There are paintings from the Middle Ages that depict the Virgin Mary knitting. 🤓😮
File under: learn new things every day. #knittersofLitsy

Image is reproduced in the tagged book. Detail from Visit of the Angel, Master Bertram of Minden (c 1345-c 1415)

Thanks to Meg for prompting me to do this. 😘

A potted plant is bad luck for a sick person. It suggests that you will grow roots and never get out of bed.

“They sit squashed amid a group of 11th Hussar officers […] the officers throw bread rolls at each other & at one point some of them roar out their old school song.”
This passage in the tagged book reminded me of the bread tossing mentioned in Levy‘s The Man Who Saw Everything. Hungary isn‘t close to Georgia, but perhaps bread-throwing is a playful activity all around the Black Sea area? Or in the military? Any thoughts on this, Littens? 🧐 🍞

Everything is always remaking itself and so are you. Everything is art and nature, and so are you.

…maybe this freedom and wildness was how they always lived and I was just a repressed and dorky square, but either way, I felt us all slip out of and step over a shroud of rules that often drapes me in a fine chainmail of oh-no-you-don‘t.

“I heard they take drugs and dance naked in the moonlight,” the farmer said. (True, although it wasn‘t as interesting as it sounded.)

[Internet photo]

“We left the camp in 1993 for a village named Schipluiden. It was within walking distance of Delft, the town renowned the world over for producing counterfeit china.”
[Why have I never previously thought of Delftware that way? Photo from internet.]

I‘ve been listening to nonfiction, historical, cozy mysteries, a thriller, and quite a bit of fantasy lately. I didn‘t realize how much I had been missing character-based literary fiction until I felt myself sink into Lily King‘s prose. I loved this quiet, tender novel about an emotionally shuttered teacher and her complicated relationship with a text she taught every year: Tess of the D‘Ubervilles. #Audiobook narrated by Christina Moore.

When this cunningly-crafted thriller / locked room mystery opens, we know that someone is missing from a group of guests snowed in at a remote lodge in Scotland. The chapters then move forward & back in time, from various points of view, without revealing the identity of the missing person until close to the end. Lots of interpersonal tensions & bad behaviour. The #audiobook zips along with five different voice narrators.

To live even a day on this earth required courage. All these things they read in school—The Odyssey, Beowulf, Huckleberry Finn—all about courage, but the teacher never said, ‘You may not have to kill a Cyclops or a dragon, but you will need just as much courage to get through each day.‘

My book club was cancelled tonight because of extremely cold weather. It‘s supposed to be -39 C by 9 pm, not counting the wind chill.

Is nausea always a manifestation of grief? Who am I to know? I have never been thus before. Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

Laszlo has always allowed his soul to hang out like his shirt-tails and Gordon found this uncongenial. He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked away out of sight where they ought to be.

The Great War had made Sylvie into a pacifist, albeit a rather belligerent one.

She was disappointingly unimpressed by the bluebells. At Fox Corner the annual exhibition was greeted with the same reverence that others accorded the Great Masters. Visitors were trooped proudly out to the wood to admire the seemingly endless blur of blue. “Wordsworth has his daffodils,” Sylvie said, “we have our bluebells.”

Our weather matches the winter setting of my current audiobook. 😕

I like the central character in this cozy mystery series. Rei Shimura is a Japanese American with a fledgling antiques business in Japan. She‘s impulsive, stubborn, knowledgeable, scrupulous and fiercely independent. Aside from her Scottish lawyer boyfriend, the rest are pretty much one-note characters. The plot is improbable but gripping. The Kamakura setting holds extra interest since I visited there last year. I‘ll pick up the next #audiobook.

History is disorder, I wanted to scream at them—death and muddle and waste. And here you sit cashing in on it and making patterns in the sand.

The day I decided I was more miserable than ever, my boss said, “You know what I like about you, Chelsea? Nothing is ever wrong.”

In Japan, Buddhism was more of an old age passion than a New Age one.

#Audiowalking by this cannabis shop today, I decided to take a photo. Pets and cannabis? 🧐

Being restricted to mostly #audiobooks at the moment (for medical reasons) has me digging deeper into my library‘s holdings. I enjoyed Massey‘s more recent Perveen Mistry series so I‘m pleased to find this older series. The first volume introduces MC Rei, a Japanese American woman living in Tokyo in the 1990s. It‘s a cozy mystery with a dash of romance and I liked this well enough to be already immersed in book 2.

Weird, immersive and didactic. This allegorical tale for older children is about violence against young people, so parental guidance is advised. I love the imaginative premise and that queer characters are front and centre. Christopher Myers is well-chosen to narrate this #audiobook because he makes his voice delightfully deep for the monster‘s dialogue. #LGBTQ

I forgave the convoluted sentences (“Just from breathing in the smell of ancient paper, with which the archivist‘s pullover was impregnated, and hearing that voice vibrating with rough affection and old dialect, Ophelia could feel her eyes smarting.”) because I was fully invested in the characters & zoomed through vol 1 & 2 of this quartet. Now I must wait for the sequels. #translation of this whimsical French YA fantasy is by Hildegarde Serle.

Dreamscape Media has released some excellent audio productions since their start 20 years ago—Milkman by Anna Burns is an example. Unfortunately, both of the audiobooks in the tagged series are available on OverDrive in a sloppy state. Narrator Emma Fenney has at least a half dozen retakes on each book that haven‘t been cut. Annoying.
BTW Brad Rose was on the money as quoted in the Publisher‘s Weekly article above: lots of growth in audiobooks.

