Welcome to Litsy!

My next book. I finished The Sound and the Fury tonight and started this. It‘s my last left from the #Booker2023 longlist.

I enjoyed this curiosity, found it wonderfully done, found the writing, which focuses so much on the sound, always interesting and terrific, with its own rhythm and life. And I say this even I didn't really get it. (I missed a lot, as I discovered afterwards reading online reviews) This maybe should have won the Booker (and I loved the winner, Prophet Song)

She‘s like, “yeah, right” 🙄 But it‘s my next read and I‘m looking forward to it. #booker2023

My 11th from the #booker2023 longlist is surprisingly humble. This search for a lost mother, who stepped out and was never seen again, is a life‘s work. Hughes has been reworking this story since she was a teenager, and it‘s her 1st and only novel. It reads like a memoir, and it feels real. It‘s just that deeply thought through. It seems to do everything Hughes wanted it to do. Recommended.

This one was rough up front. Advertised as Korean magical realism, instead it‘s satirical weird disturbing stuff, told with a humorous tone. But…if you can hang in there, it gives a scope of 20th-century Korean history, and a scathing view on South Korean capitalism and autocracy. This was published in 2004, translated only in 2023, and made the International #Booker2023 shortlist.

My 10th from the Booker longlist was wonderful! I came in with no expectations and was rewarded with an inspiring story. A novel about an autistic boy who misses the mother he never knew, working out a device for perpetual motion; and a school teacher in a bad marriage exhausted by her dysfunctional all-boys school, yet fully committed to it. A novel of the children of missing parents, some grown, stumbling through life. Recommended! #booker2023

People love this book. I just didn‘t take to his 3rd-person interior monologues (or whatever the correct term is). I mean, it wasn‘t hard listening to, but it was hard to rationalize anyone could have this little going in inside their heads. Where is the mystery, or multiple perspectives we all have on everything? Having said all that, it makes for decent listening and he does some very interesting things structurally and thematically.

I got a little buzz from the #Booker2023 award, and ordered these five the same night. They just arrived.

I‘m 7 and a half hours in. Just 18.5 to go! I‘m into it at the moment, but most of the 1st 7 hours didn‘t grab me. I spent a lot of time listening wondering why everyone was is so clueless. But i‘m carrying on optimistically. #booker2023

I really enjoyed the opening section where he writes about growing up in South Florida as the son of Jamaican parents. Fictional Trelawney has trouble fitting in SFl‘s very inflexible cultural divisions. I'm older than Escoffery, but I grew up that 1980's SFl world too—ethnically diverse, with no mixing.

The book goes much softer after that with less complicated characters and some social-media-meme friendly plot points. So, overall ok.