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Elise

@eliselittlelibrary

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Introverted but willing to discuss books 📖
- books reviews, annotations and life
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Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

★★★★★

"Are you hiding a boy in one of these stacks?" Julia said.
"Not right now," Sylvie said. "It's just me and a thousand books"

A book that made me feel everything.

Reading the blurb, I expected it to be a heartbreaking read. However, it was much more than that. It is about love, which destroyed and restored everything between the four sisters.

Hello Beautiful is about the four Padovano sisters, more like best friends, who are inseparable and knotted from birth with unconditional love for each other. Julia, the eldest, is the star of the family. Sylvia, the romantic who loves to read books and works at a library, and the twins Cecelia and Emmeline, the painter and caregiver of the family. When Julia meets William and falls in love with him, she dreams of a perfect future with him, but when William's past surfaces in their lives, everything collapses, along with the betrayal that shatters the sisters apart.

I knew this was going to be my favorite as soon as I started reading the first few lines. To be born as a woman and to be gifted womanhood and sisterhood is the greatest blessing, and I felt that immensely throughout reading the book. I loved how the author described the sisters as four different panels that hold a piece of the house, making it a home. And also, it's not only about sisterhood but also about betrayal. Betrayal that shatters everything yet gives birth to the lost.

Beautiful prose on loving the dead is something very special in this book. You will find characters walking with memories of the dead as a treasure and how they hold onto it. Hello, beautiful is simply about everything. Mental health, love, betrayal, trauma, insecurities, hatred, wrongdoing, bravery, motherhood, fatherhood, found family, friendship, passion, neglected childhood, Family, and forgiving. Of all the characters, my favorite is Charlie. His Whittman poetry and the morals of this man are immaculate. You can never hate the characters because they have their reasons to act the way they did.
. by @eliselittlelibrary

“It seems unfair, doesn’t it? Our parents got to live their whole lives without anything like this.”
“Busily building up the world that led to this.”
“I suppose they thought they had their own problems, said Ellwood.
“No one ever thinks their life is easy.”

The story revolves around two best friends who love each other unconditionally yet refuse to acknowledge their feelings. When the entire nation is battling against war with the germans, they fight with emotions eliciting within them. With their friends Dying one by one, Gaunt was forced to enlist early due to anti German attacks (he is half German) Eventually Ellwood decides to enlist, joining Gaunt in the British Army. Amid the inevitable emotions and death looming around the corner they find Solace in each other.

In this novel, love is portrayed as sacrifice. Gaunt and Ellwood’s love acts as an invisible shield to protect each other. They battle in fields with the intention of saving one another. Ellwood dreams of writing poems for his love while Daunt’s ready to sacrifice his life to save Ellwood. They are magnets attracting and repelling with emotions.

i woudn’t be doing justice to the book by only discussing the love between two men. The story provides the perspective of soilders in WW1. As a reader, i rarely seen or heard the voice of an solider, whose life hangs by a thread. How inhumane is to kill knowing the opponent is innocent, how cruel is it to live with ghosts who once were a friend, realising it could happen to them any second of the day. The undescribable fear of never seeing their loved ones chokes them evey time they enter the battlefield, and coming to understand that death is better than to live in a world filled with such horrors.

Thus, the book is about love and war.
- i havent picked up historical fiction in a long time, and i realized how much i missed reading this genre, so i took my time reading and annotating. As i mentioned before this book is mixture of everything, one thing i didnt expect is the humor. typing this review on my laptop makes me wanna re-read this book.
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#bookreview #thoughtsonbooks #inmemoriam #alicewinn #bookstagram #booksbooksbooks by @eliselittlelibrary

White Nights of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The story follows an unnamed narrator, a loner who views loneliness as melancholy and he accepts it as a way of living.The book is less than 100 pages, yet it speaks volumes about human mind. The narrator wanders through the streets of St. Petersburg, conversing with lifeless objects and forming connections so profound that it evokes a sense of yearning over the inability to engage in conversation. The narrator will make you feel all the emotions, because, as humans, we all must have felt something that he felt at some point in life. It could be embarrassment, shame, loneliness, naivety, hope, or depravity.

