Welcome to Litsy!

I took another super early bike ride today, this time to get ahead of rain instead of heat. It included a stop for a peach passionfruit breakfast smoothie and another story from GLORIOUS FRAZZLED BEINGS. I like the collection so far, but I‘m not sure these stories will really stick with me.

I didn't love every story but some were so amazing, capturing my imagination--I have to give the collection 5 stars. Incredible writing, insights. Wonderfully strange, devastatingly sad, magical, real. Lalonde's range in style and voice is enormous, impressive. The themes of motherhood really got me in the heart and gut. Memorable Indigenous characters too. I was tempted often to record Lalonde's phrases but instead I just let them wash over me.

I invite you to check out the capsule reviews my favourite quotations from the best books that I read in October, which you will find on my blog: https://lindypratch.blogspot.com/2021/10/october-2021-reading-roundup.html

How do I tell you about the cumulative impact of these fierce yet whimsical stories? They are about home & motherhood & sisterhood & womanhood… alongside teeny tiny ghosts, a fox shapeshifter, a supernatural gardener… The charming elements are mixed with thoughtful statements like: “I am good at pretending I know how to be where I am on this land I own that does not belong to me.� I absolutely love this book. #shadowgiller2021

The little fly on my nightstand puked all over my journal. I was so upset I messaged its mother, but its mother was dead because she had already lived out her long 15 days on earth by the time I was able to track down her number.

(Internet photo of Fly Guy toy)

We learn such confidence from books, feeling like if we just look in the right place, the thing that brought us happiness will be there again, waiting, every time we turn the page back to where it was the last time!

You understand motherly sacrifice & motherly overwhelm. Motherly exasperation & motherly joy. You understand the big fat food duty & pending outbursts of the improperly fed, the overly tired, the wired-up or disconnected, the greedy little wanting-everything-for-yourself hatefulness of family. The untidiness of calling all of this love.

Maybe I am like others like me—an accident or designed outcome of the generations that came before. Left here with garbled stories because each generation tries to efface or correct the stories of the last in our attempts to settle ourselves.

Finances make her want to hide in her little shell and do turtle things until all the talking is over.

Shawn and I talked for half an hour about the Giller longlist. You can watch it on his booktube channel: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tYCjcRuGFxw
#shadowgiller2021

The stories circle like a pack of snappy coyotes and I do not know why they are always nipping at our heels as my sisters and I go about our lives trying to live up to her maxim: Think only good things so only good things come. “Pensez seulement aux bonnes choses et seulement les bonnes choses vont arriver.�

So cold in the desert night, her inner fire just a bare ember, spirit body needing spirit fire to ignite, keep herself going through this world. Knowing water alone would just freeze, that‘s how cold her insides were. Dump a good dose of whisky in the first glass, hot wetness to drown out dry nerves.

She frazzled in the bowels of her grief for a good long while, coming out somewhat composted on the inside. No longer so lithe, no longer so young, Carmen had more layers to her. A soil test would have told her she‘d become a more balanced ecosystem, ground in which greater diversity could thrive.

Marianne likes learning new things, some sexual, some practical, and some interpersonal. The way she sees it, community service, environmental activism, and orgasm are all about the same kind of discovery.

When she was lucky, some squirrels up to antics out the window, a bowl of fruit revealed in light, a letter from a friend in the mailbox, a story in a good book that caught her heart in her throat to make her look at the world anew.

If you asked she would tell you that she loves him like a sheep loves clover: wrapped into its tongue and pushed sideways, mashed into sweet liquid green and fibre in the crush of its grinding teeth.

My bookshop order has come: three on the Giller longlist plus a special treat for myself—Helen Humphrey‘s latest. #shadowgiller21