Hi everyone! My name is Frede and today, I'm going to be talking about the books that I read in December.
This is gonna be a bit of a messy kind of wrap-up because it's the 21st now
and I'm gonna be talking about the three books that I've sort of read so far,
and then I'm going to my mum's for Christmas and then I'm staying there until the new year.
So everything that I read until then I'm gonna be doing another part of this and then I'm just gonna be editing
it together because I can't be bothered to do two videos for this because it's not that many books.
But I just thought that would be the easiest.
Because I have some time now and if I talk about those three books now
I don't have to talk about them at the end of the month and use that time that I could use for other things
then. So that's just how I'm gonna do it today.
It's a bit like messy but I don't really care.
So the first book that I finished was a comic I guess which is something I usually don't read.
And it's called Purgatory by Holly Brown.
So this is the kind of special limited Kickstarter edition,
I'm gonna put this down.
She's a youtuber, I'm gonna be leaving her channel down below, she makes videos about art.
I'm not an artist but I really enjoy watching her videos,
I think she's hilarious. And she has been doing this webcomic for, I don't know, two years
maybe I think. Quite a long time. And some time in summer I think she had a Kickstarter
for it and I thought okay I really enjoy your videos I would like to kind of support you.
So I donated her some money to get this limited edition from her comic.
So it's got this very pretty picture.
The normal edition kind of that you can buy has another cover which I will be like inserting a photo of here.
But yeah so I've got the special edition I guess.
This is about sort of a religious community, almost kind of like a cult.
They live in some sort of society that's almost like the 50s,
it's very conservative, you have like very strict roles for things people can do,
and you have two I think 15 year old boys, Simon and Damian, and Simon is the son of a priest I guess,
and Damian is a boy who just recently moved to that town,
and kind of through their relationship and through Simon showing Damian around,
you kind of get to see this world. It's a really cruel religion,
they sacrifice people every season or something,
to kind of wash away the sins of the entire community or something like that.
And it's a really interesting kind of concept and basically, you have their relationship
in this very religious, probably very homophobic society.
I really, really liked the art style of this,
I love Holly Brown as an artist and I really did enjoy it for that.
Also when I was reading this I had a lot of uni stress and I couldn't really do a novel,
like my brain was just not having it. So that was very nice to just still be reading something,
to be experiencing a story but kind of a bit easier on my brain I guess.
I think the story could've used some editing, though. Sometimes the dialogue felt a bit clumsy,
there were a couple of like spelling mistakes in there, so yeah, someone should've looked over this.
Like this is self-published so this is kind of why it is like that.
Yeah so I mean it's- I guess it was an average story but I kind of still enjoyed it for what it was,
There is rape in here, so definitely trigger warning for that.
Yeah, this wasn't outstanding but it was enjoyable while I was reading it.
The second book that I wanna talk about today is a DNF but I kind of really almost finished it.
And that is Siclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here which I had to read for a class on satires.
And this is a book that imagines fascism to rise in the US, it was written in the 1930s.
It's a really bad book.
So I mean this is how far I got. So I've really almost finished it but at some point I just gave up.
Because I was like I can't do it, I can't do it, it's so bad.
Because basically, what the book makes fun of is this sentiment that a lot of Americans have
like 'oh we're so special, like something like fascism can't happen here'
so this is kind of what it makes fun of, at least in the beginning.
But then this guy who is kind of this fascist figure becomes the president of the US,
And after that it just- like, it's not even a downward spiral,
it just from one second to the next just [fwoop noise] and it's bad.
And it's just, it's not a good book. The dialogue is really awkward sometimes,
the story is just like something happens, something happens, something happens, something happens,
but there's no connection between anything.
And Sinclair Lewis I think researched this topic for years, five years maybe even more,
but he wrote this in like half a year or three months or something.
And you can really see that. It's a really bad novel and there's really- yeah I couldn't do it.
All the characters are also extremely flat, they're just there- like it feels like they're just there
so that Sinclair can kind of talk about fascism but they're not- they don't feel like real characters,
and they speak so weirdly. So yeah, there was really nothing good about this.
And I really hope that for my exam I won't need this book. So I'm gonna have to write two essays
and I really hope that there will be no essay question on this book because I just hated it so much
and I really don't wanna finish this.
And the last book that I have for today is a book that I did finish but it was also for uni,
and that is Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss.
This is a book about a man who is found in the desert somewhere in Nevada
and he has lost all his memory and so he comes to a hospital and they find a tumor on his brain.
And they- he has an operation and they kind of manage to cut the tumor out
but he loses most of his memory, the only thing he remembers is his life before he was 12.
So he doesn't remember his wife, he doesn't remember his friends, he doesn't remember anything in his job,
and so his wife comes and picks him up, they go back to New York where he's actually from
so I mean that's quite a way to go from like New York to Nevada,
but so that's where he goes and then that's kind of where the story develops.
And this was Nicole Krauss's first novel I believe and you can really tell.
Because the beginning was really strong, like the first 70 pages I flew through
I really, really loved those. And then it just kind of went downhill very slowly and then very fast.
It's just- you get these- you get a lot of like plot strings kind of and they all-
you have so many loose ends. And at the end of the novel I had so many questions but not in a good way
like you know there are some books that leave you with a lot of questions
and it's like this was brilliant. But this wasn't. She- I think she was trying to do something that was
very smart, but I don't think she really succeeded in that. You can really tell this is her first novel.
