Welcome to Litsy!

October wrap up from StoryGraph.

November is going to be much slower. I am travelling a lot and just came back from a conference really sick 🤒 it sucks. I can‘t concentrate to read.

Rapid tested for both Covid and flu, because this feels like the flu (although I did get my vaccine), I was wondering if this was a different strain. Negative for both. Day off today to Veterans Day but I‘ll have to take more time off this week I think.

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Great debut novel set in a slightly dystopian world where you get another shadow if you are convicted of a crime or hurt someone. Shadesters have reduced rights, wish extra time for healthcare and pay more for everything.

Kris (a shadester) and Beau (a NoShad), a lesbian couple, have a baby with a sperm donor and Beau dies during the birth. Kris and is left to raise the baby, who has a second shadow, on her own.

#lgbtbookbingo2024

“Had she been paying attention, she would have known it hadn‘t happened overnight, that it took a million tiny stabs to bleed democracy dry.”

That hit home a little too hard.

US friends, please VOTE!! I cannot as I‘m here on a visa but I‘m very concerned about the future of the country.

#hyggehourreadathon (from last night!).

I started this book about grief. It was on my StoryGraph recommendations and I plowed through about a third of it yesterday.

Beautifully written and devastating depiction of losing your wife at a vulnerable time, during childbirth. The main character struggles as a new mother, alone.

It‘s got a dystopian flavour, and is lgbtqia. Definitely up my alley, thanks StoryGraph algorithm.

#lgbtqbookbingo2024

I stayed up until 2AM finishing this book. Set in a near-future dystopian America where the state has cameras in every house and “criminals” are visibly marked by being given an extra shadow, it‘s in part a look at American fascism and the violence and oppression of our carceral culture. But it‘s also very much a book about bow grief lives in us, about the anxiety of parenting, and about the beauty and defiance of queer love.

A soft pick for this one. I like that it seems like a book about dystopian society but it's really about grief, love, shame, belonging, and the risks and benefits of resistance. I don't quite buy the kid's precocity, but it's not terrifically outside the realm of possibility (it's not like she's starting a 401K, picking out a barbecue grill, and complaining about her arthritis at age 9, just acting more like a precocious 11 or 12).

I'm undecided about the tagged audiobook, but 5 stars to this swirly cloud I saw on my afternoon walk today.

Next

I came home from vacation to a bunch of book mail, including the most recent installment of my Tailored Book Recommendations, with titles I'm excited to dig into, and a bunch of books for work, which is mostly awesome because I get to read middle-grade fiction and nonfiction and call it "work."

This speculative dystopian novel about a world where people are given extra shadows for whatever infractions the government decides are worth punishing (ie very variable and targeted) was so hard to put down. Told in a stream of consciousness style, a new mother faces the prospect of raising her newborn daughter alone after her wife dies in childbirth and her daughter is given an extra shadow for it. Queer resistance and found family feels.

This almost stream of consciousness book about systems of oppression and motherhood and family and queer resistance is so hard to put down.

Dystopian story of motherhood, grief and resistance.

In a US where people are issued an additional shadow for every 'crime' they've committed, Kris is grieving her wife while trying to raise her newborn daughter. The baby was issued her second shadow upon her which lead to her mother's death. Through the eyes of Kris we see how (white) people with additional shadows are treated and how this affects her daughter's upbringing.

Low pick ⬇️