9

Goodbye For Now!

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Dear all of our wonderful followers and dedicated readers,

This is an incredibly difficult post to write, but it is sadly necessary to do so. The Literary Sisters has been in existence, run by the wonderful Akylina and myself, for over a decade now. However, our lives have changed immeasurably since we decided to work on a bookish blog together, a project which has been rewarding, and so worthwhile. We were students 10 years ago, with a bit of spare time to dedicate to our passion of reading, and to let others know about the books we were letting into our lives. We are now both in full-time jobs, both of which now require a commute. Our spare time has diminished, and any free moments we get are a gift.

Speaking for myself, I do not have much time to read any more, particularly in comparison to how I used to devour books when I was studying. During commuting weekdays, my tired self tries to spend my entire train journey reading, but I am consistently too tired to take extensive (or usually any) notes on these books, which I can then turn into reviews. There is also the time it takes to write a single review, which averages around 1 hour, and can run to far more. With a demanding, screen-focused day job, I am finding it very difficult to devote more of my spare time to staring at yet another screen.

My passion for reading has also changed over the last decade. It felt almost like the be-all and end-all of my life when we started this blog, but now, reading is just a hobby for me, rather than my lifeblood. I don’t have the same desire to write about everything I’m reading, or even really to recommend titles. I have stopped visiting Goodreads more than once or twice per month, and focus most of my reading energy on the Storygraph app nowadays. I want to see reading as a hobby I very much enjoy, rather than an obligation to create content.

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I bid you a farewell for now. I’m hoping that this is just a hiatus, and that I may be back to blog before the year is out, but for now, I am taking a break. I want to thank you for all of your much appreciated support over the last decade, from every like and follow to every comment left. The Literary Sisters has been such a worthwhile project for me, and I am so glad that I have been able to dedicate so much of my time to it in the past. It has meant a lot to me to be able to connect with so many readers all across the world.

All posts will stay up, so feel free to search through the archive if you feel so inclined. If you would like to add me on Goodreads, you can do so here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/56491386-kirsty.

Take care, happy reading, and all the best for a peaceful and fulfilling 2024.

Love, Kirsty xx

2

‘Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop’ by Alba Donati ****

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I somehow hadn’t heard of Alba Donati’s Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, despite it being the kind of memoir I always gravitate towards.  Luckily, I spotted a copy in my local library, and found it to be the perfect reading for rather a rainy day, where I could transport myself to beautiful rural Italy through Donati’s words, which were translated into English by Elena Pala. 

Prior to relocating to the small village of Lucignana in Northern Tuscany where she grew up, Donati lived a busy life in Florence where she worked as a publisher; this ‘made her happy but also left her feeling like a woman constantly on the run.’  A slower pace of life is something she strove for, and so she decided to open a small bookshop for the village’s 180 residents.  As she writes in her first diary entry, ‘The idea for the bookshop must have been lying in wait, ensconced in the folds of that dark and joyous country we call childhood.’ 

The bookshop itself, which was named Libreria Sopra La Penna, opened in December 2019; Donati’s Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop begins over a year later, on the 20th of January 2021.  Her second entry, written the following day, includes more background about her venture: ‘The idea to open the bookshop knocked on my door one night…  It was the thirtieth of March 2019.  I had the space: there was this little hill by the house where my mother used to grow lettuce…  What I didn’t have was the money: opening a bookshop is expensive.’   

It was lovely to see the tight-knit community’s effort involved throughout Donati’s reflections.  When it began, the bookshop was ‘a project shared with 70 per cent of the village, volunteers doing shifts so that there would always be three people around at any given time…’.  A lot of the money to enable the bookshop to open was also raised through a fundraising campaign. 

As one might expect from this timepoint, Donati’s venture was rather affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns.  She receives a lot of support from the online community in periods where the physical bookshop has to close, and visitors flock from local towns and cities as soon as lockdowns are lifted and it is open again.  Throughout, Donati is never downbeat, although she is open about the myriad challenges a new bookshop faces in the modern world; rather, she is appreciative of everything around her, in terms of people, the natural world, and the books she so loves to read.  Her focus on the small positives was a real breath of fresh air in the quite bewildering world of narratives occurring during the pandemic: ‘The pandemic (despite itself, I’m sure) gifted us these new rituals.  It gave us our Sundays back, it gave us time with nothing to do and nowhere to go.  Time for ourselves, for the little things.’ 

