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Our family is doing more experience gifts and less "stuff" this year for Christmas. So I told my son I would like to do a buddy read with him. He's not a non-reader, but he doesn't read as regularly as me.(He does read a book to his daughter every night though which I love.) So we went to the bookstore together, part of the gift, and picked one out. He found this one. I'll be sure to report back once we are finished. It looks interesting.

#booker #booker2024 #longlist

My last longlist book. This is an interesting narrative style, a series of snapshots from each fighter‘s past, future, and rather violent present. The 8 girls fighting for the u-18 boxing championship in-front of 12 fans in a neglected arena. But the narrative is doing a lot more than just following our neglected lady gladiators.

My full longlist summary will go in the comments.

I really liked this, thanks #tob2025 longlist! I was avoiding it based on the blurb, which made it sound like Rainy is pursuing a runaway wife through a dystopian landscape both twee and surreal. This is misleading, as Rainy‘s wife dies 80 pages in, and the surreal elements are mainly due to the unknown and therefore somewhat terrifying motives of others and not to an anthropomorphized Lake Superior.

Taffy is so good at teasing apart family relationships and finding what makes characters tick. I wish the ending hadn‘t wrapped so quickly, though.

A wealthy father is kidnapped and tortured for a week. He comes back a broken man to his wife and young children. It affects each of the three kids differently into adulthood. When the family money dries up, they have a reckoning with what their lives have become.

I see this only received a 33% rating on Litsy. I completely understand that people may not like it but upon finishing this book I immediately fell into a deep dive into all it had/still has raised within me. A love story, an escape into the deep woods of Montana, the writing, I was hearing the cadence of long lost relatives, the story-quick & to the point-has all the makings of a Western but it's completely Irish. Tom and Polly. The 10,000 (cont)

Akbar has an amazing use of words. The way he lays out and describes Cyrus' descent into alcoholism is heartbreaking, gorgeous and understandable.

"But Cyrus's true love, his bedrock, his soulmate, was alcohol. Alcohol was faithful, omnipresent, predictable. Alcohol didn't demand monogamy like opiates or meth. Alcohol demanded only that you came back home to it at the end of the night."

What in the world did I just read and why? So far, the #ToB25 shortlist has NOT delivered gems to my reading life. This was weird and I was lost most of the time, though maybe that was part of the point…? Felt like I was wandering in a dark forest, like the cover. Though I did think more about translators and their experiences than ever before. I‘ve undoubtedly missed something so I guess I‘ll learn from the discussion. That ending though!

This is a low pick for me, which is on me not the book. The book is excellent. I appreciate how the language and tone shift from pov to pov inside of the stories, and each tenant is a full person. I think I just needed more depth at the moment. Some of these stories are only 10-15 pages and while you get a feel for each person you also feel like a lot of their story is missing.
Overall though this is excellently constructed.

Ooh! I like this one a lot! In some ways, it reminds me of Martha Wells's Murderbot in that the main character is a (partial) outsider whose perspective on Earth and our species and Americans even more specifically is more poignant because she lacks an expectation of shared humanity with those she observes. It asks the reader, who on the planet *isn't* a visitor here? This is one I want to mull for a while and perhaps gift to a couple of people.