hi everyone it's Lauren I have a rather unexpected book haul for you today, I mean not
expected in the way that these books just magically appeared in my house and I had
no idea they were turning up, but unexpected in the fact that I wasn't expecting this
many books this soon after my last book haul, but that's ok! More books! More books! Why not?
The first two books I have to show you today was sent to me by the Booksellers
Association. They run campaigns such as the Books Are My Bag campaign in autumn
and also the independent bookshops week which this year is going to be between
the 18th and the 25th of June. Last year during independent bookshops week I did
a bookshop crawl around London with Jen and Holly which you can go and see if
you've not seen it before, and this year
independent bookshops week is 10 years old so they have asked ten bloggers and
vloggers to get involved in promoting the campaign and I'm one of he people
that they asked. One part of independent bookshops week is the independent
booksellers awards for which there are three shortlists, they have an adult
fiction category a children's fiction category and also picture book category
The booksellers association has very kindly sent me some of the books on the adult
fiction and the firstone of these is The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley now this has
been everywhere recently it's won the Costa book of the year award and it sounds really
spooky and haunting. It's about two brothers one of them is mute and they go
to this place by the coast and every year I think, we catch up with one of the
brothers many years later and something has happened when they were by
themselves in this strange place called the Loney by the sea and it sounds a
bit like a mystery and we're finding out what's happening. Also nominated is The
Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks which is an autobiography of a shepherd in the
Lake District in the north of England and he farms Herdwick sheep which is a
breed of sheep specific to Cumbria and my mum read this a long while ago
actually because she loves the Lake District and she was really interested to read this
and this is one of those books which sounds like it's probably not going to
be that interesting or perhaps not appealing to a really wide range of
people but it's been a
great success and I'm really excited to see what it's all about. Another one I'm
really excited for its A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson this is a semi sequel
to her previous book Life After Life but I believe it can be read stand-alone
I've not read any Kate Atkinson before so I was really excited to be sent this
This follows the life of Teddy Todd who is someone who goes into the second world
war and it's how he copes with his life after that and it sounds like it's a look
at how these huge dramatic events where terrible things happen affect not only
the people involved in those events but also the generations after them
and finally we have another non-fiction which is SPQR by Mary Beard. Mary Beard is a
professor of classics and she's appeared in a lot of programs and UK about ancient Rome
this is a singuar history of ancient Rome. I absolutely love Mary Beard's programs
on the telly and I've been meaning to get something by her for a while I
wasn't sure that this would be a great place to start because it is just about
Roman history and I wanted to learn a little bit more about the times in general
before going straight into this but this has had a really great response so I'm
really interested to actually read something by her, some of her more academic work
moving away from the booksellers award shortlist, Penguin also very kindly sent me
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. This has been absolutely everywhere it sounds like a
real tear-jerker, it's a romance novel about women who's lost her job and a man who has
had a motorbike accident in their lives collide and probably terribly sad and
upsetting and heartbreaking things happen, but I've not read a book like this
for a very long time since maybe One Day by David Nicholls. A couple of weeks ago
Jean from BookishThoughts was down in London to visit her university professors
so we went for breakfast and she very kindly got me a book for my birthday
which was The Magician by Somerset Maugham, now I felt like a right idiot at
breakfast because apparently this is an author I should have had of and I
completely had never heard of him but this sounds really cool, it sounds like
it mixes nineteenth-century kind of Paris bohemian culture with like the
occult
so it sounds very interesting. Jean really enjoyed it and she was trying to
think of a book she had read and liked and perhaps I hadn't read. Gallic Books contacted
me a few weeks ago asking if I would like to be sent to the new book by Muriel
Barbery which I absolutely did and it is called The Life of Elves, you might
remember that she wrote The Elegance of the Hedgehog which I've heard really great
things about and this sounds like a bit of a modern changeling fairy tale myth
It is about to foundling children, one found in Burgundy in France and the
other in Spain I believe and as they grow up they have some very strange
talents and I guess the implication is that they're fairy changlings or
something like that. It's written in a very interesting structure having flicked
through it and this is my first Muriel Barbery, so very excited about that
then the other week while I was waiting for my friend of Waterloo station I went
into the Foyles in there because of course I always pass my time in
bookshops and somehow I ended up buying books.... The first time I got another J D Salinger
and that was Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction
I read Franny and Zooey last year and I think it was one of my favourites of the year in
the end and I really really enjoyed it
these stories follow the same family the Glass family and I think any of these
books can be read in any order and I enjoyed Franny and Zooey so much I'm
really interesting to read more about this family and get more of an
overarching view of their story, and the second one but I picked up which was a
complete whim but I just had to have it was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora
Neale Hurston and this is one of those so great to classic American books I've
never read and she was a forerunner of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker
and this book appears to be about a young girl was kind of married off
to a much older man, and
how she continues on with her life and though I don't know very much more
about the plot than that this is just one of those absolutely iconic works
that has inspired so many other authors and when I saw it on the shelf in this beautiful
cover as well I just kind of had in my hand and then..I owned it. I am really excited
about that very pleased to finally bought it and finally I saw on Twitter
that Laura Bates who founded the everyday sexism project has a new book
out and as soon as I saw that I just went on Book Depository and was like 'right
I'm getting it, don't even know very much about it' but was very excited to read it
and it's called Girl Up and from the blurb it looks like it is talking about
different things that women are told, different things are put on women and
girls as they grow up and perhaps debunking some myths about femininity and
about being a woman and calling out secxism. I have been a follower of the everyday
sexism project from a few years now since it was fairly in its infancy and I
know for me it was something that really solidified my own beliefs in feminism, it
kind of made me realize a lot of every day minor stuff that you never really
think about and so I think Laura Bates is a really amazing woman and I'm really
looking forward to reading this and at the same time as buying this I thought I
had to buy Everyday Sexism, In know Jean read this book a few months ago and really
really liked it and it really inspired her, well it was one of the reasons I
think that inspired her to start the Feminist Orchestra Bookclub which is on Goodreads
As much as I've loved the Twitter project I've not actually read the book and something
that I wanted to do soon, maybe in a few months' time is do a video talking about
different feminist literature and different books about feminism just from
whatever your prior prior experience and for different levels of familiarity with
the topic so if I'm going to do that I'd better read some of these books so that I
can recommend them or not
very very exciting to finally have these so I would love to hear from you if you
have read any of these books already I am very excited to get to them if you're
new you can subscribe by clicking the red subscribe button just underneath the
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and I will have a chat to you in the comments and see you in my next video. Bye!