Something I found quite charming about Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop is that each entry ends with a list of the books purchased on that particular day, both in-person and online.  If you are reading this review, I am sure that this little delight of a book will appeal to you, and I hope you enjoy the reading experience as much as I did.  Even in translation, Donati’s voice is so soothing, and the book’s pace is delightful.  Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop exemplifies just how magical books can be, and how they have the power to bond us together during the most difficult times. 

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2024: The Year of No Reading Challenges

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Midway through last year, I made a decision. Since embarking on a career, and having a full-time job which sadly requires some in-office time nowadays, I have had pangs of guilt when looking at how behind I am on my reading challenge. My job, like so many people’s, is tiring, and there are some weekdays where I only read a few pages. Gone are the days where I would sit down as a student, and hungrily read a book from cover to cover in a single sitting. I have so many more distractions and responsibilities, and so many drains on my time.

I always want to be able to enjoy my reading life, but looking at the Storygraph and Goodreads from time to time in 2023 has made me realise that I have come to see reading as something of a chore. It is still a hobby I very much enjoy, and I hope to always be able to say that. However, my ‘pages challenge’ on the Storygraph for 2023 reminded me constantly how behind I was, with the goal of an ambitious 50,000 pages slipping farther away from my reach. ‘Only 1,215 pages to go until you’re caught up!’ it would remind me. ‘Keep going!’

I want to ‘keep going’ with my reading, but in 2024, I have decided to read entirely for pleasure, not pressure. No longer will I put off the longer titles on my physical TBR or my library list, because I’m behind on a reading challenge and need to keep up. The numbers are arbitrary. Does anyone really care if I manage to read 200 books a year, which my challenge from 2023 was set at? I’m not even sure that I do any more.

So, a clean slate for 2024. I will still keep track of what I am reading, but whether I read 50 books or 200, it doesn’t matter. I have been setting a reading goal for myself since I was in my teens, so this will seem like an odd embarkation, I’m sure. Still, I am looking forward to having no challenge, and no competition, even if the only person I was competing with to reach those hefty goals was my past self.

What are your reading challenges for this year, or, like me, are you eschewing them? I’d love to know!

4

‘The Train Was on Time’ by Heinrich Böll ****

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Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Train Was on Time, was first published in 1949, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, two years after its translation into English.  Aside from one book of his which I did not much enjoy (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), I was not hugely familiar with Böll’s work.  I chose to reserve a very old hardback, and slightly battered, copy of this book from my local library.  The edition I borrowed had been translated from its original German by Leila Vennewitz.  I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, although I admit the blurb did appeal to me and my more depressing reading tendencies. 

The protagonist of the piece, Private Andreas, is a 24-year-old who finds himself on a train heading from Germany to rejoin his unit in Poland during the Second World War.  On said train, Böll writes: ‘… it is suddenly borne on him that he has very little longer to live.’  On his journey, despite the crippling knowledge that dawns upon him, Andreas is ‘shocked to find that he can still make friends, play cards, sleep, eat and drink…  Most of the time life goes on despite Andreas’ knowledge that he is to die soon.’ 

We first meet Andreas when a chaplain is asking him to board the train; the response he gives is as follows: ‘“Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert…  What’s the hurry?  I might go crazy, I’ve a perfect right to…  I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible – that I don’t want to die.”’ 

The Train Was on Time is certainly not a cheerful read, but I found immense power in its 110 pages.  Böll’s prose is incredibly visceral: ‘As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word soon entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly flesh, tissue, cells, nerves…’.  This concept of ‘Soon’ goes on to haunt the remainder of the novella: ‘Soon.  Soon.  Soon.  Soon.  When is Soon?  What a terrible word: Soon.  Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year…  Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot.  Soon is everything.’ 

