Welcome to Litsy!

Real rollercoaster. As a repressed person with limited emotional management skills and a lot of overwhelming feelings, I find parts visualization and mapping somewhat helpful! But I couldn‘t get on board with the level of autonomy he grants parts. Halfway through the book he dropped that he does loads of K, which explains a lot. He also uses parts therapy to deconstruct racism and Trump, which totally lost me. Interesting though! Back to CBT…

This one is a hard but necessary read. You can‘t go into it lightly—it takes heart and courage to read every page. I was a cutter many years ago but thankfully it never evolved into anything worse, and I was able to get away from the circumstances which had led me to do this to begin with. Many people suffer in silence and aren‘t able to get away. They deserve a voice and a village to keep believing in them.

I always read the Booker winner, but I had a hard time finding this one. Hubby found it in a bookstore in Ireland. It arrived yesterday all the way from Galway. I hope it was worth the hunt. It‘s on my TBR for those lazy holiday pajama days. #BookMail

This was helpful, a bit eye opening and a lot of common sense that you know, but flies under the radar until it reveals itself so plainly to you. Aka, good and necessary to hear. My particular favorites included the assessments and learning about the four parenting types - emotional, passive, rejecting and driven. Helped me understand not only my own parents but also as a parent myself. Nice one to listen to on audio!

I loved the first third of this NBA longlister for Fiction in Translation.

Then it got VERY repetitive and long-winded.

The final third was more interesting but I‘d already guessed what was going to happen, although not the ultimate ending, so that lessened the impact a bit. That, and the fact that i5 was all rather depressing, kept this as a so-so..

The book follows Istvan through various stages of his life. He says little more than “yeah” or “okay.” In one sense it‘s easy to read; very short blunt sentences, little in the way of dialogue. In another sense it‘s hard to read; who is Istvan, what is he thinking? Yet of course, this is the point. Definitely a book that benefits reading a review or two as you go along I think. In short - odd and intriguing, glad I read it, glad it‘s finished.

A good story about the five children who survived a cult, four of whom have spent 15 years trying to make sense of it. Chapters from the past and chapters from the present culminate in the discovery of what really happened all those years ago. I had to suspend my sense of disbelief to get to the end of this one. A soft pick as the characters didn‘t really resonate with me, yet the mystery kept my attention.

This is why I follow the Women's Prize each year more than any other.