Welcome to Litsy!

My #weekendreads for this snowy day

The perfect way to spend a snow day ❄️📚

Merry Christmas to you all 🎁☃️🎅🍾🍽️🎄

@jhod @TCLinrow @youneverarrived @jenniferw88 @Birdsong28 @RachelO @squirrelbrain @eraderneely @kathedron @TrishB @Cathythoughts
Thank you all for the cards I am so grateful to have you all in my life 🥰😘

"Horse dung looked dignified. I could have brought it to church as an offering like the sheaves of wheat placed on an altar during the harvest festival. Horse dung took on the form of an artwork when it fell to the ground--I wanted to learn to fall as skillfully as it did."

My stubborn determination to finish this book has really thrown a monkey wrench into my overall reading plans. Nearing the end this week.

"The adjective 'cold' has such an appealing sound. I'd give up anything to experience such cold, for Ice Queen beauty, for shivering jouissance. The ice-cold truth. Acrobatic marvels that give you cold feet. A talent that makes all your competitors blanch and tremble as if frozen. Rationality hone sharp as an icicle. Cold has a broad spectrum." #wordoftheday

"Many times in the past I had danced atop a gigantic ball, ridden a stunt tricycle and a circus motorcycle. But publishing an autobiography was a far more dangerous acrobatic feet."

"In the mirror I saw my red-smeared lips, a masterpiece of the beets. I'd never eaten root vegetables voluntarily, but when a beet came swimming in my bowl of borscht, I immediately wanted to kiss it. Bobbing amid the lovely dots of fat floating on top--which at once awoke my appetite for meat--the beet was irresistible."

Next up!

How unusual! A book written by a polar bear. Sounds strange but I really enjoyed it. Each bear is very different and three write in this book. This may not be a book I read again and again but it was fascinating and enlightening read.

Bizarre in the best kind of way. Beautiful and dream-like in places, heartbreakingly real in others. The innocence of the bears‘ POVs had me laughing out loud and crying, smiling and erupting in goosebumps in turns throughout.

I love books narrated by animals, and have been utterly beguiled by the first third of this story of three polar bears.

My June TBR selections.
#readingresolutions
#Junetbr

Don't you love it when the book you chose at random from your library's New Additions section is frickin amazing?

I'm not even sure how to talk about MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR. It's weird-ass shit. It's wonderful. It's often sad, but it finds joy in unexpected places. It asks us to consider what we expect from animals and, by extension, people. It questions who stories belong to. And there's a ton about communism I'm not sure I got, but you might.

I did another small puzzle solely so I'd have an excuse to listen to MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR. It's way too cold for #audiowalking today--the book's protagonists would love this weather--but #audiopuzzling works just fine.

I couldn't resist this little Charles Wysocki puzzle at the library swap. I worked it up tonight partly because his art is fun and partly so I'd have an excuse to listen to more of MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR, which is weird and wonderful and sad. #audiopuzzling

I finished the puzzle! Even with the colour variations, that frickin sky took me all of BROWN GIRL DREAMING and a goodly chunk of MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR. #audiopuzzling

got my tourism on in nyc 🗽

@ScorpioBookDreams Thanks for the prompt! Envy people with lots of T‘s on their name!
M - Memoirs Of. A Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada. I - Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk. T - The Paying Guest by Sarah Waters. C - Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin. H - Half A Yellow Sun by Chimiamanda Ngozi Adichie

Well, I tried this and just couldn't get into it. It sure is a fun premise, three generations of polar bears, circus performers evolving to live and act like humans. I love fantastical magical realism, it could just be the timing, but this one is a DNF. #litsy #read #books

Memoirs of a Polar Bear won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation! Moving this up on my TBR📚 #wit #translation

I'm on a translated works kick...started this last night and it is surprising and different and exactly why I like reading translations. This has to be the only adult fiction told from the point of view of a polar bear. 🐨🐾 (I think that's a koala but close enough)

Visited my favourite bookshop today, The Book Hive in Norwich, and bought these two lovelies ♡

Hard to get into at first, but it's such a !!!! kind of a book. Such a balance between fantasy and reality, plus so blurred lines between man and bear that it's hard to tell the two apart most of the time. So thoughtful and interesting.