Coming back to the plot, when the unnamed narrator meets Nastenka, who is lonely (not to the narrator’s extent), they feel devoted to meeting each other and I remembered this quote I read somewhere “you do realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat” and the narrator felt exactly like this when he meet her under the moodlight for 4 nights and the ending made me so much for the character. I was sad,
but for the most part, I was feeling rage to my bones.

At times, you read a book and feel so much for the characters to a point where you feel the need to defend them, and then you realize the author has delivered a masterpiece even though it is an unfair ending for a beautiful book and as a reader, I realized how much human connection matters to living a relatively normal life and how the narrator accepts life as it is with no transition. If you love good quotes with a devastating ending, I recommend that you pick this up soon.

Q- What are your thoughts on this book?
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#classicbooks #fyodordostoyevsky #whitenights #bookreview #bookstagrammer #bookcommunity #quotes #quotedump #nastenka by @eliselittlelibrary

A day in September
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I’m still reading call me by my name

Maybe I was drunk when I annotated this ( cuz who writes that )

Love empty cafes by @eliselittlelibrary

Currently reading Call me by your name by André Aciman.

P.s- Going to normalize posting messy tables and half eaten sandwiches 😋
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#currrentlyreading #callmebyyourname by @eliselittlelibrary

Currently Reading Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy.
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Q- what are you currently reading?
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#currentread #memoir #arundathiroy

Love quotes on grief and love it more when it's on the first page of the book

Nothing beats a good reading / Yap session with a good friend @reka.readss ✨ by @eliselittlelibrary

“The first time you swim after a long while is as close as you’ll ever get to happiness,” said Sonia.
But, Sonia, that is so strange. I thought the exact thing my first morning in Goa!”

I recently finished reading the book The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia by Kiran Desai. The book revolves around Sonia and Sunny, and that’s what the title of the book says, but the story is far from that; it’s about a multitude of characters, their lives, and their political opinions, their culture, in full detail, and sometimes you wonder and search for the main theme: “loneliness”.

The book speaks about displacement, race, racism, immigrants, the lives of immigrants, and how they are perceived by natives and vice versa. As a reader, you will see the struggles of these characters and how they navigate life. I’m being critical here, I think, cuz I’m not a person to criticize an author who spent 20 years of her life writing (creating) a book. I was a little disappointed. (Maybe I had high expectations)

I wish the novel revolved more around Sunny and Sonia (at least 40% of the book). Still, it was about a lot of other things, which felt unfair to me, who was excited to read about the said 2 charcters because, again, the “title”.(I would have preferred a different title cuz it’s not just only about the relationship but more than that. Sometimes I felt the main theme side-stepped and was not prioritized.)

My reading experience was good. i loved how the author portrayed vulnerability of sonia, i saw a part of myself in characters, the family dynamics was something i was able to relate, the perception of society of a married women, a widow, a single woman, a woman who chose to live alone and a woman who chose to separate and how they are perceived in the society and their narrative was different, whenever the author brought up sonia and sunny together, I devoured.
And I felt despair when it came to an end. I have a huge respect for the author because of the research that must have been done to write something complex to bring out the narrative of every character, with complexities that make them who they are.

Buddy Read with @nooretics ♥️

#thelonelinessofsoniaandsunny #review by @eliselittlelibrary

#bookiplannedtoreadnext

This is what I have planned to read next. I recently finished Kafka on the shore. It was a weird book with a lot of good quotes. I don’t plan on writing review (for now) but I love the scenes and how two stories aligned at the end. Most importantly the journey of Kafka. It all came back to where all started but with different lense. That’s one thing I get away from the book, because seeing situation from different perspective ( I love talking about perspectives ) will help understand life.

Anyway, I have been away for awhile and I’m taking it slow. One by one. In reading and in life. I haven’t read much this year but the ones I have read are pretty solid ones. So I’m happy about it 💃✨

Q- what are you currently reading ?

#readingupdate #brokencountry by @eliselittlelibrary

Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
★★★★★

Evil Eye revolves around the main character, Yara, born and raised in Brooklyn by a Palestinian family, who assumes that marrying an entrepreneur will give her freedom and solve everything she has been through. Despite having everything she thought might open doors, it seems like nothing now that she has it.

