Hi everyone it's Lauren and this is my June reading wrap-up, so all of the
reviews of the books that I read last month. Which was June, which means we're
now in July, which is just it's just ridiculous I'm just I must be getting
old because I feel like each year is like ah another year's gone past and
then next year I'll be married ha ha and then I'll be dead. As always all of the
books I mention are going to be linked in the description box below if you
would like to check any of them out further. I must say I had a bit of a
disappointing month not in terms of the quality of the books I read in general
but kind of the quantity. I was feeling really sluggish I just couldn't be bothered
to read for much of June really and the culprit behind this was this book Brick
Lane by Monica Ali. Now I've read this because this was our pick for the
Feminist Orchestra which is run by Jean at Bookish Thoughts and myself. I will link
Jean's channel in the description box below and also a link to the Feminist
Orchestra Twitter feed and Goodreads group if you would like to join in. We
read a feminist leaning book, nonfiction or fiction every two months so this was
our pick for May and June and I'm sorry to say for me at least this was a
massive disappointment. It's about 400 pages too long and I just really, really
couldn't get into it. I will discuss this more in a video properly reviewing this
book with Jean in the next couple of weeks so I won't spoil anything by
giving away my thoughts too soon other than I just felt like it was a massive
drag.So this must have taken me like most of June to read to be honest and
then once I put it down I wanted to try and read some quick or short books just
to kind of get me back into the swing of readings the first thing I picked up was
Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith. This is a poetry collection and the first
poem in this collection is quite long and it's the most emblematic I think of
what this collection is trying to do as a whole and it's called Summer Somewhere
and the main premise behind this poem is that there isn't place where all black
boys who have been murdered by the police or being shot or come to an
untimely death are kind of collected together and living somewhere in peace
and harmony and it's kind of about that imagining them continuing to live and
having love somewhere so you hear from the boys in this sort of heaven like
place and we also hear from their families who've been left behind and
it's sort of trying to find some kind of hope through the pain, although it's
obviously very difficult to find that and very difficult to read.
The rest of the collection does focus on kind of on pain really, I feel like this
is a very raw an emotional collection and all of the poems as a whole do you
sort of feel like this howl, like this expenditure of pain from Danez Smith
So he's talking about growing up black and the racism he has to deal with he
talks about being gay and he talks about being HIV positive
and dealing with that diagnosis and what that means
for his own relationship with his body and then his relationship with others
like family and future lovers. It's very vivid, very confronting for you as a
reader and also very open in sort of the scale of his pain and his anger and his
suffering and all of these different facets of his life and it's a very sort
of raw and honest look at the darker side of his psych. It is a very emotional
and very challenging read actually and not in terms of the structure of the
poems just more in terms of the subject matter and the different structures of
the poems are very fluid and very free he uses lots of different
techniques which i think is interesting especially for me as somebody who
doesn't read a lot of poetry, I think this would be a good
place to start if you don't like very very structured poems if you want to
read something a little bit more I guess modern, I don't if that's the correct
term for it. Tthe next short and quick read I decided to pick up was this
little penguin modern classic by Audre Lorde which is The Master's Tools
Will Never Dismantle the Master's House this is a collection of her essays and
speeches I believe and you know I kind of picked this up I thought it was short
and this was a challenging read it's very academic, it's very philosophical
and this took me a while to read considering is only about 50 pages 100
pages long or something. It's difficult in a book of essays to pick out your
exact favorites because you end up coming away just with an overall feeling
from the collection but I think the two middle essays The Master's Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master's House and Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, I think
those two essays were my favorites. The first couple I found quite difficult to
get into and get into what she was trying to say but those two essays in
particular were really interesting because she's coming from the
perspective as a black lesbian woman and she's got all these different facets
of her life where she's experiencing oppression and her overall message is
that you can't change a patriarchal society whilst following the rules and
playing the games of that society you have to kind of reimagine a whole other
