Welcome to Litsy!

💙 Probably a podcast. I get extreme anxiety in front of video cameras.
💙 I missed reading Spring by Ali Smith in the Spring, but I'd like to finish Summer before the seasonis over.
Thanks for the tag, @Eggs ! #two4tuesday

#SummerSouls #Summer

Anyone want to join us is celebrating the Summer Solstice Season with community and nature? Let @AllDebooks know to add you to the tag list.

Hurray, it's nearly time for another #LitSolace event.
Our #MidsummerSolace event runs from the 1st - 30th June. Come and celebrate all things summer with friendly games and activities, a #buddyread and lots of lovely chitchat.

All are welcome to join us. Please let me know if you wish to be added/removed from the taglist.

@LitsyEvents

Hosted by @AllDebooks @TheBookHippie @Chrissyreadit @jenniferw88

More in comments ⬇️

While the other 3 books in the series are stand-alones, Summer is the continuation of the previous seasons. It brings together characters from the other books and also links them in ways that the reader will discover but the characters themselves remain ignorant of. This is clearly meant to show how we are all connected even though the country is divided, and it does stretch the ability to suspend disbelief. But I enjoyed revisiting the characters

Tell the Daily Mail from me, Keith, Daniel calls after them, from me as a representative of all of us here, that we're internees in a prison camp, we're not enemies, and that a prison is always a prison, even in August when the sky is blue.

Brilliant ending. How she ties the four stories together. Wow I can‘t wait to read them all again.

Adding to my mega stack of library books. What can I say, they fit the weather. ☀️🔆☀️

Just like the first time I read this, the brother disturbs me, gluing his sister hand to a glass timer and his views on the torture game he plays.

I loved that several people from previous books, returns in this book

The book look at how our treatment of illegal immigrants today is much the same as the way we have treated other groups of people earlier, interning Germans during WWII.

I‘m so glad I have reread this quartet.

#WeeklyForecast

I can‘t believe I have no buddy reads this week.

I‘ll finish Summer.

Then I want to focus on the Women‘s Prize for Fiction Longlist and read The Final Revival of Opal & Nev and hopefully get a good start on Flamingo.

Excited for the shortlist announcement later in the week.

At my reading group last night we discussed the quartet of bks. It was ages since I started with autumn so it was great to realise the connections through the series + it made me want to start reading again.
Ali Smith is a wonderful writer who creates imaginative and well drawn characters esp children with great dialogue. Add focus on art and a political voice this is a unique picture of a country over 5 years far from at peace with itself.

September was a much better reading month than I've had lately 🥳🎉 Five books finished and another two almost done so I'm rounding it up and calling it seven. Hurray! #bookspin #doublespin @TheAromaOfBooks

I enjoyed this series more with each book as the connections between the stories reveal themselves. Glad I read it, though I‘m sure I missed loads and if someone could make a graph of all the connections I missed that‘d be great 😬 Love the Hockney covers too.

OK! Bring on the September #bookspin - In August I only finished two books and I already have two of these on the go so I'm setting myself up to do better this month, right? 🙏

When one of your biggest fears is running out of reading material when out and about 😅🙈 But lucky I brought more thank one, cause I just now finished Summer, the one I Said two days ago I should try to read slowly since it's for book club. But I couldn't. The stories were so human and simple and elegant and complex and I just had to read on and on. And order the three other book in the Quartet series 🤩 Very much a recommend!❤

Summer holiday to me is having the chance to spend all day reading. That's probably get I have finished two books already today and started two more ❤ we are reading Summer for book club, so I should pace myself, but the writing is so engaging I'm not sure I'll be able to 😅

Thank you so much for the tagged book, Sharm! @Smarkies
What a lovely surprise! 😃
Sending you warm wishes and virtual hugs! Stay safe! ❤️

My hopefully first and only complete bail on the Women's Prize Long List 2021. I have many theories on why this didn't land for me. But mostly I was painfully bored. I would pick it up read a few pages and then go off and read another entire book. I have renewed it from the library twice trying to get through it but a little over half way and it is just not going to happen. Going to go read a book on urban pigeons instead.

I forgot to do my #weeklyforcast yesterday! I have been struggling to get through Summer so hoping to wrap that up this week.
A bit intimidated especially after the first two chapters with The Second Sex, but it is a feminist cornerstone so going to be dedicated to getting it read.
Unseen City should be a fun relief after the above tow, all about pigeons and how they live and even thrive in the city.

#weeklyforcast
Started Lost Apothecary on audio hoping to push through this stack, started Summer today also, it feels a bit manic?

My pup being silly.

Ali Smith‘s final seasonal quartet is a mixture of everything in the 1st 3 seasons. Lots of sort of single moment sections where I read as fast as I could to try to take in the whole single scene and thought. Very timely, with Covid being prominent in this 2020 novel. And very moving in parts, especially the last 100 pages. This is the first one I didn‘t want to end and felt sad wrapping up. I want to know what happens next.

Post shot no. 2 plan - rest and try to get a little lost in this. (It was Moderna).

It‘s invariably spring. Just started this.

Bringing together various characters and experiences, it begins with the very smart Sacha worried about her brilliant brother Robert. His prank fortuitously brings them in contact with Charlotte and Art (Winter), who invite the children and their mother on a trip to meet Daniel and Elizabeth (Autumn). In the present Immigration Removal Centers (Spring) echo the past WWII British Internment Camps and through it all art and connection bring hope.

