Welcome to Litsy!

#bookspin /#doublespin list for January. I‘ll add the picks to my tbr and put up that list for the bingo board since that seemed to work out nicely last year!

Happy Holiday Season! Wishing all of you cozy reads.

I managed to catch one of the miserable respiratory cold/flu viruses going around. Great timing! So, I‘m in bed with tea, animals, and books. I‘m always grateful for audio books, but never more so when ill.

I read this 4 literary fiction book club & I really haven‘t liked the picks recently including this 1. I‘ve never read Erdrich b4 & I can‘t say I‘d be in a hurry to read another one. I listened to it so maybe that has something to do w/ it, but I wasn‘t invested in the characters & there were so many little sections that it just felt disjointed. I didn‘t pay the most attention; I just wanted to get through it. The voice acting could‘ve been better

Set in the Red River Valley in North Dakota, this novel is about a sugar beet-farming community that is suffering through the 2008 housing recession and just living their day-to-day lives. Crystal is a trucker who hauls sugar beets. Her husband has left her after seemingly committing a financial crime. Her daughter is 18 and engaged to one boy, but is in love with another (but is she really?). I loved it.

https://youtu.be/Mzak3MZP2no

Introduction
Andrea Gibson, RIP
Mystery guest
Weekly highlights
A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri
How to Breathe Water by Sharon Butala
Standing Heavy by Gauz'
Animal Person by Alexander MacLeod
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir by Danny Ramadan
These Letters End in Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere

Always a favorite author!

I loved this book and the small-town dramas. I could especially relate to the girl who sort of wanted to go to college but getting married was so much easier.

Life, love, tragedy in a small farming community. Great story.

I read 1/2 of this. It‘s good writing, but I didn‘t like the characters and I stopped wanting to read- which is uncommon for me. I anticipate that the second half is better, but life is short and my books to read pile is tall. Moving on.

Ah, I liked this one. It moved along and the characters were deep. A plot twist was predictable but then another wasn‘t. The only other Louise Erdrich I‘ve read is The Night Watchman and this book is not that. The Mighty Red is far more mellow and I can‘t say more without spoilers.

I always love her writing, but her books leave me mid. I'm glad I read this, but it's not an all-time favorite. Story set in ND in a tight-knit farming community. 3 🌟

Adored this and would put it right up there with the (many) other Erdrich books I've loved. Totally invested in the characters, loved the setting (time and place), and her writing just works for me every time.
This would absolutely have made my #AuldLangSpine list had I not finished it the day after filling out the form, @monalyisha !!

3.5⭐️ I thought it was a decent story. Felt kinda blah. #literary #2024 #indigenious #fiction #contemporary +5pts

The Mighty Red begins in 2008 and follows a young woman named Kismet and her mother, Crystal. Crystal works the night shift, driving a truck for a sugar beet farm and Kismet has graduated from high school. Two young men, Gary and Hugo, are both in love with Kismet; she decides to marry Gary against her own better judgment. She and her mother are also caught up in a scandal when her father skips town, appearing to have stolen the church fund.

I love Erdrich‘s well drawn characters so I‘m excited to start her newest about sugar beet farming in South Dakota.

4.5⭐️/5⭐️

My 90th book... which was my goal to read this year! Great book to end it on!

I could feel the insular small rural community on every page of this book when the rest of the world seems so far away and you marry someone because, well, they asked.

I was underwhelmed by Erdrich‘s recent novel but I enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more a few days after finishing it. The teenage small town characters who love each other and hold out hope they can eventually be together, a husband who absconds with the town church‘s money, the tragedies large and small that affect the residents, and the land, always the land in an Erdrich story, offer a story that ultimately is quite rich.

I‘ve seen a lot of division over Erdrich‘s latest where a good portion of the disappointed seem to be established Erdrich fans. Which I find interesting.

Erdrich isn‘t stepping out of her comfort zone here; she‘s been doing this long enough. And really I don‘t feel she needs to. She does what she does, and she does it well.

Most complaints tend to be about not connecting with the characters. What if we look at it as The Mighty Red as narrator?

I love Louise Erdrich so it pains me to say that I did not love this book. There are some important points in here about farming and the environment but it all gets buried in a clunky plot about the lives of people in one small town including a tragedy in its past, the ill advised marriage of recent high school graduates and a string of bank robberies. The characters don‘t have Erdrich‘s usual magic so it was harder to understand their choices.

Erdrich‘s latest is excellent, as you might suspect! This book focuses in on a small farming community in ND and two recent high school grads in particular, while hinting at some recent tragic and difficult events. The tone and humor in this one remind me very much of The Sentence, so I suspect other readers are likely to be as happy as I!

So excited to get my hands on this book in time for my two camping weekends in a row! I've only managed to read one physical book and one audiobook this year so I'm looking forward to changing that.

So excited to learn that we‘re getting a new novel from Louise this October!