set of rules and a whole other set of structures and dismantle that completely
and I really liked that message and I thought overall her views are very
interesting and this was a great introduction to her writing, so she's
written a lot of stuff so I can go and explore her a little bit more now.Next I
picked up an absolutely fantastic book which I'm so pleased I read especially
after the funk that I experienced after Brick Lane this really got me back into
my love of reading and that is Normal People by Sally Rooney. This is Sally
Rooney's second book this is a proof apologies as a little bit beaten up and
this is going to come out in September this year I really loved Conversations
With Friends, which was her debut which came out last year and in my opinion
this book takes all the best things about that book and just distills it
into something even more focused and even more finely tuned and this is a
shorter book it just feels so much more accomplished into the point even in the
way that I loved Conversations With Friends before, I feel like this is even
better. This is about two young people Connell and Marianne and it's about
their relationship as it kind of waxes and wanes through school and through
University so when they start out Connors mother and cleans Marianne's
house they're from very different social classes and this is again like
Conversations With Friends, it's about what remains unsaid within relationships
and different people's motivations and it's about the misunderstandings that
happen when you just don't communicate with each other efficiently and you just
get the sense between Connell and Marianne that a lot of things could be
avoided if they could just be a little bit more vulnerable with each other and
communicate their feelings better, but that's not what life is like and what I
really love about Sally Rooney's plots and how she deals with her characters is
that it feels so true to life and you're just getting so frustrated
with these characters and you want them to get together and achieve their
goals but she doesn't quite let that happen and she gives you a conclusion
and something which kind of feels satisfying which I've found with both
this and Conversations With Friends but it's also realistic and people repeat
the same mistakes. As I said this isn't out
yeah it comes out in September, I don't know what the cover is going to look
like but I would highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this
when it does come out. And finally another really fun read I'm so pleased I
picked up and that was Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae brown
This is about Molly Bolt and how she grows up surviving in a small poor
southern US town and she kind of breaks out of that mold to go to university
it's about her navigating the sort of 50s 60s and 70s I think is when this is
set being a woman against the expectations of her time and also being
a lesbian and what I absolutely adored about this book is that Molly is so
unapologetic as a character throughout the whole story. As soon as
she discovers within herself that she has an attraction to other girls she
just goes out and attacks that and she never questions that that could be wrong
she doesn't have any kind of self-loathing or any kind of
internalized misogyny or anything about herself, she's so confident and I think
this is great especially as you spend a lot of time with Molly as a child and
as an adolescent and it's really nice to read about an adolescent who is just
fine with themselves just loves themselves and she does experience
sexism, she experiences classism and homophobia but she never lets that stand
in her way as such, she's not able to succeed within the society as much as a
straight white man would be able to but she doesn't let that hold her back in
terms of if other people have a problem with her then that's their problem, she
never thinks that being gay for a minute could be wrong and she completely backs
herself to achieve and she keeps trying even though she experiences considerable
setbacks in her time and it's really funny as well she's just got such an fun
enjoyable voice and I'm really enjoyed reading it. So that's me for June,
hopefully I'll have a bit of a better reading month in July or at least you
know I won't have anything that I dislike reading as much as I disliked
reading Brick Lane! Hopefully as I said a full review of that will be up in the
next couple of weeks with Jean. I would love to hear from someone who read it
and enjoyed it, I've been following people's comments in the Goodreads group
for the Feminist Orchestra and quite a few people have said that they've
enjoyed it but then I think there's been an equal amount of people saying that
they found it a bit of a slog so it's it's an interesting one. In general I'd
like to hear from you if you've read any of these books already I'd love to
discuss them more with you in the comments and let me know what you've
been reading in June let me know how your June's been, how's the first half of
your year been? How about that? We've had the longest day of the year we're ready
hungry so it's basically winter it's all downhill from here! Ao I hope you're well
and I will see you in my next video, bye!