Hi guys it's Aisling, welcome back to the Waterstones vlog. I've got some book
recommendations for you today; two very different ones but I hope you like them
anyway. So recently I had been in a bit of a reading slump. I was really
struggling to make it the whole way through a book. I was picking up books
and reading half of it and putting it down and just not returning to it. So I
decided to read something different. So I strolled into the music biography
section at work and picked up Clothes, Clothes, Clothes,
Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine. And this is part of the Faber
Social greatest hits series. There's a few other books in this series
that have a new cover with this kind of pop illuminous block colour. This book, it's
been out a while but it's been rereleased. And I have been intrigued by
the titles for a long time. I think a lot of the girls or women would be with a
title like that. And had always meant to pick it up and I finally did. So what
I will say first of all is that it reads very much like a novel. Sometimes I
forgot that I was actually reading nonfiction because Viv's way of
describing things or retelling stories from her life. I really enjoyed
it and it didn't feel like I'm reading nonfiction. Not that there's any
wrong with reading nonfiction. So the book is split into two
halves. Side one and side two, kind of like a record when you're playing it.
Side one documents Viv's life when she's kind of trying to break into music,
her early childhood, her teenagehood, her early womanhood, her boyfriends, the
clothes shops she used to go to and the kind of general scene in England at the
time. And you don't really need to know much about punk music or The Slits, the
band that Viv formed. You don't need to know much about it to enjoy it.
But I did enjoy learning about this scene and what was going on in London at
the time. And then side two of the book, the second half, is about
Viv's adulthood. So her struggles with fertility, her marriage you know kind of
becoming bored and disillusioned with her life and giving it another go
at music. So I found it really inspiring because I don't think we read a lot of
or not enough of biographies by women who are older and still maybe making
music or still making art or still acting. A lot of memoirs and biographies
tend to focus on the younger years and how something happened rather than you
know how did we get to the point that we are at now and what's going on now. So I
found that really interesting and I felt that it will speak to a lot of girls and
women over a very wide age range. So I would recommend that for anybody.
Maybe if you've got a rock chick mom you can get her that for Mother's Day,
recommendation right there. And the other book that I've read recently after Viv
Albertine got me out of my reading slump is a novel, new fiction, The Dreamers by
Karen Thompson Walker. Now this is a very beautiful, very strange book. So what
happens is this fictional town is taken over by this virus everybody starts
catching and it's spreading really fast throughout the town but the catch is
that the virus just makes everybody fall asleep and start dreaming and no one
knows where it comes from but it's spreading really really fast. And we get
a lot of perspectives in this book so it's not about any one particular
character. We follow some students in the university in the town, two young girls
and their father, an older gentleman who's a professor, a teenage couple
who maybe are not together, or they are, we're not sure. And it keeps returning
and sort of linking all of the different narratives and stories together. So it's
really cleverly done. And what I will say is ,of course I won't spoil it for you,
but there is an amazing twist at the end that I did not see coming. It's also very
sad but it's very enlightening. I will say as well I actually learned a
lot about sleep because Karen Thompson Walker includes a lot of kind of
biological facts about sleep and what happens when you're
dreaming and when you are asleep. So that's kind of thrown in there as well
as a little bit of extra fun. The writing is beautiful, the prose I think is
described on the front as luminous. And I would agree, it's fantastic. I'd recommend
it for fans of maybe Margaret Atwood or something like that but it's kind
of more maybe quiet than Margaret Atwood. But I enjoyed it, I absolutely
flew through it. So I hope you guys will enjoy it to. So guys those are my two
recommendations for this month, I hope you enjoy them and are inspired to pick
them up and I'll chat to you all again soon. All right, bye now.