On the front cover of the book, it is mentioned “A moving meditation on motherhood....Stunning” The stunning part is true but highlighting motherhood seemed doing injustice to the book. Motherhood is a theme but its story is far deeper than that, as a reader i felt deep in my bones what the author was trying to convey through words. I’m not sure how many of them were able to relate to the main character but reading i was able to understand more about myself and was able to get around why sometimes I feel restless and angry. I felt heavy while reading certain parts because the words mirrored my soul.

The world has progressed tremendously yet I sometimes question why people cling to superstitions like the evil eye and a lot more. Maybe to control certain parts of life, maybe to point out others for one’s hardships, or maybe it was taught to them at a very early age its almost impossible to break free from what was rooted in them. I’m a believer in evil eyes (sometimes, when life turns upside down) and this book showed how life has its limits. Leaving evil eye aside, what about what was taught to us at a very young age, and as adults we find it hard to abide by the rules and regulations the society and family have set for us. Maybe, by abiding by these expectations leads to complex trauma. passing down for generations. I was speechless when I discovered that trauma has DNA, that it could be passed down.

(Continued in the comments)
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#bookreview #evileyebook #etafrum

{ books, book review, bookstagram, book community, reader, reading community, annotation, quotes } by @eliselittlelibrary

#quotesfromcurrentread

“A thing repressed was buried so deep you couldn’t feel it anymore. You might even forget it was there. But once you dug it up to the surface, you were forced to feel it again, like a throbbing tooth every time your tongue grazed it. And she couldn’t do that. Itmade the everyday task of living unbearable. “

“As a child, Yara had struggled to form close friendships, despite attending school with the same group of girls most of her life. She wasn’t a bright and bubbly child, the way her Mira was, and always preferred to sit alone at lunch, her nose pressed into the pages of a sketch pad or a paperback novel instead of chatting with her classmates”

#etafrum #evileyebook #quotes #currentread

Q- what are you currently reading? by @eliselittlelibrary

one of my reading goals for this year is to read more classics. these are the collins classics i own, i have read a few books and i have to get through the children’s classic first before diving into complex classics.
q- what is your favourite children’s classic?
Books Featured
- Pollyanna by Eleanoe H.Porter
- A little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Wolf.
- The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
- White Fang by Jack London

#collinsclassics #flatlay #classics #books #booksbooksbooks by @eliselittlelibrary

“All these superstitions and predictions and belief deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep withinweakening their self esteem to such a point’ that they now feared anything, everything.”

“perhaps death was scary for everyone, but more so for the one who knew, deep within, that he lived a life of pretences and obligations, a life shaped by the needs and demands of other people”

10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world by Elif Shakaf revolves around “Tequila Leila”, her death, and what happens afterwards. After she passes for 10 minutes and 38 seconds, her body recalls memories and tastes related to those memories.

The taste of salt which reminded her of her birth, lemon and sugar reminded her of the days when women around got together for hair removal, cardamom coffee reminded her of the streets of brothels in Istanbul, and throughout the journey in the strange world, Leila recalls vivid memories and special tastes that were a crucial part of her life. Those memories recollect how she met her friends or how she calls it her “Support System” during her lifetime.

There are literally no words to describe a beautiful book with a beautiful concept. Friendship is one of the significant themes of the book. We as humans tend to forget that when one is not born to a loving, caring, and understanding family one can create a family of their own through Friendships. If this book teaches you one thing is that sometimes the blood isn’t thicker than the water.

Agree or NOT but friendships are the ones that’re keeping us sane in this wild world with cruelty, injustices, and violence. At the end of the day as humans we are not meant to hibernate our entire life, we are meant to be with people who understand the language we speak and what matters is who stays with you when the world turns against you.

Leila stands out as a remarkable character. Her resilience, bravery and self-assuredness shine through as she takes charge of her life, realising it wasn’t the right path for her. Despite trusting the wrong people, she owns her choices and builds a fulfilling life with those she loves.

★★★★★

Q- Have you read this book? by @eliselittlelibrary