Hi everyone, it's Lauren. A happy New Year to you! I hope you've started 2018 well
This is my favorite time of year to be on booktube, and to watch booktube
because everybody is uploading their favorite books that they read in 2017.
I love watching those videos and I also love making them myself because I love
reviewing what I read, looking back at all the fantastic things I've read and
being able to recommend them again to you! So I have 10 books in this video
just by accident, it's not necessarily a top 10 and I'm not going to do them in
any kind of countdown or any particular order, it's just going to be
random, just hit you with them, surprise you! So the first book that I'm going to
show to you is actually the last book that I finished and that is Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie. I read this because it was shortlisted as part of the Costa
Novel Awards. It got to the top 4, it didn't win, but this was my favorite book
on the shortlist. This book is a modern-day retelling of the Greek
tragedy Antigone and it is about a family of British Muslims. So our main
characters in here are Isma and her younger sister Aneeka and Aneeka's twin
brother Parvaiz. All three of them are living under the shadow of their father
having been a suspected terrorist in the Middle East and he had died on his way
to Guantanamo Bay and at the opening of this book Parvaiz has recently left the
UK to join Isis in Syria, so it covers a whole range of topics, mostly about kind
of being British and being Muslim and how you 'should' portray your
identity and your culture and kind of what it means to be of a different
culture in Britain at this time. It also looks at what would drive someone to
join a terrorist organization such as Isis, but although that is a main part of
the plot it doesn't just focus on that it also looks at Britishness in terms of
the class system and on top of all those really interesting topics that it
examines, it's such an enjoyable book and I really love the writing style, I got
completely swept up with the characters and really invested in it so I would
really highly recommend, this whether you're interested in the topics, whether
you're interested in Antigone or whether you just want a really enjoyable read!
Keeping to the theme of literary prizes there are two more books on this list
which were shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction back in the
spring. They featured on my Top Reads of 2017 So Far video and they're here again
in my Top Reads of 2017 at the end. I absolutely
loved these two books, the first of them is Do Not Say We Have Nothing by
Madeleine Thien. This is about a young girl Marie who is Canadian Chinese and one
day her mother and her taken another young girl called Ai Ming who is Chinese
and fleeing the Tiananmen Square massacre which has happened in China and
through this meeting Marie and Ai Ming talk about their family histories and
Marie learns about her father and Ai Ming's father's relationship and
through this family history we see a viewpoint of the Chinese Communist
revolution or the kind of the after-effects of that and there is so
much in this book. I found it so beautiful it talks about beauty, beauty of language,
beauty of music and numbers and patterns but then also about families and a
person's presence in their children's lives and the kind of the after-effects
of that throughout the generations. This is an absolute triumph of a book she has
so much in here it's so accomplished and she covers so many different topics so
well but on top of that it's also an enjoyable read as I said before. Enjoyability
in reading something is very important to me. You get a lot of books
which are shortlisted for literary prizes or win literary prizes and it's
more about the accomplishment of the book in my opinion than whether it's
enjoyable to actually read it, and all of these books I'm recommending to you
today I absolutely loved the actual experience of reading as well as being
impressed by is the structure of the boosk themselves. So the second one on the
shortlist, which I do not have a copy of because I think it's still with my mum I
think I've leant it to her, is Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo. This book is
about a couple in Nigeria who are unable to have a child and so the husband's
family encouraged him to take a second wife and that's all I really want to say
about this book because it takes you in so many interesting different places and
the plot twists and turns in ways that you wouldn't have expected it's so
wonderfully written and weaves in themes of family and motherhood and culture and
storytelling and I absolutely loved it. If you'd like to hear a little bit more
about the Women's Prize shortlist from this year and I did a video with
Jen Campbell where we discussed all six books in quite a lot of detail, so if you'd
like to hear a bit more about that I'll link that there and in the description
box below. It really was an amazing short list I thought
all six books were fantastic. These two were my favorites, but I would
recommend you watch that if you haven't already. And what's a segue that was
because my next book on this list is by Jen Campbell and that is The Beginning
of the World in the Middle of the Night. This is a collection of short stories
and I'm always amazed at how many different ideas and topics Jen manages
to cram into such short stories. Things that she covers in here for example
include ghosts, death, the afterlife, body image, women, growing up and adolescence
and love and fairy tales, a strong theme of fairy tales throughout. All of
the stories are quite different in their style and kind of what they're talking
about but it does really feel like a coherent collection Iand just so
imaginative and original. Next we have Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal
which I think is called The Heart in the US. This is an absolutely
beautiful book which I read on holiday it's about a heart essentially, it's a
heart transplant, but what we get is the journey between the boy who owns the
heart, Simon, him being in an accident and then the whole journey that this
heart goes on from him the different people it touches up until the point of
the recipient of the heart. When I first heard about this book I almost thought
this would be a book from the heart's perspective or something because I
thought it would be a journey from person to person but it is a little bit
more than that and we get perspectives from lots of different people from Simon
himself, Simon's mother and the doctors and the nurses which are working on
Simon, the person who is facilitating the transplant, the doctors that perform it
and then finally the woman who's going to receive the heart, but they all kind
of jump in and out and it has this beautiful feeling like you're getting on
with this character for a portion of their journey and then you're kind of
jumping off and allowing them to continue with their story and then going
along with somebody else but you still feel like you understood that character
fully and it's such a beautiful pondering on life and what life is and
about death and how that is part of our everyday lives.
