Hi everyone it's Lauren and today I'm going to be talking through all of the
books that I read last month in November. As always if you find any of these books
particularly interesting there'll be links to each of them in the description
box below. I read such a range of books this month, it's quite eclectic and
there's quite a different...there's quite a variance in my opinions of these books
as well, there was a couple that I loved and then some which I did not love so
much So I don't know whether to start with
the bad news, I think I might because I think that was the first book I read
this month and that was The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Now, this is bad news that I didn't like it but you know it's also bad news
because I was really looking forward to reading this book and I heard so many
good things about it. This is set in a kind of post I wanna say post-
apocalyptic, it's not really it's kind of post-exodus from Earth and the
galaxy or I guess, the earth has died but all the humans are living either on Mars
on various ports around the galaxy there's lots of different aliens. It kind
of reminded me of that Star Trek type situation where there's an alliance
of different species all together across the galaxy, and in this book we're
following this one woman called Rosemary who's coming from Mars onto this
spaceship, the Wayfarer and the Wayfarer's job is to punch holes in space. What I've
heard from other sources is that if you do read a lot of sci-fi then this book
series is quite different to a lot of other stuff that's out there in that
genre in that this is about a journey of this of the ship going from one place to
this new planet and they're going to punch a wormhole back to where
they came from, that's kind of the whole plot really, but it's quite
episodic and it does feel like a TV series in a way, where you're really
focusing on the characters and on the people in the spaceship and each chapter
or so something will happen but the characters are the through-line
Unfortunately for me, although I enjoyed the reading process actually, I
didn't think it was unenjoyable to read, I just found the writing extremely poor
and the characters really just really weak. Really weak, really un-thought
through. I felt like it was very, very obvious that all of
these ragtag different people all living on a spaceship different species I
thought it was very obvious that they were all created by the same mind, I
thought it was very clear that their interactions were supposed to be
hilarious and different and I thought it was really trying too hard
I didn't kind of lose myself in any of the characters I thought they were very
superficial. I just, you know considering that's supposed to be the
strong point of this book, and there was so much exposition as well not just in
terms of the plot but in terms of people's characters and it was so
unnecessary and unneeded I mean if it had been written well enough you wouldn't
need to explain your characters' motivations all the time. So I was just I
was really disappointed. Maybe it was overhyped, maybe as someone who
doesn't read a lot of sci-fi this was not what I thought it was going to be?
I would love to hear from you if you have read this book, I'd like to hear all of
your opinions whether they good or bad First bad review out of the way now so
that's good, the next book I have to talk to you about I adored basically so
that's some good news and that is Kindred by Octavia E Butler. Now, I read
this because this was the November/December book club pick for the
Feminist Orchestra, the details of which I will leave in the description
box below. I will do a much fuller review video with Jean about this book so I
don't want to go into too much detail about it now but it was absolutely
fantastic. I guess you wouldn't really call this sci-fi, it's more like a
paranormal kind of book I suppose, it's following a woman called Dana who's
living in the new United States in the 70s and periodically she is pulled back
in time against her will to Maryland during the slave period which is
obviously not a safe place for a black woman to be at that time, but then she
discovers that one of the slave owners, one of the ranch owners is
actually one of her ancestors so she has a vested interest in keeping this boy
alive and it's almost worse in a way, it almost really brings it home to you
because she's not of that society and she hasn't grown up in it so she's
almost more vulnerable than the other people I mean, all of the black people
obviously at this time a very very vulnerable
to violence but you almost feel even more for Dana because she shouldn't be
there and she doesn't really know how to navigate herself and I just couldn't put
it down I was so invested in her safety and her
getting out of there alive which has made it feel really, really
real and really frightening in parts but also just so fascinating as well at the
same time and amazing writing. I would 100% recommend it and as I said I'll go
into much more detail when I discuss this with Jean with the official kind of
book club video later...later in the month I think. the next book I picked up
was A Room with a View by EM Forster and I picked this up because I I've read
a little bit of Foster before, I've read Howard's End I thought it was okay
and wasn't blown away by it but I wanted to give his writing another try
I've got to say after reading this I have come to the same conclusion that
it's fine. This was written in 1908 and we're following a group of
English people at that time when we meet them they're all on holiday in Florence