I would like to read something else by her, because as I said, the beginning was really strong
and maybe she developed her writing more into that direction.
I don't know, I might have to look into that. But yeah, so it was mediocre.
It wasn't bad but it was, yeah it was a bit underwhelming, I guess.
So these were the three books that I've read so far, as I said it's the 21st.
We'll just have a little cut until the end of the month. So see you then.
So it's now the 30th of December and as you can maybe hear, I'm a bit ill,
so we're sitting on my bed today [laughs]
And yeah basically, after we last spoke I read three more books.
And the first of them was The Good Immigrant. I started this at the beginning of the month
and finished it around Christmas. This I think made its rounds on booktube last year,
it's an essay collection kind of by different I guess ethnic minority writers from the UK
who speak about their experience as being some sort of immigrant to the UK
and how they are treated by people there, their experiences. Very differnt people, you have actors,
you have writers, you have comedians, you have I don't know people from all walks of life
which made it really, really fascinating to have like these many different perspectives
from people who come from so different places in society
and then also have a different I guess ethnic background
and are therefore also treated differently. Obviously, and I think that this is something that everyone has said
who talked about this, some of those essays were more appealing to me than others
because that's what you get when you have 21 people who are so different from each other
writing in one book, there will always be chapters that you like more than others.
But it was amazing for me to have so many different perspectives in just one place
and I definitely learned a lot from this.
And overall basically I think this is a super important book that I think everyone should read.
The next book that I finished is a tiny poetry collection by Warsan Shire
called Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It's really just I think 30 pages or something,
it's really short, 34 pages. And in this very short poetry collection she really manages to put so much in here.
There are some poems which are really short, just one or two lines. Which is not my type of poetry.
I always want a bit more than that. But most of them have like this length.
They're like much longer. And her poetry really worked for me, kind of her style of writing.
So basically, this is a collection where she talks about mostly like war,
and the experience of like fleeing war, war is a very I guess recurring topic in this collection
but she also talk about I guess sexual assault, she talks about eating disorders,
a lot of very heavy topics. And these poems really, they- so many of them just
pack a punch and you read it and then the last couple of words just make you go like
wow ok, I was not expecting this kind of turn.
I always find it very difficult to speak about poetry but this was a collection that really, really worked for me.
And I'm gonna have a look at what else she's written because this was really, really good.
And then the last book that I finished was a short story collection,
so I really read a lot of different types of books in the second half of the month,
and that is The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night by Jen Campbell.
I've seen a lot of people rave about this book and I love Jen's youtube channel
she's really one of my favourite booktubers, and I'm kind of really frustrated about this.
Because Jen can write. She's an amazing writer in the sense that she really knows how to use language
to make you feel things. And she can really spin these beautiful sentences,
but with some of these stories, they just didn't work for me at all.
Especially, like for example the first story which is called Animals.
Which I've seen a lot of people say that this was one of their favourites,
and for me, the general premise of the story was fascinating,
it's basically if you haven't read it about people buying hearts, mostly from animals
to kind of carry those hearts around with them and then after a while they implant them
into different humans. Which is a fascinating concept.
But what just really irked me and that was something she did in a couple of other stories
but it was the worst in that first story for me, she did a lot of research on different topics,
and I've seen her talk about this in youtube videos where she says some of these stories
came into existence because she did research on a certain topic and then these things she found out
inspired her to write a story. But sometimes it felt like she was just info-dumping,
like showing 'oh look at all these things I know', putting them in the story
and they had something to do with the story, but it was just- you know you have the plot, you have the action
going on and then there is this random sentence, I don't know, 'There used to be a queen who ate hearts,'
and then the story kind of goes into this direction but it just- it really always dragged me out of
the experience of reading those stories and experiencing the world in those stories,
which was really frustrating because as I said, her writing is beautiful.
And so some stories really just left me with this feeling 'God, I wish you had edited this differently.'
Yeah, there were also some stories that I don't really think I got,
where I just read them and at the end I was left feeling very confused
and just feeling like I read a couple of pages with a lot of beautifully written sentences
but no substance to them. Which was really, really sad because as I said, she can write.
But sometimes I felt like I just don't- I didn't get it. I don't know.
There were some stories in here that were amazing, though.
There was one which is called Margaret and Mary at the end of the world.
That was one of my favourite stories, I also really liked the title story of this collection,
those were really, really good. They were really strong and also in the Margaret and Mary one,
there was also a lot of research in the background of that story,
she kind of manages to weave this research into the stories but it doesn't drag me out of the story as much
as with for example the first story. So there were some stories in here that were so strong and like amazing
and if I would give the stories themselves star ratings I would give those stories five stars out of five,
but then there were some that just- just really didn't work for me
and just kind of left me a bit disappointed and underwhelmed.
So, yeah. As a whole, I'm not sure how I liked this.
So these were the last three books that I read in December,
this was a bit of I guess an experimental way to do a wrap up, but this way I had my books to hold them up,
which was nice because I like being able to hold my books up.
If you've read any of the books I talked about today also in the first kind of half of this
do tell me what you thought of them, I would be very interested to hear about that.
And thank you for watching this video, I will see you in my next one. Bye!
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