movement exercises and am thrilled that at the start of the week I couldn‘t hold a bread knife but now I can. Still with a lot of pain but I CAN! I managed walking twice but am claiming a weather foul, it‘s rained & I can‘t risk falls ⬇️

Another anthology with much the same response: the Tess Sharpe story was brilliant. Anna-Marie McLemore & Tehlor Kay Mehia were also quite good. The others were a mix of mediocre, mhe, annoying & outright depressing. Probably someone more interested in dystopians would enjoy this more than me and I‘ve given it a higher mark because it‘s extremely diverse, well written & well edited but I‘m just not an anthology fan. #MoreMehThanYeh #borrownotbuy

Halloween reading!!! I‘ve rarely found an anthology in which every story was great & this did not break that streak. The Theodora Goss story was brilliant as was the Rachael Caine. Armstrong and Kenyon wrote in their own universes & it was obvious knowledge was missing. Of the others, a few were brilliant, most mediocre but it‘s an anthology so... I would recommend it if you‘re a fan of Goss in particular but #borrownotbuy as @Cinfhen would say.

It‘s a good book and a useful addition to Rubin‘s canon but brutally, I finished it because I got sick of seeing this on my “Currently Reading” stack 😂🤦🏻‍♀️😂.

If you‘re one of her podcast listeners, and I am, the book feels like a lot of repetition with limited new material but I still think there‘s value in knowing how people, including ones self, respond to Inner and Outer Expectations and it‘s readable, well written and well collated.

Okay, I‘m updating my #BFCr4 goals. Light-ish though the others were, I couldn‘t manage daily walks in Singapore, the heat made the swelling in my arm just too extreme BUUUT I‘ve now got hideously painful OT to do so... yay? #BFC

On last weeks goals; I read three books which puts me well on track for that at least but I only walked twice in a row and ... yeah... NOT HAPPENING AGAIN. I did however manage to take all my vitamins so 👍🏻👍🏻

Mixing my media (Instagram and Litsy 😂🤦🏻‍♀️😂) but @Lizpixie - were you still missing these scrunchies? I do not have enough hair for them and would be happy to send them your way. 😊

Also Puff giving total stink eyes to her brother ... 😂🤦🏻‍♀️😂
#catsoflitsy indeed ....

😊😊😊😊

@Lindy not only a babass, but an calm anarchist as well!!! 😂😱😂😱😂

Enough YA for a bit, now for some philosophy I‘m hoping will help with my #BFCr4 fitness and wellness goals. 😊😊😊😊

Loved it. 😊 It‘s very much the first book in a series & probably will resonate most with people who read Babysitters Club books then watched Buffy (so maybe it‘s a YA book mostly likely to be a hit with readers who grew up in the 90‘s 🤔) but it‘s light, funny, fast paced & poignant all at the same time. The editing is tight & the writing is elegantly well tuned. Teenagers might miss a lot of the pop culture but I suspect they‘d enjoy it as is.

The completion of a story arc & the series, this is a much stronger offering than the last two books but it was not for me. The author has moments of amazing lyricism but she‘s also inclined to broody hyperbolic angst & florid flights of language fancy, neither of which work for me. The story also messes with historical timelines, slips between 2019 vernacular & that of the late 1800‘s & uses a thoroughly implausible mcguffin ⬇️

Oh good lord... 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ Literally about to run off alone into the night to confront a stalking murderer in attire that prompted pages worth of angst two books ago and would have seen her thrown out of any actually respectable hotel if not arrested (trousers but in 1889) 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ Seems we‘re giving over continuity and historical accuracy to become a bad gothic melodrama. If only she‘d burned a note and worn a silk nightgown...🤦🏻‍♀️

Spoilers blanked out but this sort of deviation into florid flights of fancy is what‘s really turning me off this series. I‘d potentially understand it if it was a penny dreadful or a tropey romance but it‘s not. It‘s a decent book with a few glaring and frustrating historian errors but these hysterics are not even remotely my cup of tea.

#BFCr4

Okay... so, a tad light on for details but that‘s because I only got clearance from my surgeon to do anything more than “sit still and don‘t sweat” this morning....which is great because I‘m going stir crazy but so limited it‘s driving me insane already (I can walk, that‘s it but... let‘s do this thing). Still, let‘s see if I can become at least a walker who takes all her vitamins!!!

Oh thank goodness that‘s over....! While the imagery is stunning, it cries out for brutal editing because the language is florid and overblown. Audrey Rose, a character with promise in the first book, spends most of her time whining about decency, romantic indecision or (*gasp*) desire, an unfortunate fall for a previously interesting character. Once again, actions do not match character ages & seem shoehorned down to make the book YA. 😭🤦🏻‍♀️😭