Hi everyone, it's Lauren and these are my reviews for all of the books that i read
in the first part of June
The first thing that I read was Girls Will be Girls by Emer O'Toole which is
one of my favorite books that i have read this year so far. Emer O'oole has a
PhD in performance and her main argument in this book is that gender or the
aspects of gender are a performance and they are separate from your biological
sex
so the clothes we wear, whether we wear makeup or not, how short our hair is and
how you hold yourself, how you walk and what you say, how you say it, all of these
things are a performance to align yourself and with a certain gender and they're
all things that have been taught to you by society since you've been a child so
for example, when you're a teenager maybe you wanted to align yourself to a
certain group of people, like you wanted to dress a certain way and then as you
walk down the street people would think 'Ah, that person is a punk rocker' and you
align yourself to a group and you find yourself an identity and her argument is
that gender is that. There's a whole chapter in here on body hair which I
thought was really interesting because she says that women's body hair has
become disgusting
whereas men's body hair is just completely fine and completely normal
and she talks about the journey that we've come on to get to this situation
now that, for a woman to walk around with visible body hair is a really difficult
thing to do that's quite a radical statement for you to not shave under your
arms and wear a top where people can see that, and it's become not a choice, it's
become 'you have to do that' and she did an experiment where for two years she
didn't shave
and she talks about how uncomfortable she felt the whole way through and it's
just really interesting, and really illustrates the fact that you think
you're choosing to make yourself look a certain way when really the alternative
is really difficult to deal with and there's a whole chapter in here on boobs
and how women's chests are viewed differently to men's chests and naturally,
if you're talking about gender being a construct she does talk about both
gender and sexuality being on spectrums she doesn't stick to the gender binary
idea and I just really love this book I thought she argued really coherently
and persuasively and by the end of it when she talks about just taking down
gender, and just playing with gender and doing different things
I was just right there with her
and I just thought 'yes, this is this is fantastic!' The next book that I finished
in June was Me Before You by Jojo Moyes... I'm gonna upset some people but now I think!
This is about a woman called Louisa who loses her job and then finds
another job caring for a guy called Will who is a quadriplegic after a motorbike
accident and she's not doing any personal care but she's there to see him
talk to him and hang out with him during the day and they develop a friendship
Now there has been a lot said about this book and its depiction of the disabled
and I would agree that it is ableist over to the extent that this is written
from the perspective of an able-bodied person and the way it views disability
is that there really isn't anything left to live for if you are paralyzed
from the shoulders down and it's not a great view of a quadriplegic life and
it's a pretty patronizing and not very supportive
view of that life, it's a very two-dimensional view of what it might be
like to be in a wheelchair
However i think the reason for that is that every character in this book is
two-dimensional and none of them are fully realized that iIhave no
surprises that the depiction of someone in a wheelchair is done badly because i
feel like the depiction of all people is bad
That said, I didn't hate this book while I was reading it, but I did find it boring, I
didn't connect with any of the characters and I find it very surprising
when people say that they were really emotionally affected by this book
because I can't find a single personality in that book that my
emotions can latch onto and I'm really disappointed because I wanted to enjoy
this book but it just has nothing to recommend itself
I then finished a little book of short stories which was Sum by David Eagleman
which is 40 tales of the afterlife and what this is is 40 very very short
stories a page or two each and each of them imagines a different afterlife
either a different meaning of life or of different, what the afterlife might be or
whether there's an afterlife or not or where people come from
and it's really interesting there is some humor in here as well and I was
worried that it might be repetitive with each short story being about some form
of afterlife but actually the overall effect is that it made me really think
about
the meaning of life in general and it's just different ponderings on where
we might come from what life might mean whether immortality is something to
strive for and there's lots of different tales in here wher immortality happens
and things go terribly wrong,
different ideas on who or what God is and and another recurring theme is God
may be worried about his or her creation and losing control of it. One of the
short stories Ii really liked in here was that when you go to heaven
Mary Shelley and is sitting on a throne and ruling heaven because God's
favorite book is Frankenstein
because when God read frankenstein he thought 'Oh! Finally someone understands how
lonely is to be the creator and create something which then goes amock!' and so
he just reads Frankenstein over and over again and leaves Mary Shelley in charge
which I thought was quite funny and sometimes it's just a nice reminder to
think about the big important things and the meaning of life sometimes and be
reminded of your own mortality so i really enjoyed this. And finally I've
just finished a book of flash fiction which was My Mother was an Upright Piano
by Tania Hershman and this is 56
I think the short fictions, flash fictions and this is part of my easing myself into
poetry idea that I had, and to me, although these are fictions they really
do feel much more like poems because they're not really about plot - what I get
from each story is an emotion and so to me, I link that more with poetry, and you
can see they're not very long at all they are like long poems just in prose
form really and they're very abstract it's very difficult for me to explain
and what this collection is like but the overall take away that I had from it is
that it's like you're half way through a dream and when you're reading them, and
each fiction is like a single emotion where everything else in life has been
muted and the volume on this emotion has just been turned up or this situation
and overall when you're reading it, it feels like someone grasping at reality or
grasping at human connections and dealing with their own emotions and
trying to make sense of it and within
its kind of abstract and emotional feeling is this framework of British
society which I thought was really funny so that for example there's a very
little fiction where a woman is saying to her husband
'Can you see those dogs out in the garden? There's 48 dogs' and her husband's like
'I can't see them...come inside I'll make you a cup of tea' and it's that sort of thing, the
rituals of making cups of tea and going to the seaside and it's a very
British domestic framework that a lot of these have, which I thought was really
nice and in opposition to some of the more fantastical things that are going
on in here. So i'm really pleased that I had a go at this and this was my first
introduction to flash fiction and it was a really different experience it was
really nice commuting reading this actually because you didn't have to get
too invested in a plot that it's almost like her thoughts and feelings just
washed over you and I got more of an experience from it that I expected to
Let me know if you've read any of these I'd love to hear your thoughts in the
comments. I'll be back again in a couple of weeks' time with reviews of what I
read in the second part of june
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underneath the left hand corner of this video just down there and i will see you
next time. Bye!