Andreas becomes more and more convinced that his time on earth is nigh: ‘Soon I’m going to die, before the war is over.  I shan’t ever know peacetime again.  No more peacetime.  There’ll be no more of anything, no music…  no flowers…  no poetry…  no more human joy…’. 

The Train Was on Time really probes its protagonist; against the context of a real conflict, it describes the internal conflict he is constantly experiencing, too.  This is such a powerful topic, particularly to explore in the brief space of a novella.  I found Böll’s character study fascinating from the outset, and liked the author’s approach of a continual narrative, which has the odd paragraph break but no chapters as such.  The omniscient perspective, with flashes of our protagonist’s thoughts, was a really satisfying approach.  The novella feels momentous; it propels its readers forward at speed, and has an unmistakeable intensity to it.  The story is a little peculiar at times, but overall, I found it quite moving.  I would not describe The Train Was on Time as an easy read by any means, but it is a story that I believe will stay with me for a long time to come. 

2

‘Swanfolk’ by Kristín Ómarsdóttir ***

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I have wanted to read Icelandic author Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s work for years now, and I had my eye on the first of her books to be translated into English, the endearingly titled Children in Reindeer Woods.  To my surprise, my library had a copy of her newest work, Swanfolk, which was shortlisted for the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, and has been translated into English by Vala Thorodds. 

The novel opens, quite mesmerisingly, toward the end of March: ‘I came from a county that didn’t exist and lived from birth in its capital, by a blue bay and a violet mountain where slopes were scaled by a verdurous green in summer and in winter were veiled by snow…  On the horizon, the sun curtsied politely like a chorus girl.’  We learn that Elísabet Eva’s parents disappeared when she was just twelve, and she and her brother were raised by their grandmother. 

There are a lot of unusual components to Swanfolk.  The novel is dystopic, and is set in the ‘not-too-distant future’, whilst still holding onto, and examining, some quite old-fashioned societal structures.  Our protagonist is ‘a young spy’ named Elísabet Eva, who enjoys solitude.  She is often found, when not at work at the secretive Special Unit in the Ministry of the Interior, taking long walks around a local lake.  On one such occasion, she sees ‘two creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-swan.  She follows them through tangles of thickets into a strange new reality.’  When she first sees the Swanfolk, Ómarsdóttir describes them as involved with a myriad of quite ordinary tasks: ‘One creature bounced a fishing line in the water, another washed her hair, others swam the evening rounds like townsfolk milling about in warm summer twilight.  Yet the earth was still frozen underfoot, as befitted the season.’   

When reflecting on what she has seen after she returns home, Elísabet Eva reflects: ‘… I lay down in bed… and doubted everything I had seen.  Surely no one would credit the word of a person who had fallen asleep in a bush.’  She goes on: ‘I was out in the open air, mixed up with a mysterious and strange realm of which few stories existed – certainly none that I had heard, and I was meant to be better informed than most of my countrymen in fundamental matters of human life in the under- and overworlds and all of the worlds between.’ 

The Swanfolk are intelligent, and hold a lot of agency.  One of them tells Elísabet Eva: ‘It’s a strange thing to be half human and miss the other half, to be half swan and miss the other half…  It gives rise to a complicated emotional life.  Sometimes we think like humans even while we feel like birds, think like birds but feel like humans – we are jealous of swans, jealous of humans; despise swans, admire humans.’ 

I found Ómarsdóttir’s prose, and the ideas it conveyed, strange yet compelling, and admired the way in which the author provides a showcase of very unusual perspectives.  The second chapter, for instance, opens: ‘During the night a flower grew in my throat, and by midday it had bloomed.’  Elísabet Eva was a most unusual protagonist; she allowed us into her world, and I was compelled to read her story.  She is perhaps one of the strangest characters I have read about in quite a while; she has an imaginary sister and an imaginary dog, both of whom she sees everywhere.   

Swanfolk is rather dark, in both its tone and subject matter.  This imaginative novel really drew me in, and whilst I did not love it, I admired the author’s writing and the power of Thorodds’ translation.  Ómarsdóttir blurs the lines between realistic and otherworldly, and there is something really quite magical about this strange novel.