Hi everyone its Lauren and I have a fun tag video for you today celebrating
independent bookshops. Independent Bookshops Week is a campaign which is
run by the booksellers association between the 18th and the 25th of
June and this tag was created by Will at the Vintage Vlog whose video I'll link
below in the description box and it's all about the joy of books and book
shops which is something that I really love so let's get started
the first question is What book is currently in your bag?
this is like an in-joke! In-joke! Because the booksellers association also do the Books
Are My Bag campaign in October. My answer for that is Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
because of course, it's everywhere at the moment a lot of people have read it, have
loved it, there's also some controversy about it and it is out in the cinema at
the moment so i thought i would read it and see what all the fuss is about
also I don't really read I've never read Jojo Moyes to begin with but i don't
really read romance novels very often so I thought this would be an
interesting break for me and also I always always have my kindle in my bag
because i have like, 'reader's fear' where I just worried if I finish a
book i won't have another one to read so i just really like having it, like
always, even if i'm reading a physical book so that if i finish it
it's fine i've got my whole library with me all the time. Question two is What the
last great book that you read? and for me that's actually the last book I read
which is Girls Will Be Girls by Emer O'Toole
the main idea in this book is that gender is a performance and when you
were born you are not born wanting to wear high heels if if you are female or
wanting to be a car mechanic if you're male or whatever and it talks about the
way that society defines gender roles and that it's easier for someone to fit
into those roles as their gender & people who defy those norms or what society
deems appropriate for your biological sex then that can be very
very difficult and it's so interesting
it's really really easy to read and from the beginning it leads you into these
theories just so easily, like by the end I felt like I'm, not an expert in gender
theory, but she's talked about quite a lot of different complex and theoretical
things
but at the beginning it just brings you along on that journey and you don't have
to have any prior experience or knowledge about gender theory. Question 3
is What book have you gifted the most? now I'm not someone who gets people books
very often because the people that I know that read a lot I worry that
i'm going to give them something that they have already read and the people
that I know that don't read a lot
I just think I don't want to push my reading upon them, but probably recently
and the book I've gifted the most is The Improbability of Love by Hannah
Rothschild because I think this is really really fun and whether you read a
lot or you don't read a lot
I think you're going to get something out of this book. This was shortlisted
for the Baileys women's prize for fiction and it's about an undiscovered painting
and a lost painting which gets found in a junk shop and lots and lots of people
are trying to own this painting for all different reasons though it's a bit
of a mystery but it's also really fun and really funny. Question 4 is What is
your favorite independent bookshop? now I go in lots of different book shops for
different reasons and a lot of it has to do with location i'll be honest but the
really small independents
I really like the london review book shop which is near the british museum
because i think it's got a really nice atmosphere in there i really like
the displays that they do and there's a cafe attached to it as well and which
was really nice little cakes so it's just a really nice experience going in
that book shop and another new one which I need to explore a little bit more and
it's a book shop just off Brick Lane called Libreria which Jen Campbell took
me to and it just looks really really interesting it's like little wonder cave
of books all of the bookshelves are curved and there's mirrors on the
ceiling so it didn't look feels like you're in this complete world of books
Question 5 is what's been your favorite book recommended to you by either a
bookseller or a fellow booktuber? and i'm going to be really boring for this and
just use girls will be girls and again because I'm not very good at taking
recommendations from other people I've realized when I was thinking of my answer
for this question there's a lot of books that i've bought because other people
have really loved them, but then maybe I haven't read them because I've just been
reading other stuff that's quite an interesting thing I've learned about
myself is that I don't really
listen to people when it comes to choosing books! Question 6 is What's your
favorite book shop memory? and I think for me that has to be about two years
ago when i was going around Waterstones and I'd saved up a load of money i had not
bought books in ages
I think it's before i had a booktube channel and I just went mental and I
just thought, i'm going to spend all my money and buy loads of books and I
brought a tote bag with me
I was going around the shop putting all the books in there that I wanted and
then by the time I got to the till i had two books which couldn't fit in my tote
bag so I just put them down on the till and then the cashier said something like
'ok great that's 10 pounds' or whatever
'will you need a bag?' and I was like 'mate, I haven't paid for any of these!'
