Hi everyone, it's Lauren and this is part
1 of my October wrap up, so all of the
books that I've read in the first couple
of weeks in October. So the first book
that I finished was Hot Milk by Deborah
Levy, this book was shortlisted for the
man booker prize which is why I read it
I've also read Swimming Home by Deborah
Levy, which I really loved so I was really
excited to read and this new release by
her
This is about a mother and daughter and
the mother's legs have mysteriously
stopped working, sometimes she can walk
sometimes she can't walk and so they go
to Spain to see the specialist doctor to see
finally what is wrong with her legs; she's
been plagued with illness her entire
life
It's more about the daughter coming to
terms with herself
coming to terms with her relationship with
her mother and her own identity than it
is about her mother's illness but it's
also the question of whether her mother
is really ill and it's a slightly oddball
slightly off the wall novel in the way
that I felt like I was watching like an
Almodovar film, like it's just very weird
but there seemed to be a lot of symmetry
a lot of meaning in everything that's
happening and although it's a little bit
strange in terms of plot it's almost
like it's very very controlled and while
I appreciated the cleverness of the
novel, I almost felt it was a little bit
contrived in terms of things wrapping up
a little bit too neatly. Some of the
themes and some of the points that Levy
was trying to make I think came a...
I felt like they were being hamered over
my head a little bit
it's almost like it was too precise and
too clever and I couldn't just get swept
up in it because I was noticing what she
was doing the whole time which is a
shame because generally I really enjoy
Deborah Levy's writing but I find with a
lot of books that are shortlisted or long
listed for the man booker prize that I
have this massive expectation going in
and I did have quite high expectations
for this novel so there's nothing wrong
with it, it was very clever, I just was a
little bit underwhelmed I suppose. The next
book that I finished was Night Waking by
Sarah Moss
so I read Sarah Moss's latest novel
The Tidal Zone earlier this year and I
absolutely loved it and I want to just
read everything she's ever written so
this is the first book in a series of
linked novels. The premise of this is a
family with two young children have gone
to a
ficitonal island in the Highlands of
Scotland where this woman's husband has
an ancestral home and they're living there
for awhile he investigates puffins and
she's a fellow of Oxford University
she's a professor but she's taking a
break onto the island to look after the
children. She's supposed to be writing her
book about childhood in the
Victorian ages and while she's there she
starts investigating a situation on the
island and where children were dying
within sort of 8 days of being born between a period
of about 20 years
this is based in fact, but this is a
fictional story. What I really loved
about this novel is that Sarah Moss's
writing of families is just so real and
so like funny but also really really
honest and I loved these sections of
this family on the island and it's
just such...I mean I'm not a mother but
it felt like a very true painting of
motherhood and that she was like she
loved her children but also dealing with
a toddler and a seven-year-old is very
very trying and I think that came across
really well, but these sections are
interspersed with letters from people on
the island in sort of 1800 and that
part of the story was equally
interesting but very differently written
so I like this sort of past and
present juxtaposition
Overall I wasn't as impressed by this
book as I was by her latest novel but I
think that's to be expected because
people's writing develops and this is an
older novel by her, I definitely want to
read the second two in the series they
kind of linked, I don't think you have to read
them all together but that is Bodies
of Light and Signs for Lost Children
I believe, so I definitely want to read those because
I really enjoy her writing. The next book
that I read in October was I Know Why
the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and
this has been downloaded on my kindle
for an immense amount of time and i'm very
pleased I finally got around to it
This is an autobiography of Maya
Angelou's life from childhood up until
the age of about 16, when she was a child
she grew up with her brother and with
her grandmother in the southern US and
her parents were divorced and at
different places in in the north and she
spent time with her grandmother, time
with her mother and father and back
again and its really really interesting
looking at these different cultures in
different places while she's growing up
herself
often kind of changing her opinions on
the world around her. What I really loved
about this was Angelou's writing I
thought the writing was so beautiful and
it's very interesting the way she
constructs her life because it's almost
like these sections of things that she
remembers, so it's like isolated
incidents, things that burn through in
her memory from when she was a child and
yet she always manages to mythologize
them or it turns into a coherent
story and it's very interesting because her
writing is very beautiful and I think
there's an element of the 'unreliable
narrator' in here because obviously this
is Maya Angelou's real life but it reads
like a novel because of the way it's
written and it reads like fiction almost
rather than an autobiography and I think
that poses a really interesting question
because it's not the character of 'Maya
Angelou' being purposefully unreliable but
it's like this is someone's real
memories and how much of it is real, how
much of it is looking at it through the
eyes of a poet? Through
the eyes of someone who wants to create
a novel out of this, and I found that
aspect of it very very interesting so
I'm really pleased that I finally read
it and I'm looking forward to reading
the next book in her..I was going to say her
series but obviously, of her life
because I think she's written more
biographies from you know, 16 and upwards
and then the last book that I read in
the first half of October was
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora
Neale Hurston. This book was not what I
expected it to be at all, I think I
thought it was going to be more like a
fictionalized version of I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings, I don't know why, but
it's so much more than that
This follows a young girl called Janie
and she when she's 16 her grandmother
sees her kissing a boy and so she
marries her off to a much older man and
it's sort of about her going through
different marriages going through different
men, going through different periods in her
life, but through Janie going on this
journey what we get is a look at all
these different aspects of black culture
in America at the time and what Zora
Neale Hurston is doing is taking the oral
culture of her mothers and grandmothers
and the everyday lives of African
Americans and bringing it into the
higher form of a literary novel which was at
the time
kind of new idea because this is
written...all of the speech is
written in dialect and it's a novel that
seems to manage to say a lot of things
without it
feeling to allegorical which I thought
was very impressive. Something that I
really liked in as part of this novel is
it when Janie is talking about her
grandmother who married her off she's
saying that her grandmother was born
into slavery and she kind of escape from
slavery or slavery was abolished during
her lifetime, and then when she had her
daughter and a granddaughter she kind of
looked at what she wanted a woman to be
and she thought he could just sit around
and be someone's wife and not have to
work that would be amazing but then when
it comes down to Janie's generation
she's like 'I don't want to just be a
wife I want to do this and that, I want
to marry for love' and it's that sort of
evolution of expectation. I think it's the
kind of book that you could really study
because there was so much in here and I
feel like I almost didn't get it
well I definitely didn't get it on the
first reading and I thought her writing
was so interesting and she's definitely
someone that I want to explore more off
because she's written some nonfiction as
well and I'd be really interested to see
what that kind of style of writing is
like because this is almost so literary
that'd be really interested to see what
it's like reading something just
completely in Zora Neale Hurston's own voice so
I'm quite impressed myself reading four
books in the first two weeks of
October because I've been in a little
bit of a reading slump recently so I'm
glad I could kind of get back in
do let me know if you've read any of
these books and I will see you in my
next video, bye!