Welcome to Litsy!

Sarah @HardcoverHearts and I are buddy reading Emile Zola‘s Rougon Maquart series in publication order. Starting no. 9 today: Pot Luck.

4⭐️ One apartment building, 8 households, and a bunch of servants. Their lives crisscrossed with filthy scandals that easily catch the attention of soap opera producers.

“...if it‘s this hole or that hole it doesn‘t matter. They‘re all pretty much alike. If you‘ve been in one of ‘em you‘ve been in ‘em all. They‘re just pig-sties.” —-> Does this remind you of corporate jobs? 😅

Lunch break with my good buddy Zola

Because I‘m so bad with names, every book that I read has at least a piece of note for my sanity 🤣

Uncle Zola here was a genius. For each of his novel, he threw in so many characters, but I have never once had the difficulty in remembering them. I don‘t know how he did it. He‘s just amazing 🥰

I love Zola! I'm only 150 pages into this one. Brian Nelson's translation is great (he's done several excellent Zola translations). It doesn't look like this will join my Zola faves list: there isn't much of a plot, really. Nevertheless, it is a rich portrait of society and a scathing critique of bourgeous "values" and hypocrisy. And it's fairly seamy.

Here's what we did for Thanksgiving: lunch at Santouka Ramen at the Mitsuwa marketplace in San Jose where we picked up sliced beef and other items for our hotpot dinner which also included lots of vegetables, 3 kinds of mushrooms, fishcakes and fishballs. After dinner was fruits and a chocolate tart I made. Unfortunately the crust shrank so my 5yo dubbed it the chocolate pizza! Hope you had a great meal with greatcompany!