Hi everyone it's Lauren and this is my February reading wrap-up. I actually
didn't finish that many books in February, I've had so much going on just
in life in general I've been busy every weekend I'm training for this blooming
marathon that I'm supposed to be doing, so I've started a lot of books, I've not
finished loads so I thought I'd do sort of some book reviews of things I've read
and then also a bit of a currently reading video as well. So the first book
that I finished this month is a poetry collection and that is Why God is a
Woman by Nin Andrews and I read this on the recommendation of Jen Campbell who
really enjoyed it, yeah I'm not sure how to feel about it! This is about a mythical
island in Central America I would presume, where the patriarchy is turned
on its head, women are in control of the island and the boys and young men are
objectified and one of the things that happens to men on this island is that
when they hit puberty they sprout wings from their backs and when
they sprout the wings that's when they start getting really objectified by the
women, and it is an interesting look at inequality and the patriarchy and modern
feminism in a way because the way this is structured all of these poems are
prose, little short stories really, from the point of view of a young boy who
has left the island, he's looking back on his childhood. It was kind of questioning
like my own views in a way because I was thinking oh that's a bit weird, like it's
it's hard to kind of imagine women being all-powerful and how it would be for a
young boy to grow up and just imagine marrying a woman how one day he could
have a really powerful wife and it she was so beautiful it'd be amazing and
kind of worrying about the way he looks and those are all traits that you kind
of associate with young teenage girls and hearing it from a boy's perspective
was a little bit uncomfortable and then it kind of makes you question why you
think that is uncomfortable, so it's quite interesting, it's clever in that
way and it's very imaginative I liked what she did with kind of how the men
changed their own bodies in order to be attractive to the women and they need to
have all their feathers and how big their wings need to be and she talks
about doing tattoos around their penises and they have to be completely hairless
and they have these beautiful kind of flowers all tattooed around their groin
area because a normal un-tattooed penis is all
disgusting and you need to be hairless and all pretty and it that kind of stuff
think was very interesting. I think some aspects of this collection went a little
bit too far for me and that's not to say that it's extreme in any way, just that I
kind of found the images that she was creating it's almost like I just
couldn't keep up with them and in some cases it's so full and it's so
vivid and she paints a really interesting picture, but then in some
places I was just like okay I can't you've lost me now, I'm not on board
with you anymore. Next I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I'm really
pleased because I said I was going to read it this month and I did, and this is
a gorgeous new edition which has been released by Vintage Books. They have this
new dystopian series they also do The Handmaid's Tale and 1984 in these beautiful
kind of black and red covers. This is set in a far-flung future where most of the
West it seems to be in this book is highly civilized and that means in this
context that people don't give birth anymore
babies are kind of engineered in laboratories and they grow in test tubes
and throughout this growth process different things are done to the
embryos to make them different types of people, so society is completely pyramid-ised
I don't know if that's the correct word for it, but they have the alphas at the top
of the pyramid who are kind of designed individually and they are programmed to
be the leaders of civilization and then it goes down to the betas and then at
the epsilons and gammas kind of down at the bottom who are doing all the manual
labour, and everybody is raised and brainwashed as they grow up in these
institutions to really love what they do. So if you are a gamma then you really
like manual labor and you like repetitive tasks and you're very stupid
because they put alcohol in your embryo and all these kind of things and so that
everyone in society is completely happy with their station in life and society
works perfectly and everyone just has sex with everyone all the time because
they don't get pregnant and marriage doesn't exist, couples don't
exist and everybody's together and there's no kind of individuality. There's
not a great deal of plot to the book it's much more a look at to this society
and some of the action happens when two people from the UK go to an uncivilized
part of the world I think probably like Mexico it's meant to be
and they find a woman and a young boy who were meant to be civilized, they're
from the UK and they've kind of been mixed up in this uncivilized 'savage'
world and that's all this little boy has known. So it does have elements of The
Tempest where obviously the title's from and it's like this little boy is the
Miranda character who is being brought into civilization. It is quite
interesting reading about this sort of dystopian future in today's modern
society because I'm not 100% sure Aldous Huxley is saying this is just a dreadful
future or if he's just kind of musing on how far things could go, because to me I
feel like he's kind of poking fun at both ends of the spectrum. So in one
sense you have this brave new world where even the idea of saying mother and
father is disgusting and like really embarrassing for people because people
don't procreate anymore they just think it's so base, people can't even think
