Hi everyone it's Lauren and these are the reviews for all of the books that I've
read so far in the month of March. I've read quite a lot of varied stuff this
month so far and but there are two books that I absolutely loved, so I'm going to
try and rocket through some of the stuff that I didn't like quite as much
so I can spend loads of time gushing about the books that I just adored! Very
quickly firstly I wanted to talk about this book Feminism is for Everybody by
bell hooks. I don't think I've mentioned this on this channel yet but
Jean from Bookish Thoughts and I are restarting the Feminist Orchestra book
club which started at the beginning of March and this is for absolutely
everybody, if you are well versed in feminism and feminist texts or you've
never read anything about feminism before or you're kind of interested you
don't really know what to read then this group is for you. So I will link the
Goodreads group in the description box, we're reading one book every two months
so there's plenty of time for you can get involved. We're going to be reading a
range of nonfiction, fiction and memoir as well there's loads of different stuff
take a look if you're interested in any of the books. This is the book that we
decided to kick off the book club with because and it says on the top, feminism is
for everybody and it is an introduction to feminism in general and I've nearly
finished this book. I thought I'd mention it briefly in this wrap-up but I will be
doing a much more in-depth discussion with Jean at the end of April kind of
when everybody's had a chance to read the book. I really enjoyed this book
I think it's very, very interesting and it gives a very comprehensive definition
of feminism and overview of its and implications in all different areas like
political arena so it talks about women's bodies about beauty about
different politics like class and race and all these other different structures
it talks about women in work and it's kind of it goes across everything and
there's very short chapters so there's a lot to talk about here, a lot of things
to unpack because she covers so many topics. We're also going to be having a
Twitter chat on at the @femorchestra Twitter feed if you would like
to go give us a follow and that's on the 30th of April at 7 p.m. GMT and we're
going to be discussing questions which are prompted by the book so it's a bit
more of a wider discussion you don't have to have read it
to be involved in the Twitter chat. So if that interests you at all we'd love to
see you there and have a bit of a discussion. I also tried my hand at a
little bit more poetry this month and picked up Arial by Sylvia Plath which
was recommended by a whole bunch of people and I did like it,
I do like Sylvia Plath's writing in general. For me I felt like some of these
poems were like really hard-hitting like I loved Lady Lazarus which is talking
about all her kind of near-death experiences/suicide attempts but
some of her other poems to me felt a little bit repetitive and some a
little bit too abstract. In general I feel like her language is very visceral
and very sumptuous and when I find a poem that speaks me I think it works
brilliantly and then sometimes I feel like there are tracks that she's going
down where I can't quite follow her narrative and the images kind of just go
off on these little tangents, which is in some ways very, very good and then in
some ways I was like oh well I can't be bothered to work out what you're doing
so I just think I'm very very fickle when it comes to poetry and I don't want
to work hard at it basically and I don't really want to try and tease out all of
the meaning. I will strive to continue to read some more poetry until I find
something that really speaks to me because I feel like it's like any art
form, really you have to kind of understand the form to really get
something from it and if you never read any poetry and then you read a poem
and go oh I don't understand it, then you've not really tried hard enough
So that's how I feel it's like things like opera or ballet or anything
you kind of need to understand the form that the artist is working within, so I'm
gonna keep going with poetry. Speaking of different art forms I also
finished The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare which I read because I went
to see the Royal Ballet's production of it which I absolutely loved I thought it
was staged beautifully I really loved the music and the choreography so it's a
big thumbs up from me there, and this is okay it's quite interesting this very
much to me felt like one of Shakespeare's plays which was literally
written to be entertainment, and I know they all were, but some of the plot
points just felt a bit contrived so this is about a king Leontes who suspects
that his wife has had an affair and the child that she is carrying is not his
but it's actually his friend's child and he basically accuses her
and it all goes downhill from there, she has the baby but then she dies when he
accuses her, the baby gets brought up by some shepherds it you know it's one of
these kind of classic tales but it did feel like a bit out of the blue where he
just decides that she's been adulterous there doesn't seem to be any reason for
it, it's almost just as if 'the king is jealous' and that's our plot point from
which a whole story comes from and if that plot point wasn't there, there
wouldn't be a story and it felt you know it was fine I didn't feel like I loved
the language in it as I have done in some other Shakespeare plays. Next I read
The Sellout by Paul Beatty which was a pick for my IRL a book club and this was
quite interesting one of the girls in the club was saying that she'd heard
that Paul Beatty doesn't like it when people refer to this book as satire and
I find that quite interesting because I don't really understand how you could
interpret this book as anything but satire but maybe that's just me. This
is a look at racism in America essentially but it follows a story of a
man in a Californian town whose town has kind of been erased from the map so he
goes around and making it a town and putting in the boundaries of the town in
together and he also reintroduce his segregation basically in that town he
takes on one of his friends as a slave and it's like looking
at kind of institutionalized racism and the pros and cons of all the different
things of integration and segregation but it does take a very wry look at that
I personally didn't quite gel with the writing style of this book I felt like
Paul Beatty was kind of trying, it was not it was a laugh out loud funny but
kind of every sentence had this little funny little nod or funny little joke
which I almost felt like was too much I felt like he was trying to be too funny
or trying to be too clever while I was reading it and it's a it's an
interesting structure of a novel because it's not quite magical realism because
nothing magical is happening as such but it's very it's it's very unrealistic
things that are happening and it is very of that feel, it did feel like I was
reading like One Hundred Years of Solitude or something it's very
interesting the way the society is coming together. I don't really know what
genre you would define this book as but to me it felt like it was going on sort
of too long and trying it's too much and it might have worked
better as like a short story or a set of essays or something. But, you know how can
I be someone to say I'll probably you're trying to cover too many aspects of
racism? That's a ridiculous thing to say because there's there's so many
different ways that that affects people's lives and you know he's looking
at a whole wide range of stuff so it shouldn't really be for me to say that I
felt like there was too many different things going on in this book, but you
know as much as I found it really interesting the observations he was
making it did just kind of mean that I didn't get fully on board and I found
it a little bit difficult to read.Now I get to my favourite books, oh you're
excited I'm excited! The first one this is like in order of how much I love them
so the first one that I read that I really enjoyed it was Conversations With
Friends by Sally Rooney. This is about a group of four people it's two young
women in their early 20s Bobbi and Frances who get mixed up with this older
married couple Melissa and Nick and it's mostly about Frances's affair with Nick
and how that kind of unfolds but it's really about the relationship between
all four of them and this is all told from Frances's perspective so you only
really see what she sees but even with the limitations of that single viewpoint
what Sally Rooney manages to do is really look at how different people can
interpret one situation and your perceptions of different people's
behavior and kind of what they mean by that and what their intentions are and
it's also looking at how one person wants to be liked by everyone else.