This book has been on my TBR for ages. Is an interesting story that follows three generations of polar bear circus performers. It's told in three parts and from three different perspectives. I'm not sure what I expected, but it was fascinating and really made me think about the ethics of animal performances. At the same time, I absolutely fell in love with the polar bears. Hear my full review on Ep. 27. - A

"I feel like the little girl in a bear book for children."
"Which bear? Winnie-the-Pooh? Or maybe Paddington?"
I didn't know either of these bears. "I mean Lev Tolstoy's The Three Bears!"
Wolfgang said: "I've never heard of that one."

Just one of the many reasons to love Powells! A whole display of women in translation.

I don't really know how to describe this book. Three generations of polar bear's memoirs, which are kinda confusing and really weird. I kinda liked the third part about Knut, but the first two were just not my thing. I don't know what I had expected, but this definitely wasn't it.

Last month, I rated 15 out of 30 books with 5 stars on Goodreads. This month, only 6 out of 30 got 5 stars, but that made it easier to choose my favourites. Exit West and Memoirs of a Polar Bear both look at human global migration. Du Iz Tak? is an adorable #picturebook with anthropomorphic insects and an invented language.

#Readathon is over and I read four books, and made it half way through a fifth. Of the books I read, they have all been four or five stars, so all in all a pretty good readathon in my opinion. Now, I really need a nap! 😴📚

The last snacks and the last book of my #readathon. So far this book is weird, and I don't really know what I feel about it yet.

Revolutionary. Funny. Surprising. Surreal. Three generations of polar bears - interacting closely with humans - provide viewpoints of emotional power and poetic reality about personal relationships, culture, immigration, and politics. Translation from German by Susan Bernofsky.

Was my longing for the world beyond the wall not in and of itself proof that I was a Berliner? When I was born, the Berlin Wall was already part of history, but many Berliners still carried a wall around with them in their brains, separating the right and left halves.

[Image courtesy of Google]

The male members of the species Homo sapiens appealed to me a great deal. They were soft and small and had fragile but adorable teeth. Their fingers were delicately constructed, the fingernails all but nonexistent. Sometimes they reminded me of stuffed animals, lovely to hold in one's arms.

Recently a visitor tossed a pumpkin into my enclosure. It was an amusing present. It rolled across the stone and fell into the water, but it didn't drown: to my astonishment, it knew how to swim.

[That's my sister in the photo, hanging out with pumpkin people in the Magdalen Islands.]

I wanted to wrap myself in the black woollen blanket of grief and brood over my clutch of sorrows until they hatched and flew away.

This visit by two men made my pen go limp. Of course, the image of a pen standing up vertically or not strikes me as unduly masculine. As a female I am more inclined to say: The smaller the newborn text, the better, because then it has a better chance at survival.

The specialists conjectured that Tosca's stressful circus life had made her lose her maternal instincts. It's well known that circus animals under Socialism were overworked and under a great deal of pressure.

All of them were referred to as birds, even though the only thing they had in common was wings. The sparrow, a brown mixture of modesty and agitation, the blackbird with her unassuming humour, the magpie's painted mask, and the pigeon, who lost no opportunity to repeat her favourite motto: "Really? How interesting. I had no idea!"

"pressure had been put on them by religious fundamentalists who refused to tolerate our kiss. One of the many threatening letters they received said: 'Sexual fantasies involving bears are a form of Teutonic barbarism.'" -Tawada

[Did anyone else think of Engel's Bear upon reading that passage?]

Equally misplaced was the notion "maternal instinct." With animals, childrearing is a matter not of instinct but of art. It can't be very much different for humans or they wouldn't keep adopting children of different species.

"Why do panda bears bore you?"
"Since they're born wearing such impressive makeup, they don't make any effort to be interesting. They neither master any stageworthy tricks nor write autobiographies."

I changed the channel and found myself looking at two panda bears. Two politicians stood outside their cage, shaking hands. I found these panda bears meddling in human politics improper.

My German textbook was more economically priced than a large package of salmon, but unfortunately harder to digest.