Welcome to Litsy!

#AboutABook Day 31: #FavoriteOfJuly - read while I was in Indonesia earlier this month. The bittersweet ending smacks of the bitter realities most brilliant people have to contend with: the need to survive in the here-and-now taking precedence over unrealistic dreams or lofty aspirations. My review: https://wp.me/pDlzr-qAU

#AboutABook Day 16: This is almost a #Memoir of sorts by Indonesian author Andrea Hirata. I read this while I was in Bandung a few weeks ago and enjoyed it tremendously. Here is my full review: https://wp.me/pDlzr-qAU

#CoverLove Day 31: A #Weapon can Wound. Paired with delicious Indonesian cuisine while I was in Bandung a few weeks back. And of course, I had to being Kurniawan with me.

#CoverLove Day 11: there is #Gold in this cover of the first book in the Buru quartet that I managed to hunt down while I was in Bandung, Indonesia last week.

Pulpy, funny, bawdy, thick w/ machismo, but a feminist core. After witnessing a brutal rape at gunpoint, Indonesian teen Ajo becomes impotent, hardening him against ubiquitous violence against women, feeding his desire to fight men. Rabelais in Jakarta. Scene flash-forwards and back. Cartoon violence w/ 💜. Semi-truck lane battle thrill. Punchy trans. Annie Tucker 2017

29 “one thing was clear: chili peppers would not make your d*ck stand up.”

Beauty Is A Wound is a book you get, when a writer starts out with an inventive theme, but slowly devolves into sexist, misogynistic garbage, which feels like its from the wet dreams of a horny and misguided teenager.

There is an unhealthy and disturbing fixation on sexual assault, incest and beastiality. But the worst is how the author makes it seem like the women invited their brutalisation with their beauty.

Just NO!!

(Contd in comments)

Novel that follows three generations in Indonesia & parallels its history from pre-war colonial time through WWII and the post-war era. Dewi Ayu is a beautiful prostitute with three gorgeous daughters and a 4th named Beauty who is hideous. the beauties, like Indonesia itself, are coveted, raped and abused. Fascinating mix of history, magical realism, myth and even humor. https://cannonballread.com/2023/07/beauty-is-a-wound-a-novel-elcicco/

⭐⭐⭐⭐
It starts at the end - a tragic end that the writer unravels in reverse for us to read as Kurniawan sets the story of two families, interlocked onto each other that we only understand the further into the book we follow and by then we're back at the ending.

This was such a different book from what I usually read that I couldn't help but be drawn in.

Home is a family saga of #Indonesia from 1965-1998, but most of the book is set in Paris. Dinas Suryo can‘t go home and ends up starting an Indonesian restaurant in Paris. Then the story shifts to his daughter, Lintang, a student at the Sorbonne who has an assignment to make a documentary film.
Although it took me a while to finish, by the end, I was so absorbed in this family, their history, the food, and the meaning of home. #ReadingAsia2021