Hi everyone, it’s Lauren.
In this video I’m going to be talking about and reviewing the books that I’ve read so
far in the month of August.
Now, I have spent two weeks of August on holiday, just on the beach, just reading which has
been wonderful and it means that I’ve actually got through quite a lot of books, so I’m
going to be splitting this into two videos and I’m just going to talk about the first
four today.
And the first one that I finished was Mend The Living by Maylis de Kerangal, which is
called The Heart in the US.
This is…I hesitate to say ‘a story of’ but it is the story of a heart transplant
essentially.
The way I understood this book before I read it and from how it had been described to me,
I thought this was going to be specifically the story of Simon’s heart’s journey from
him to the person the donates it to and all of the different people that his heart touches
on the way.
But it is a lot more than that and it’s got a very different tone to the one that
I expected.
The feeling that you get is that we are going on this journey with Simon really and all
of the different people in his life, but at the same time, we’re not part of the entire
journey as the audience, as the readers, you really are getting a snapshot and the feeling
that I got from it was that all of these different characters, so Simon’s mother, his girlfriend,
the doctors and nurses in the hospital that are trying to save him, the people who organise
the transplant, the woman who needs to receive a donated heart, it’s like all of them are
going on their own journeys on different parallel train tracks and it’s like their lives are
continuing and for me it really felt like you were jumping in there with them for a
portion of their ride if you like.
But you did get a sense of their entire life it wasn’t just ‘on this day this was happening’,
it felt like you understood their pasts and their histories and personalities and you
were just seeing a glimpse into them and then you would get off the train essentially, and
their lives would continue and it really had this feeling of momentum, of life and of a
heartbeat continuing.
You got this sense that although Simon had gone essentially, he was brain-dead, that
his heart was going and you got the sense of what hearts are and what it means to be
alive and it’s really interesting the way that it’s structured.
And not just in the overt senses that certain characters are thinking about what a heart
means to us metaphorically, but also in the way that it’s structured in terms of jumping
between characters and the sentence structures as well are very long.
There are some sentences that could last a whole page and there’s lots of pauses with
commas, and it really does have this feeling of a continuous rhythm like a heartbeat and
it’s very interesting the way it’s put together.
Obviously, in some instances very heart-breaking, and also quite philosophical about life and
death are there’s some really beautiful moments in there so I really, really enjoyed
this I thought it was very beautifully written very quietly arresting.
The next book I’m really pleased that I’ve finished
because I've been reading it for a very long time and that is Apollo's Angels by Jennifer
Homans which is a history of ballet, and this has got a bit melted where
I was holding it in in the sun, you can see on the spine like it's almost
almost completely come off!
Well it's quite nice now because it's a bit of a memory of my holiday!
This is a completely comprehensive history of ballet and it's very skilfully done.
We start right back in the 16th century in France with the origins of ballet, and
with each chapter she jumps in time but also in location so we go to Italy, to Denmark
and see how ballet’s developing there, in Russia, in Imperial Russia and then in the
Soviet Union.
we go to the Royal Ballet in the UK and then finish
up in New York and although obviously ballet and what was happening in these different
countries is overlapping it's interesting in that really the innovation and where ballet
was kind of big as part of culture did you're kind of following ballet as it
grows and changes but it's also going on a journey around Europe and across the
Atlantic, so it's quite interesting.
What Jennifer Homans does really well is although this is a very big book and it
is quite complicated and you know, there's lots of technical things that
she discusses in here, I did find it very easy to read even though there's a lot
of it to read, so if you're at all interested in ballet
I think this is a fantastic starting point.
You wouldn't even have to read all of the chapters if you didn't want to
really, you could just say I'm interested in learning about Italy and you could just
read that chapter on that; it's quite well-structured in that way.
What I found quite interesting is that as the timelines converged on the modern day
and we've got two periods in history that I knew a bit about already
choreographers I know like Frederick Ashton, Kenneth Macmillan and George Balanchine
I really felt Jennifer Homan's opinions come out in ways that I hadn't noticed in the much
more historic section.
So she was a dancer herself and, you know, it's fine to have opinions but
I did find it quite interesting because you know we all love Balanchine, great,
but she LOVES Balanchine, it's like it is an objective opinion that there's nothing
ever that could surpass that, which was a bit like, I'm not sure
that's required in a historical book.
But there is an epilogue at the end as well which is very much her own opinion which I
did really appreciate and what's interesting is this book is written in 2010
but she kind of ends the history in the mid 80s with Balanchine dying and sort
of in the UK with the end of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev sort of that era
is where she then closes the door and says right that's the end of this history
and she has the opinion that she feels the great innovative parts of ballet
and the great masters aren't the art is dying which I think is such an
interesting opinion at the end of the book which I completely don't agree with,
especially from what I see in the UK!
