Welcome to Litsy!

I really loved this! I picked it up on a whim in a used bookstore in Canada because Ondaatje is Canadian, it turns out he is also half Sri Lankan - most of his family is from and still lives there. Focused on the history of his family & it is everything you could ask for about a 1920-40s eccentric family the stories are amazingly outlandish and pure fun. You can tell there is a cover of nostalgia but the writing is delicious enough to forgive it.

"Both my grandmothers lived cautiously, at least until their husbands died. Then they blossomed, especially Lalla who managed to persuade all those she met into chaos. It was Lalla who told us that the twenties were 'so whimsical, so busy - that we were always tired.'"

This book I bought on a whim at a used bookstore in Edmonton, Alberta and only 35 pages in I am delighted. Michael Ondaatje (known for his novel The English Patient) talks about his family and particularly his father who seemed to be a terrible 1920s rich troublemaker. Engaged multiple times - a few overlapping- he finally married Michael's mother.
The wedding almost doesn't happen because the bishop is a terrible driver.
#NFNR

#Weeklyforecast

NFNR books tagged and The Three Mothers (about MLK, Malcolm and Baldwin 's mother's) I also have on audio Viola Davis' autobiography Finding Me.

Fiction needing to read and get back to the library - Emma Cline's The Guest and The French Goncourt Prize winner - The Most Secret Memory of Men which I am incredibly excited for and have high hopes. It seems to be a Senegalese -French Shadow of the Wind 😍

Memoir 3 of my #nonfictionnovember reading frenzy. Can you believe I put off reading this one because I thought it was about running? Instead Ondaatje uses a few visits to Sri Lanka in the 1970s to take a trip down memory lane, with stories from his family told interlaced with poetry. ⤵️

It's baaaaaaack

#maymoviemagic #dontstopmenow #howfarillgo
#twopromptsatonce 😂
“Don‘t stop me now I don‘t know how far I‘ll go” is the kind of thing Michael Ondaatje‘s father might have said when a croquet game went wrong and he started brandishing a gun. This memoir of Michael‘s childhood is full of anecdotes and tall tales - which he admits might have grown taller with telling over the years.

"And so its name changed, as well as its shape ... the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language."