I almost bailed, but I‘m glad I stuck with this #audiobook narrated by the author. I found myself experiencing a very different life through essays that are more like prose poems. Hodson‘s subjects can be disturbing: dating bad men, for example. Her writing style is arresting & even though her sentences don‘t always work for me, they make me take notice. “If I don‘t get what I want, I‘ll die. If I get what I want, I‘ll die. Either way, I lived.”

I‘m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I‘ll never have to have children. I‘ll have created something that can stand in for me, that can live on after me.

He gazed at Berenilde, uttering not a word, but Ophelia sensed that in their silence there was much more than in all the conversations in the world.
🙄[Please spare me the romantic hyperbole.]

Don‘t you know you can‘t trust a writer? She‘ll see a cigarette and call it a house fire. She‘ll take a suggestion and turn it into a crime scene. She‘ll wrap herself up in caution tape. She‘ll write you down.

(Author photo from internet)

Christelle Dabos is a French author. Some aspects of her Mirror Visitor series strike me as very French:
-Much fuss is made over people‘s accents and finding different accents difficult to understand, plus social ranking is linked to accent.
-A different attitude toward sexual harassment: “A nanny pushed a pram while blushing at the admiring whistles of workmen up scaffolding.” One loveable scamp of a character‘s hobby is seducing married women.

Ophelia, with her tiny voice, big hair and large glasses, tends to be ignored in her boisterous Animist family. Animists can animate objects in this elaborately described fantasy world. When her diplomatic marriage is arranged, Ophelia is sent to her husband‘s ark and she must quickly learn to stand up for herself. Ophelia stays true to her morals amid vicious political intrigue within a dizzying plot. #audiobok #translation #YA

Emma Fenney is the audiobook narrator and she‘s great at performing lots of different accents. I am bothered by her pronunciation of one word, however: Citaceleste. The author has created a portmanteau name for the floating celestial citadel. I don‘t know if it was spelled exactly the same in the original French text. In either case (French or English), it seems wrong to use a long i in the first syllable (Site-a-selest). What do you think?

Yesterday my doctor told me I must stop reading so much until my concussion symptoms are totally gone. Audiobooks are fine, so I am #audioknitting as a way to keep my hands off the print books I am itching to read. #KnittersofLitsy : this is my first attempt at brioche stitch.

The March sisters, 21st century version. I enjoyed this blended family reboot of Little Women. It‘s set in Brooklyn, their father is serving in the military overseas & it‘s told in an appealing #comics format with brightly coloured cartoon images. Journal entries & letters provide a natural check to the momentum of the graphic sequences. Issues of poverty, bullying, war, serious illness, coming out, first love & sibling relationships. #kidlit

He had seen the bull with the cows and Maurice had said that was what people did too, including their mother and father, he sniggered. Teddy was pretty sure he was lying. Hugh and Sylvie were far too dignified for such acrobatics.

Was he supposed to be educating his aunt, he wondered? Was that why they were here? “The lark‘s known for its song,” he said instructively. “It‘s beautiful.” It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. You were either moved by it or you weren‘t.

Poor mice, he had thought when he was a boy. Still thought the same now that he was a man. Nursery rhymes were brutal affairs.

(Internet image)

I approve of this kind of propaganda in a children‘s novel. 👍

An absolutely charming compendium of weird facts and simple cartoons, created by a reference librarian who has been reading about animals since she was a child. #AllAges #CanadianAuthor

Turtles can breathe out of their mouths as well, but why bother when you can breathe out your butt instead? To observe this, scientists put safe amounts of colouring in water near turtles and observed them pulling oxygen from the coloured water. This type of breathing uses fewer muscles and lets the turtles conserve more energy in the winter.

“One afternoon the members of the board all turned into frogs.” The premise behind each piece of short fiction or poetry in this collection is highly imaginative, but they evoke haunting emotions and reflections on the relationships between humans and other animals in urban environments. Shaun Tan‘s surreal illustrations add to the power. #AllAges #OzFiction #poetry

The rhino was on the freeway again.
We blew our horns in outrage!
Men came, shot it dead, pushed it to one side.
We blew our horns in gratitude!

But that was yesterday.
Today we all feel terrible.
Nobody knew it was the last rhino.
How could we have known it was the last one?

I've tagged my favourite Canadian novel of 2019 for this post about my 2019 #readingstats. 36% of the books I read were written by #CanadianAuthors.

More #readingstats from 2019: a large chunk of my reading (green in the pie chart) was written by women, trans or genderqueer authors.

From an article in the NYT by Richard Flanagan:
The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.”
The photo above is of the historic village of Cobargo, at the end of December. I am thinking of everyone affected by the wildfires in Australia. My heart is sad.

“I drove up separately, thinking I would save time. It turns out I could have read Tale of the Genji in the time it took.”
#helloGenji

There was a time when she would sit beside Jam‘s bed and read her NK Jemisin books until Jam drifted off, only leaving when sleep wrapped heavy around the room.

People who don‘t live with parrots always ask the same question of those who do: Can your parrot talk? That‘s because humans love talking. From the cradle to the grave our lives are measured, trimmed, emboldened by words, and to hear an animal speak them back to us is nothing short of pure delight.

It‘s not quite a rags-to-riches story, but this chef memoir is about overcoming long odds and past mistakes through effort and determination. It reminded me of Gabrielle Hamilton‘s memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter. The #audiobook is engaging and narrated by the author.