On a similar theme, a similar medical theme is When Breath Becomes Air by Paul
Kalanithi and this book is a memoir. Paul Kalanithi was a brain surgeon who
realized that he was suffering from terminal lung cancer and this book is
part autobiography of his life leading up to that point and then part
rumination on medicine and philosophy and life and kind of as his own life is
coming to a close. What's really great about this book is that Paul Kalanithi
can write so well, he actually wanted to write his whole life and studied
English at university. So the book itself reads beautifully, it's so interesting
and heartbreaking to hear his perspective as his life draws to a
close and also his thoughts on life in general and kind of what he wanted to do
I avoided this book for some time because I thought it might be a little
bit of a morbid read and I only actually picked it up because it was a pick for a
book club that I'm part of, but I'm really glad that I did read it and if
you're feeling a little bit like 'Do I want to read someone's memoir when they
knew they were dying?' I would still recommend it because it's quite
uplifting and joyful about life and at the same time. I seem to be putting these
books into pairs, so continuing down that theme I have another two books both on
gender. This year I did want to read a lot more books on feminism and Gender
Studies and I did read a few, not as many as I wanted to and some of them maybe
not as successfully as these tw,o but the ones I have in my hand right now are
absolutely fantastic reads. The first one is The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry. I
really enjoyed this because having read a lot of books on feminism from a
woman's perspective and being a woman myself, it was really refreshing to
hear from a man's perspective and what it's like to grow up with the pressures
of masculinity as they are in current society and it's a very short book, this
was a companion I think or at least inspired from a program that Grayson
Perry was doing for the television and so there's lots of different
perspectives in here and different people that he was interviewing at the
time and it's really arguing that we need a new definition of what
masculinity is because there is really no place for that old-fashioned caveman
masculinity in modern-day society but because boys are encouraged into a
certain mold when they're growing up then they have all these masculine
attributes which there really is no place for and no outlet for, so very, very
interesting ,very short read. I'll recommend this everyone, it's been on my
boyfriend's nightstand for a long while because I want him to read it and the
other book on gender I absolutely loved I don't think this
will come as a surprise to anyone with The Gender Games by Juno Dawson. Juno
Dawson is a transgender women and it does what it says on the tin, this book, it
says 'the problem with men and women from someone who has been both' and I really
loved this book because Juno's voice is I was going to say authentic, of course her
voice is authentic, but it's just so friendly and companionable and when
you're reading along its colloquial but still reads so well and she gets all
of her points and her arguments across in a way that is so easy for anyone to
understand, even if you've never really read about gender before and what this
book does really well which really impressed me is that it's part
autobiography and part a social study really and she talks to lots of
different people in her life and gets different opinions but the balance works
so well in this book and it doesn't feel too much one or the other so you're
getting her own perspective but she's very clear when it is her own
perspective and then we're talking about general things in the world as well so a
very interesting very helpful very useful book and a great one to start
with. Actually I think if you're new to gender studies I think both of these would
be fantastic for for beginners in reading around this topic. Very quickly
another book that featured in my Top Books of 2017 So Far back in June and I
read this right at the beginning of last year and that is the Essex Serpent by
Sarah Perry. This book, I've said it before but this book I didn't like it as soon
as I started reading it. It took me a while to warm up to it, but as I read it
I got so involved and my enjoyment of the book was almost exponential like by
the end I was like 'I never want this book to end!' This is a historical fiction
novel it's about a woman called Cora who used to live in London with her son when
her husband dies she moves out to Essex and meets a vicar there and all of the
people locally are talking about this Essex serpent which is an old monster
which has been seen and perhaps it's back in the marshes. This is at a time in
history when people were interested in fossils Mary Anning was digging up
plesiosaurs on the beaches and Cora is very much of that mold; she's a woman who's
interested in science, in fact and she's trying to work out what's going on. This
book has massive Crimson Petal and the White vibes if you have read that, it's a
sort of historical book where all of the characters are so fully formed and fully
flourished and yet it doesn't feel anachronistic. And finally a book that I am so
pleased to have read this year and that is The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
This is not a new book and it's a book that lots of people have loved for a
long time but finally I got to it while I was on holiday and I'm so pleased that
I did. This is about a young boy who joins University and while he's at
university he kind of falls into this group of Ancient Greek students who are
all very well off, all very eccentric and what we know at the beginning of the
book is that one of this group is going to be killed by the rest of them and we
don't know why and we don't know how and the whole of the book then is unfolding
kind of the build-up and to this death and then the aftermath of it and it
unfolds so slowly and so beautifully and I completely loved her writing. It's a
very long book and it's the kind of thing where nothing much happens
although obviously a murder happens so it's a big thing, but day to day not much
seems to be going on but behind the scenes there's a lot there. It's the kind
of writing which I think it is deceptively easy and deceptively simple
you don't realize how clever it is while you're reading it and it just really
stayed with me. I felt like so a part of all of those characters and it's not
often that I want to go back and reread a book, especially a book that's that
long I've got to say, but The Secret History is definitely up there, at some
point in my life I would love to reread it. So that is my top 10, I am so in the
zone for hearing about fantastic books at the moment so please tell me what
your favorite books of 2017 were. I've been watching everyone's videos, my watch
later playlist is like 50 videos long all of 'Best Books of 2017' so I'll get to
them eventually and then buy loads I presume I have more to read next year! I
would also love to hear your opinions if you read any of these books and I will
see you in my next video, bye!