But my opinion conflicting with hers in some aspects doesn't diminish how much I
enjoyed this book or how impressed I am with it as an endeavour because she's
got 400 years of history in here which is pretty impressive.
Next I read Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss.
Sarah Moss is the author of my favorite book from last
year, The Tidal Zone and there are three books - Night Waking, Bodies of
Light and Signs for Lost Children, which are quite a loose trilogy.
Having read Bodies of Light now I can see that Night Waking,
which came before, isn't necessarily connected to the other two books.
I think this one and Signs for Lost Children are very much a continuation
of the same story and Night Waking is a bit more of a side story;
it's about some different characters and some different aspects of the
same story but you wouldn't necessarily have to read that first without
going into these two.
This is historical fiction and it's set in the 1800s
and what we are following on the surface of it is the story of these two sisters,
Alethea and May and them growing up under a very strict, Spartan, domineering
mother who's very, very religious and very conservative and essentially
it's the story of their lives really growing up in within this regime
and it's also looking at the beginnings of girls being allowed to go to
school, women being allowed into universities and being allowed to train as
doctors and it's almost them being on the on the brink of this new future so there's
lots of really interesting themes within the book.
We're really looking at the position of women within
that time period and looking at thoughts at the time which would have been very shocking
and new which now would be quite common feminist thought and looking at how women are treated,
especially sex workers and poor women.
We're looking at attitudes towards mental health and things like hysteria
and how that is very gendered and we're also looking generally at what happens
when you are raised in a very, very strict environment and whether that's
something that spurs you on or becomes part of your personality or
whether that's something you're going to rebel against, how that's going to affect
you throughout your life and thematically I thought it was so
interesting and I really loved all of the points that she was making.
In terms of the plot I found this very oddly structured;
we jumped through time very quickly which I quite liked as a technique
but it did really feel like I was reading ‘…and then she did this, and
then she did this, and then she did this, and that's the end of the book’ it didn't
feel like there was a real obvious plot structure but I quite liked it, I really enjoyed
her writing it's so easy to read and although…it's like one of those books
were not much was happening per se but there's quite a lot that's being examined
and I definitely feel like Signs for Lost Children is going to be a very
obvious sequel and it's going to continue and from looking at people’s reviews
on GoodReads it sounds like that is a very popular
book I'm really looking forward to reading it, and in hindsight perhaps this
book’s kind of laying the groundwork for the second book.
Qnd the last book I want to talk about in this video is
The Gender Games by Juno Dawson, which I also read on the beach and I really, really
enjoyed this book I was just thinking about it today and do you know what,
I think while I was reading it I didn't even appreciate how well it was written
and I think I gave it three stars when I finished and then earlier today
when I was thinking about it I was like you know what, I'm gonna go back and
change that to four because I think she's got such a colloquial, familiar, easy style
that it's almost like you can you can miss how well
structured and put together this book is.
So this is Juno Dawson's, I wouldn’t say autobiography, but it's really looking at
a specific part of her life which is her issues with gender.
She's a transgender woman, but when she was growing up she
kind of thought perhaps that she would be a gay man and so she's kind of coming
to terms with her sexuality in one sense and then also having
problems with her identity and it's looking at how in a wider sense how our notions
of a very strict binary gender makes it very difficult for people
like her to understand, understand themselves but also all of us and it really
puts us in such small boxes and what I really liked about this is that
it is looking at the world through this framework of her life and what I think
is handled really well in this book, which I didn't really notice on the
first read because I think it's just done so well you don't even notice it, is
that it's made very clear that these are Juno's opinions
these are her experiences and this is what she thinks.
this is like how she got to this point, how she has found transitioning,
she's not trying to speak on behalf of anyone else and but at
the same time she’s managed to have other people within this book she interviews
other people and gets their opinions on different things and she's definitely
examining different aspects of our society, different attitudes towards
gender and it kind of balances that autobiography side and this perhaps
just being a book of essays on gender; it kind of merges those things
together very, very well.
So, I would really recommend it, I think Juno's got such an easygoing
tone that you can read her opinions and her arguments and it's like they came
out of your own head is how you feel like you thought of them yourself
because it's so well explained and as I said this is very interesting from two
different angles from that kind of autobiographical angle, that this is an experience
from a transgender woman but it's also so much wider than that and discusses
how gender affects everybody and screws everybody over and no one is
really winning from this very binary, strict notions that a lot of us have on gender.
So that's it for this video, there will be another one coming at the end of
August because I did actually read a few more books on my holiday TBR, one of them
being the secret history by Donna Tartt, which I just finished yesterday and I really
really liked so I will look forward to talking to you about those in that video!
Please do get in touch if you have read any of these books, I would love to talk to you
about them a little bit more in the comments what have you been reading in August have
you been on holiday in August, let me know everything that you've been doing and I will
see you in my next video, bye!