Welcome back to Book Break! Today we are talking about books about
books, just my favourite subgenre, and maybe the most
perfect topic for book lovers to be reading about. And I have just been
feeling even more grateful than usual for books
recently. So if it is safe for you, why not visit your local
indie bookshop and show them some love? Thank them for all of the joy they
continue to bring us, particularly in stressful times, and maybe while you're
there you can buy any of these books on my list. When it
comes to books about books, obviously there are wonderful examples like The
Book Thief or The Shadow of the Wind which are really famous examples of this
genre. I have tried in today's video to put together a list of books that you
might not have already read, and this is a mix of fiction and
nonfiction. Either way this is a list for true book lovers.
So to kick us off I want to recommend the brand new book Dear Reader by Cathy
Rentzenbrink. This is a real love letter to books. It's
all aboutthe comfort and joy that books can bring
us. So Cathy Rentzenbrink says that she has been losing herself in
books for as long as she can remember, but particularly when tragedy struck in
her own life it was books that kept her afloat. And I think
so many of us will be able to relate to that feeling,
that no matter how stressful or hard things have been in our life,
books have always been there for us. Not to sound super cheesy!
So Dear Reader is a really moving but also really funny and joyful
book that is all about celebrating books and all they bring us,
and how they can genuinely change your life.
And it's packed with book recommendations as well from one true
book lover to another. And knowing how important books are in
helping us through our lives, the next book I want to talk about is
Well-Read Black Girl by Glory Edim. So this is all about the importance of
representation, and who gets to see themselves in stories.
It's an anthology collected by Glory Edim, of essays written by
Black women on the theme of finding themselves in literature.
And Glory Edim is really passionate about this she's actually the founder of
the well-read black girl book club, which is based in Brooklyn.
And it's really a space for Black voices to be uplifted.
And now, taking the idea that books can genuinely change your life, I have a
fiction recommendation. This is The Girl Who Reads on the Metro
by Christine Feret-Fleury. This is a very quirky little book about
a woman called Juliette who is given a job by a mysterious
bookseller. He gives her the mission of passing on the perfect
books to strangers at the perfect time in their life.
And Juliette has this real talent for finding
each person the exact right book they need to change their life
at that moment. I'd like her to come recommend me a book now! And then there's
Meet Cute Club by Jack Harbon, which is a super sweet romance story
about two men who meet at a romance book club.
One of them is a romance lover, the other one not so much, but he joins the book
club anyway as a way of them getting to spend more
time together. So it's a really sweet story, you get
representation of book lovers, which are always the best characters to read about,
and it's also quite meta, so you get to watch the romance tropes that they're
talking about play out in their own story. And for
another really heartwarming one, you should read The Reader on the 6,27
by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent. So this is about a man who works at a book
pulping factory. And he is a book lover so he absolutely
hates this job. But every day on the 6.27 train that he takes,
he reads aloud from one of the books he's managed to save
from the pulping machine. But then one day he finds
a diary of a woman called Juliet who turns out to be just as lonely in the
world as he is. So again it's a really sweet story about
books bringing people together and uplifting people's lives. And then for an
older book with a similar theme, there's Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil
Hrabal. So this is about a man who works as a
paper crusher in Prague under a police state, and again rescues
books to take home for his own reading. So we have similar concepts here
but actually very different books. The Reader on the 6.27 is much more of a
quirky, heartwarming, book club book, whereas Too Loud a Solitude is much
more philosophical and political. A lot of it is about
censorship, but they are both ultimately very funny.
And they are both of course about celebrating the power of the written
word. And while we're talking about censorship,
I have another non-fiction recommendation here,
for a real-life example of literature changing people's lives.
So this is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. This is a memoir of
Azar Nafisi's time spent as a professor at the university
of Tehran in the 70s and 80s, when the government were imposing
stricter and stricter regulations on what books she was allowed to teach,
and on what women were allowed to do and wear. So Azar Nafisi started a book club
for some of her female students where they would meet up in secret and
read forbidden Western works like, for example, as the
title suggests, Lolita. OK back to fiction. We have Balzac and
the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. So this one is set during the Chinese
cultural revolution, and it follows two city boys who are
sent to a rural farming village, and there they meet the daughter of a
local tailor and both fall in love with her. But they also find
a hidden treasure trove of translated literature.
And both the boys and the daughter of the tailor find that these books
change their lives in really unexpected ways. But maybe the biggest
life-changing moment comes in The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett,
when the Queen of England discovers a little mobile library and becomes
completely obsessed with reading. She actually decides she doesn't want to
carry out any of her royal duties anymore,
she just wants to stay and read. Very relatable.
It's a very short, very funny little novella, I really recommend.
Then a book that delves into the art of writing itself
is Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. So Mr Fox is a writer
and Mary Foxe, with an e, is his muse. He wrote her into existence and now she is
back to challenge him. So this one really plays with the art of
storytelling. Mr Fox and Mary take turns writing
stories, challenging each other to this game, but
the reader is never quite sure who is writing which story, and where
fiction meets reality. Poetry lovers, we haven't forgotten about
you. Off the Shelf is a collection of poetry that celebrates bookshops.
Such a lovely idea and this was put together by Carol Ann Duffy,
and a collection of the poets that contributed to this book actually went
on tour together in 2016 and again in 2018,
visiting bookshops across the UK doing poetry reading and really celebrating
those wonderful places, bookshops, that just feel like home when we step inside
them. And finally, finishing up with two more
non-fiction books that talk about the experience of being a book lover.
Bookworm by Lucy Mangan is a memoir of the author's childhood
spent as a book lover. So she talks about so many of the beloved books that we all
grew up reading, and also discusses which books
might go on to inspire a future generation of book lovers.
And lastly, The Gifts of Reading is an anthology where we get to hear from some
of the world's most beloved writers, all about the gifts that reading has
brought to them. So we have essays in here from Philip Pullman,
Candace Carty-Williams, Chigozie Obioma, Jackie Morris and so many more.
And the collection was inspired by an essay by Robert Mcfarlane,
which begins with the wonderful line "this story,
like so many stories, begins with a gift. The gift,
like so many gifts, was a book." So i would love to hear some of your book
recommendations that fit this theme, all about books and bookshops. So many of
my favorite books fall into this category.
And I've also put together a playlist for you to browse through here
of Book Break videos that were filmed at some of our favourite bookshops.
So many happy memories there. And we will see you next time!