What I really liked about this is the kind of it brings out that feeling that
you know that you can like or love more than one person, but you want to be
everybody else's favourite, so you want everybody to like you the most and they
can't like anyone else more than you but you're allowed to like everyone and it's
that sort of wanting to be loved and wanted to be respected and worried about
how you are perceived by other people and it's so well observed under the way
she structures there and I really believed all of their interactions and
their relationships and it's also about not really knowing what other people are
going through all the time not understanding their histories and you
know the differences between the face that people put on things and then the
emotions and you know the pain of the struggles or whatever is going on
I just thought it was really good it's just it reads really easily it reads
really well but she's doing something a little bit more than you would expect
kind of with the relationships with the people in here, so I would highly highly
recommend this. And now I come to my favourite book which actually might be
the favourite thing I've read so far this year
oh yeah, I think it might be! and that is Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Canon
this was a Christmas present to me from Simon of Savidge Reads and I am
simultaneously very grateful to him and also very angry with him because this
made me extremely emotional. This is about an old woman at Florence who is 84
and she's living in a care home and when the book opens she's had a fall and
she's lying in her living room and she's thinking back to to thing she's thinking
back to some of her time in the care home and she's also thinking back to her
past with her friend Elsie and then the main plot is following what unfolds when
a new resident comes to the care home and Florence immediately recognizes him
as somebody from her old life who died 60 years ago and so she's thrown into a
panic she's trying to uncover what's happening and she's like with her friend
in the care home trying to work out what his intentions are kind of whether he is
the person from her past or not and at the same time in Florence has dementia
so she's remembering some things she's not remembering everything, but surrounding
that main thrust of the narrative it's also looking at wider concerns as
whether your life means something and the little things that you do in your
life how they can have big ramifications in somebody else's life, so we're not
just looking at Florence and Elsie's life you're looking at people who run
the care home and some wider people from their circle of friends and this is
quite similar in a way to Joanna Cannon's first novel The Trouble With Goats and
Sheep, because that was about a small community of people down a cul-de-sac
and they were trying to uncover him a mystery but within that book I felt like
there are lots of characters to the point where you kind of struggled to
keep track of everybody and the way this is structured is just such a clear step
up from that novel because there are still lots of characters in here but she
really focuses in on Florence and on a certain couple of people in the care
home and you really feel like you get to know
them and it is so impressive how she manages to have all these different
little threads of plots and stories and little mysteries but you are able to
keep track of everything and because Florence is suffering with dementia
there's some things that you know which Florence clearly doesn't know or has
forgotten and there's some things that fForence knows and she's
definitely not telling us or again she's forgotten or her memories are kind of
being inconsistent or unreliable and you just feel like you're going on this
journey with her to uncover what's happening at the end, and on top of all
of that the writing is just so delicious I loved, I loved some of her turns of
phrase. I'm just in awe of this book basically I think she's packed so much
in there it's so beautifully done it's so accomplished and well-structured and
it's also just so heartbreaking and I just loved it and it's just like
these quiet beauty it's just like all the little sadnesses and little loves
that we have in a very ordinary life it's not the kind of big dramatic things
it's all about the little ways that people touch each other's lives and
that's the kind of thing that makes me cry
apparently! And I was supposed to be buddy reading this with Lauren from
Lauren and the books but we didn't really talk about it that much between us
because I think we were just rocketing through it and I just sent her a message
like oh I'm halfway through I love it she's just like yeah me too we haven't
really kind of talked about it loads as we went along because I was just racing
through it. So I want to put this in everybody's hands and it's been listed
for the Women's Prize for Fiction which I was honestly a little bit surprised
about when I saw that announced but now I've read it I'm like yes of course!
and it's just it's just so heartwarming and lovely and I I cannot recommend it
enough and I would love to hear some other people's opinions on it just
because I just love and it's a pretty little battenberg cake! So as always all of these books will be linked
in the description box below if you'd like to check any of them out yourself I
would love to hear from you if you've read any of them if you've got any
opinions and what else you've been reading in March and I'll see you in my
next video, bye!