Welcome to Litsy!

Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder—the starry firmament above me and the work I do, which is so terrifying it requires a divinity degree.

Deep in thought, I walked to Charles Square, where I tore up the thank-you note, knowing it was the last, because the days of small joys, small pleasures had come to an end: my press had tolled their knell, it had betrayed me.

hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes.

smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don‘t know.

I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain;

#czechrepublic A sad and amusing devotional to the love of the written word, Hantá has been compacting waste paper and rescuing select literary and artistic treasures from the compactor, for 35 years. “Not until we are totally crushed do we show what we are made of”. An excellent way for this reader to celebrate the start of the new year.

Set in 1950s Prague, the narrator is a self-educated waste-paper compactor, whose love for the written word, philosophy, and art is made visibly manifest on the bales he produces. The first chapter of this novella has some of the most evocative and wonderful writing, but as the meandering narrative continues, this same lovely writing describes more unpleasant moments, tainting my overall enjoyment.

Maybe the perfect book for #Littens. A solitary man rescues and surrounds himself with the rare books he is tasked with destroying by his totalitarian government. A deceptively simple man on the surface, his immersion in the intellectual and spiritual knowledge of the past allows him to see the rot at the center of his society's mindless obsession with material "progress", even as those same forces of progress close in to destroy him.

Most curious about this one. It‘s been in my TBR stack for years.

“I would load entire libraries from country castles and city mansions, fine, rare, leather- and Morocco-bound books, load whole trains full, and as soon as a train had thirty cars off it would go to Switzerland or Austria, one kilogram of rare books for the equivalent of one crown in convertible currency, and nobody blinked an eye, nobody shed a tear, not even I myself, no, all I did was stand there smiling...”

I first heard about this author on the Book Fight podcast, but I was more interested in this book that they mentioned in passing, about a man who rescues books from his workplace, where he runs a trash compacter. There is a lot about philosophy and I'm sure I'm missing some metaphor or something in translation, but it was short enough to be enjoyable.

It's been slow progress with The Essex Serpent so I'm going to take a diversion with this. It starts so well: "For thirty five years now I've been in waste paper, and it's my love story. For thirty five years I've been smearing myself width letters until I've come to look like my encyclopaedias... My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books..." ❤

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

There are some really beautifully written sentences in this book. And that's about all it has going for it. Thank goodness it's a short one, or I would've bailed midway. I disliked the main character, the ending, and the novel's treatment of women. Also, there is a lot of gross stuff in this book. I had to stop reading it while I was eating. I will refrain from listing all the disgusting scenes, if you really want to know, you'll have to read it!

"I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me." #FridayReads

This is supposed to be an important novel, and I love the quote about popping a beautiful sentence in one's mouth like a candy. But this is the kind of modern European fiction that I hate: what few scraps of story there are are in service of some grand philosophical something-or-other. Yuck. Neither was I won over by how eager the narrator was to describe in sensual detail his girlfriend's many public appearances with shit all over herself.