Welcome to Litsy!

There was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting, one hundred years of silence ... of the convicts and Aboriginal people little was ever said. Of a slave system and a genocide nothing. What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone...

My father's mother and father...were... illiterate. My father had...a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn't.

He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?

I missed my big sister greatly and the point of the books was to smuggle a message of love to her, and each book, every faux sentence and every scrawled picture of a word was simply saying that one word over and over.

And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.

Interweaving memoir, science, history and fiction, Richard Flanagan sure can write. This book was striking and affecting. Talk about stopping you in your tracks and making you think. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This thought-provoking book is a mix of unusual personal/family memoir and what feels like a NF version of Labatut‘s How We Cease to Understand the World. It ruminates on life, death, war, and more. I found it fascinating and I‘m glad it serves as my final completed book of 2024. #TOBlonglist

An idiosyncratic memoir with much about Flanagan‘s father, WW2, the atomic bomb & invented vignettes about H. G. Wells & the physicists who developed the bomb. It‘s artfully woven together in his usual muscular style. His writing is jaw-droppingly good & he‘s distilled this tapestry of a life history to its essence. Humble, Australian & acutely aware of injustice in Tasmania 1780s through to the war, & how precarious life is, including his own.

Thank you Richard. Lots to think about ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
First book for the year and he is Aussie .

Early Christmas gift. Will be near the top of my TBR pile.