and I just tipped it out on the till, I was like yeah there's there's quite a lot of
books in there that i need to pay for and it just really made me laugh because I
could have just walked out that shop with all those books no one had seen me
going around on the shelves like putting these books in my bag Question 7 is
What the bookshops mean to you and what do you love about bookshops? and I think
for me before I really discovered booktube as an outlet and it was just a
really safe space and a really beautiful space and I loved is getting lost in
bookshops and looking at all the shells I spend a lot of time when I do go and
proper bookshop shopping
I spent a long time looking at all the shows looking all the different displays
reading all the blurbs and it's just a wonderful thing to do I love walking round
book shops by myself it's quite an insular and imaginative process and
deciding if you want to buy something and learning about new authors and it's
just a really comforting thing for me going round book shops
Question 8 is What are the books that made you or what books have most affected or
influence you? and I've got three books for this question first one is a set of
short stories by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, which is the thing around your neck and I
really love this collection because all of these stories are in some way
connected with an immigrant experience and what it's like to come to a new
country and be completely misunderstood and that's an experience that I don't
have and it opened my eyes in a lot of ways to what it must be like to go to
a new country and and just small things about your culture which you take for
granted other people don't understand
similar to that was something I read last year
it was a room of one's own by Virginia Woolf now this is basically a long essay
or speech but it is fictionalized and it's Virginia Woolf talking about what
women need in order to progress and in order to become great writers and the
two things that she says you need are the means to support yourself and a Room
of One's Own in which to write and this just was a book that really spoke to me
and make me see some things I hadn't really thought about before in terms of
feminism and the history of feminisim and the history of men writing about women
and women not having a voice of their own there's a lot of topics in here that
I loved, there are a lot of sentences that I kept on the lining and finally a book
that really affected me and still does when I think about it is A Girl is a
Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride and this is just beautiful it's a very
interesting book is written as a stream of consciousness and at first it's very
difficult to read it very difficult to understand i would recommend to keep
giving it a go
because the more you get into her style the more you're sort of getting what's
going on and you just get used to it by the end and it's just a beautiful
beautiful heartbreaking story i think because it's told
with such honesty from the main character's perspective you just you
just empathize with her so much
Question 9 is what book would you recommend for father's day? this is quite
difficult because you know I don't think as a type of book but dads like reading
a book that i have gifted to my dad in the past and I've also gifted to my
boyfriend's dad is The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
which won the man booker prize in 2015 and this is about the
japanese prisoner-of-war railroad it's a very raw yet very beautiful book and
it's the kind of thing that I think my dad would be interested in because it's
sort of about war and it's about a part of world war two that in the West at
least we we don't really hear about
so I thought my dad would like this Question 10 is What is at the top of
your TBR or to be read pile? and for me that is something very exciting which is
Eimear McBride's new novel which is The Lesser Bohemians and I was sent an
advanced copy of this last week
this isn't out until September, I honestly don't know anything about it
and i sort of want to go into it cold because it's just my love for A Girl is
a Half-formed Thing which is making me really excited about this
so that's my attempt at the independent bookshops week tag i hope this was
interesting
I'm not very good at tag videos and tagging other people in it because I
don't know
and who's done it already but because this is such a beautiful tag about book
shops which is something that I think really important i would love anybody
who wants to have a go at this tag to have a go so I tag
everybody's watching this who has a booktube channel to join in
and if you are in the UK there are events happening all across the country
in your different independent bookshops between the eighteenth and the
twenty-fifth of june so please look them up you can find details about them on
the independent bookshops week website or just go into your local bookshop and
see if they're doing anything during that week if you don't have a booktube
channel I'd love to hear your answers to these questions in the comments below
and I will see you next time bye!