5 🌟
Network Effect: Martha Wells 🎧 (I am a fangirl for MurderBot)
4.5 🌟
The Prophets: Robert Jones Jr 🎧
* Summer: Ali Smith 📖
Passing: Nella Larsen 📖
4 🌟
Address Unknown: Kressmann Taylor 📖
* Piranesi: Susanna Clarke 📖
3 🌟
The Duke and I The Second Epilogue: Julia Quinn 🎧
*Unsettled Ground: Claire Fuller 📖
*Exciting Times: Naoise Dolan 🎧
Afterlife: Julia Alvarez 📖
*Luster: Raven Leilani 🎧
*Consent: Annabel Lyon 🎧

I love Ali Smith. Some her writing confuses me, I don't always know where she is going in her novels. But she writes some of my favorite prose. I enjoyed the fourth of her seasonal quartet. I found it uneven however I gobbled it up in 2 days. The final message: connection with others is the key. I loved that was the theme throughout all the quartet. It is such a relief from some of the other novels on the Womens Prize long list. 4.5 🌟

This may be my favourite of the quartet. The storyline set during WWII was very good. Not all the narratives are tied up in the end, but enough to provide a satisfying finish.

Finally finished Ali Smith‘s seasonal quartet. Summer was a beautiful novel, eliciting drifty and languishing feelings of the season in story that was very post-modern in construction, but enjoyable nonetheless.

January stats. 2021 is starting strong! Top reads are on my blog: https://lindypratch.blogspot.com/2021/01/january-2021-reading-round-up.html?

Of course I‘m quoting Einstein, Hannah says. Well, paraphrasing. He said that the only real religion humans have is the matter of freeing ourselves from the delusion that we‘re separate from each other and second that we‘re separate from the universe, and the only peace of mind we‘ll ever get, he says, is when we try to overcome this delusion.

I slowed my reading pace because I didn‘t want this to end. Then, when I finished, I immediately wanted to start again from the beginning. Instead, I think I will go back to the first in the quartet, Autumn, then reread them all in order. They are cunningly interlinked, yet each stands on its own. Beautiful, breathtaking, big-picture novels, attuned to the reality that each life is valuable.

Change just comes, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you.

Reminds me of a recent closed-caption fail I witnessed: “It comes back with a venue Janis” …(It comes back with a vengeance.) The speech to text software is amazing, but not yet perfect.

Face like an Eastertime lamb, head like a dandelion clock, but a dandelion clock holding the hidden infrastructure not just of the world. Universe too.
——
Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn‘t need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.

(Internet photo)

T‘was ever so, her mother says. Since summer first was leafy.
Now her mother‘s saying lines from when she was an actress. But the only thing her mother was apparently ever really in was a washing up liquid advert on TV back before everything. Sacha was shown the advert when she was little, there‘s a video of it in a cupboard, now unwatchable because there are no video players left alive.

I‘ve been saving this as a treat to start reading on New Years Day. I even chose a special matching bookmark, a relic from a long-defunct lesbian bookshop. 🧁

#12BooksOf2020

I thought the final part of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet was one of the best books of the year. I am still thinking about it.

Just finished this, and it will be one of my best reads of 2020, probably 5 ⭐️. Of the quartet, the only other one I‘ve read is Winter, which I liked but wasn‘t blown away by, so I wasn‘t sure I‘d follow through with the entire series. Now I want to read the other 2 (Autumn and Spring) and maybe reread Winter.

Ali Smith is an amazing writer, there is wordplay & beautiful writing in this book,as in other titles in her seasonal quartet.She doesn‘t shy away from hard looks at Brexit, WWII internment camps,modern immigration issues.Her characters are complex & full of life , trials & tribulations,like all of us.Sometimes like with Hemingway & Fitzgerald, you get a feeling for the era more from a novel than from a history book.Time will tell if these qualify

This is why we read, in my humble opinion.

The conversation between Kamila Shamsie & Ali Smith at Manchester Literature Festival today was FABULOUS! Sarah Wood‘s video footage (views from windows, bookshelves, art on the walls in the respective homes of these women) made it easier for me to focus on what they were saying.
“We are not one thing, we are multiplicities.” —Smith
“It [Summer] places you in the moment & takes you out.” —Shamsie
Recorded murmur of a hall filling with voices=💔

Four interconnected books, one for each #season from Ali Smith‘s Seasonal Quartet. The tagged book is the latest, the finale of the quartet.
The books look so gorgeous side by side. Image from Penguin.co.uk

#wordsofoctober

In this final installment in Smith‘s Seasonal Quartet, we meet several of the characters from previous books in this series again. The focus is in internment camps during WW2, the treatment of illegal immigrants today and it focuses on activism.

I must say that the little brother and his view on people and world, really worries me.

I‘m a little sad that this quartet now has come to its end. This is a series I will reread in the future.

Our latest episode of Books On The Go is up! We discuss the Booker Shortlist and Summer. 💛🎧

Rare shopping day in these days of Pandemic.

I flew through this. I love Ali Smith‘s blend of quirky characters, wordplay & riffs on Dickens & Shakespeare, & her warmth & humour. She uses Einstein & filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti to show how WW2 divided communities in UK (as today Brexit divides families). England‘s treatment of refugees reveals the best & worst of us. Not as tight as the first 3 but the Quartet is an incredible achievement & a joy to read.

A wonderful conclusion to an excellent series of novels that dissects the temper of the times in which we are living and views it through the prism of art and of the past. I loved the way this last part brought together threads from the earlier books. Ali doesn't pull any punches - there were times I thought I was going to combust with anger and others where I just wanted to cry - but ultimately she leaves us with hope for whatever is next. 👇