about giving birth or like breastfeeding and how it's disgusting and I kind of
relate to that as we go as a society and we grow we kind of become more civilized
and move away from our animal urges and instincts and all the kind of disgusting
parts of life are unmentionable, so I do think that's quite funny the way he's
extended that and yeah it's fine, like it's just an interesting look at that
world it's not an amazing plot like rip-roaring story, it's just an
interesting kind of thoughts and exploration on society. And the last book
I finished was Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss. So Sarah Moss's book
that came out a couple of years ago, The Tidal Zone was one of my favourite books that year
it's actually one of my favourite books ever I really, really, really enjoyed this
book and so I just thought I would go back and read her back catalog as it
were and Signs for Lost Children is the third book in a loose trilogy, the
first one is Night Waking and the second one is Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost
Children's the third one as I said, but Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost
Children are basically an extension of the same story. Night Waking is about
a kind of modern family who move up to Scotland and it's about them on this
island and then simultaneously there are some letters which were written by some
people on the island from the mid 19th century and you kind of got
those two juxtaposed stories. Then the next two books in the series
are about that family and so we go back into this 19th century world and that's
where these two books take place. So Signs for Lost Children does kind of expand
upon the themes which were touched upon in Bodies of Light, which is about kind
of female, the female body and kind of medical practice at that time so it's
looking at things like abuse and madness and kind of how women had to deal with
things like childbirth and poverty and prostitution and rape and then also how
any kind of signs of depression everything were kind of treated as
hysteria and all of the themes that she raises in the book I find really
interesting and I really enjoyed and in this story Alethea is now a
doctor and she's working in an asylum in a madhouse and her husband Tom has gone
to Japan and so we still get these kind of two juxtaposing stories. I feel like
this is what Sarah Moss does in all of her books because The Tidal Zone
was like that as well, it has lots of different, seemingly unlinked threads
going on at the same time and Night Waking was like that, we had the
nineteenth century and the modern times and then in this story we have kind of
Cornwall in the 19th century looking at female madness and then this guy in
Japan like just buying a tapestry, like I mean it does look at the kind
of madness and society and propriety in Japan so that is kind of interesting but
it's not really obviously linked to what's happening with Alethea in Cornwall
and to be honest I could have really left the Japan story I felt like there
was no need for that to be in the book at all, but I did find the looking at
madness and kind of how women were perceived in that time I still found
that very interesting. So that's what I've managed to finish this month but
I'm also in the middle of a few other books there one of them being Ariel by
Sylvia Plath. This was recommended by a bunch of people when I said oh I'm not
sure about poetry on my Instagram and everyone was like 'Read Ariel!' so I am
reading it, and you know I've read some Sylvia Plath before. Some of these poems
I'm loving and some of them a bit like meh so I'm halfway through, I'll reserve my
judgement on that, but interesting. I'm kind of reading a poem a night before I
go to bed so that's working out quite well. I'm also in the middle of The Sellout
by Paul Beatty, I say the middle I think I'm like a quarter of the way
through and this is okay I'm not sure where we are
going in terms of plot yet but it just seems to be a look at race relations in
America and yeah his writing's quite interesting so I'm liking that.
I also have just started Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney and I'm
really enjoying her writing so far. It's just about a group of friends I believe
and kind of how they perceive themselves within the group and how they perceive
each other it seems to be very much about those spaces in between what we
say and how we interpret things and like I said I'm only a few chapters in, but so
far I'm thinking yeah this looks really interesting so I'm probably gonna finish
that one a bit quicker than the others I imagine and then something that I must
read know try and read it today see how quickly I read it is The Winter's Tale
by William Shakespeare because I'm going to see the Royal Ballet do a performance
of this in two days' time and I don't know the story of The Winter's Tale and
I probably need to know that before seeing the ballet, but I've never read it
I don't know, you know how I said I didn't know the story , I also I've never
read it! I didn't know if you got that! but I also plan on doing a Shakespeare
video on this play as well especially after I've seen the ballet so yeah
probably you should read that first it's probably a good idea. So that is me for
February, I would love to know what you've been reading in February I just
feel like this year is like nearly over it's like just time is running away from
me, I feel like I've not got time to read, not got time to do videos, I'll be happy
with the marathon's over I'll tell you that much! So hopefully once that's out
of the way and also some of my more busier weekends I've got coming up are
out of the way as well, I'll have some more time for reading and have some more
interesting things to talk to you about in my next video, so I will see you then
bye!