Welcome to Litsy!

#JuneSpecials Day 12: #RedRose paired with my book club title last year that I abandoned. Maybe I will get around to reading it again.

I can‘t lie - I didn‘t get it. I started in print and ended in audio. Both formats were a miss for me, but the audio was slightly better.

Interesting book of living a life vicariously after a sibling‘s death. This exploration of feelings & reflections is taken even further when adding thoughts/ideas only related to the color white. Loved it‘s uniqueness.

❤️🖤❤️🖤
#Valentines
#Black History Month

This week I‘ve read two books by the same author for the first time! 🎧

This is a very tender, but also very sad book. In different very short texts, Han Kang talks about white things. White being the color of mourning in Korea. We learn about her older sister, who died shortly after birth. We learn how that still hunts Kang, how it affects her life. I was deeply moved by this work, by its calmness, by its insights.

The Vegetarian is very moving and intriguing. The narrative is told from 3 separate perspectives offering a complete exploration of trauma, emotional breakdown and mental strain. Is Yeong-hye mad or is her behaviour a logical conclusion of the society she‘s been subjected to? There are elements I didn‘t fully understand but it still left a powerful impression. 7/10

A woman has become mute. She has lost her husband, teaching job, and custody of her 8-yr-old son. Lost herself, she takes a course in Ancient Greek taught by an instructor about her age who is losing his sight. Somehow a gentle warm story comes out of this, layered onto of darker histories and life pains, and terrific interesting prose. This completes my two week run through Han‘s four English-translated novels. (Another is due out in January)

Starting the next book - more from Nobel winner Han Kang

This reads like a collection of prose poetry. A series of white things, with a theme on an older sister who only lived a couple hours. Each topic gets a page or so. A blizzard is characterized by "this oppressive weight of beauty", a handkerchief is falling "like a soul tentatively sounding out the place it might alight". Very interesting, if generally mystifying to me.