Welcome to Litsy!

To kick off December we are going to have some giveaways for our #LitsyLove members! 📚📦🎊🎉 @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks and I will be gifting some books at random over the next few days (International members will be eligible for gift card giveaways - so keep an eye out for those posts). Check back on our pages over the next few days so you don‘t miss out on the fun!

If you would like to win this book comment below 👇🏻 Drawing will be Sunday!!

You wouldn‘t believe what people will believe once they know our story. They‘re ready for anything, basically—will believe anything, because they‘ve been thrown off-balance, are still wondering if any of this is true, our story in general, but aren‘t sure and are terrified of offending us.

You know what I think? I think everyone should be able, just once, to make an inanimate object come to life and be his pal. Like an orange. Or a hammer.

Nothing can be preserved. It‘s all on the way out, from the second it appears, and whatever you have always has one eye on the exit, and so screw it. As hideous and uncouth as it is, we have to give it all away, our bodies, our secrets, our money, everything we know: All must be given away, given away every day, because to be human means:

1. To be good
2. To save nothing

When my parents passed on, and we read their wills, we discovered something we didn‘t at all expect, especially from our devoutly Catholic mother: they had both left instructions that their bodies be donated to science. We were bewildered and we were pissed. They wanted their cadavers to be used by medical students, they wanted their flesh to be cut into and their cancerous organs examined. We were breathless. They wanted no elaborate funerals...

His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way—not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I've-seen/lessons-I've-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with strangers.

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

I'm glad I finished this surrounded by palm trees because I couldn't shake the brooding darkness of this book. There are many bits of great writing here but far too much navel gazing for me to care about the main character and Toph et al. Moreover, the seeping nature of the narrative, bits intersecting into other bits gets overbaked by the end, coming across as James Joyce's Ullysse Light. Will read others in the not so near future.

I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.

Dave Eggers anyone? #attractiveauthors #junebookbugs

This shot is a few years old so he may be older and greyer now (as am I - and nothing wrong with that 😂😂😂)

More importantly I love this book with the heat of a thousand suns! It's the sort of book where the sentences make you catch your breath - you put down the book, stare into space and feel stunned for a minute - so original, so intense, so colourful.

Read a debut novel. #readharder2017

I always loved the quirkiness of this book. #publishedin2000s #readjanuary

"Dave Eggers drew this" at @bookshopsc

A (very small) portion of my tbr pile 📚