Welcome to Litsy!

"On my name day it began to rain, so we moved the chairs into the hall to sit it out until the rain stopped. But it never ended; it came streaming down relentlessly, obscuring the horizon. Not in drops, but in stair rods."

I really loved this musing on rain and I am glad I read this in the fall the perfect time to absorb the beauty of her writing.

While I really enjoyed this I do think it is a bit too long. I really ran out of steam the last 50 pages or something.

Something Tokarczuk does so well is weave stories into one book that make you feel like you are sitting on a porch while neighbors drop by and tell you gossip. You have the story of the villager who walked up the mountain to see his childhood home, the story of a saint - and the monk who wrote her story, the story of the man 👇

Reading the new Tokarczuk and she tells the story of Saint Wilgefortis (aka Kummernis or Solicitous) a 14th century nun whose father tries to force her to marry and she is "given" the face of Jesus to show how virtuous she was and how she was called to religion.

She is considered the Patron Saint of Intersex people specifically and the LGBTQ+ community in general.

#CharacterCharm Day 23: #Maid - even if “old maids.” 😂🤣

#bookspin The Books of Jacob
#doublespin The Other City

The spin of destiny gave me my longest (920) and shortest (163) book of the list!
#BookspinBingo card ready to go!

4⭐️ Some things just don‘t change. The 19th century Warsaw was all about money, women, greed, and racism. It was bad then, it is worse now. I enjoyed Prus‘ humour - I didn‘t know he could be cheeky and funny 😆

Enjoying this chunky novel 😃 Are you tackling any chunkster now?

I lucked out at a little free library today!! No way could I leave this behind, I've been wanting to read it for a while. I'll have to find something good from my stash to put in the little free library to pay it forward (cause we all know that, as excited as I am, I'm not finishing a print chunkster like this any time soon 😅).

With some distance now I have an even greater appreciation for this behemoth. With so many themes I can‘t even begin to relay them all here. But one I especially appreciated was that of the invisible & everlasting connections between people, places, events, ideas, beliefs, etc. They are the “sparks” Olga gathers in this book.

The Prologue & final scene doubles down on this theme in a most delightful way I can‘t spoil!