and what's happened is they're on it they call it a 'pension' and it sounds to
me a little bit like a package holiday like they've signed up to go on this
pension and therefore they're going around Italy all together and it's about
what happens when people of different classes all mingle in a situation like
in Italy where you know the normal social rules that you'd have in in the
UK are not present anymore Parts of it I found very funny, some
of the characters I found really engaging and it was quite interesting
but other parts I did feel like EM Forster just kind of almost starts in
the middle of a sentence or in the middle of something that's happening and
sometimes I'd have to kind of flick back through the pages and be like 'what just
happened? I don't think I really understood that' or a lot of things were
implied without being really fully explored so I felt like I couldn't get
really into the book or sometimes I lost little bits and aspects of the plot
A complete change of genre and mood again and with my next read which was Dreamer's
Pool by Juliet Marillier, and I read this together with Jean and Jill and we
had a little bit of a of a read-along which was really fun. This is...I was gonna say
hardcore fantasy, high fantasy, I suppose it's not. Again, I don't read very
much sci-fi, I don't read very much fantasy either so I wouldn't really
know how to specify this book within that genre but it's set in a kind of
fantastical medieval Ireland...(like Ireland the country)-type
environment. What I really enjoyed about this story is it's kind of half fantasy
epic and it's half mystery and it's also very feminist and very modern in
the kind of issues that is dealing with as well so it's really interesting it
was really fun to read but you also felt like you're unraveling things that was
going on as well. Firstly you have the two main characters, Blackthorn
who is an old wise woman or healer or she was many years ago and Grim who are
two people who were locked in a prison by this chieftain for spurious reasons
that have been released but it is on the proviso that Blackthorn is kind of
indebted to the Fae or like the 'other' good people, the magical people of this
realm and she has to not seek revenge for seven years I think? Yeah,
might be seven, it might be six, might be five, I don't know - a period of time she
has to not seek revenge and she has to help everybody who asks her for it and
so I feel like the long plot of this series is going to be
following Blackthorn. In this book she's dealing with a situation between a
prince and his new bride and something's a little bit odd with with his bride
when she arrives in this new kingdom they're going to try and work out what's
been going on with her so yeah it's really fun a lot of the
themes in this book are about power over women and a lot of the things that go
wrong are with women being assaulted or how they are going to deal with
unplanned pregnancies it's very modern, the way it's looking at
victim-blaming in sexual assault cases and I mean I know I'm saying it's 'modern'
as if this is historical fiction which is obviously not, it's fantasy, but it's
really nice to see those kind of perspectives being tackled in a book
which is kind of set in that very medieval
old-fashioned landscape it was just really good fun and I can't wait to pick
up the next book in the series. I'm gonna quickly talk about a poetry collection
which I only read half of because I just could not get into it unfortunately and
that is Who is Mary Sue? by Sophie Collins. Now the title poem in
this collection I actually really really liked because the concept of a Mary
Sue is when an author kind of writes an idealized version of themselves and this
poem is really interesting looking into the kind of catch-22 that women writers
are within where if they write a very different interesting character the
critics would say you're just idealizing yourself, what you would like to
be and if they write a very gritty dark character that they must be being very
true but again about themselves and how they're not kind of given the benefit of
the doubt when it comes to being very inventive and very clever and there's
sections in the poem of blank space where it's kind of implied that women
writers are being silenced by the way that their work has been criticized so
they're too scared that their characters are going to be described as Mary Sue's
so they don't write at all. That poem I absolutely loved, every other poem in
this collection made completely no sense to me at all there's some really nice
parts and I know you're not supposed to really understand every single poem all
the time I understand that and and some of the language was very good but I felt
like I couldn't even get a thread of what any poem was about, sort of one
stanza I would be talking about 'when I was little my mother said this to me
and my sister' and then the next stanza would be talking about like
Imperial Russia and the next stanza would be talking about a duck and you're
just like reading these poems that 'what? what?' so I just wasn't getting
anything from it, so I stopped reading it but the Who is Mary Sue? poem was really good
and really different kind of to everything else in his collection so that was a bit
of a shame. And finally a book which I very very much enjoyed and I have
actually talked about a little bit in my previous video which is a reading vlog
of the weekend when I was reading this book and that is Educated by Tara Westover
Now this is an autobiography and Tara Westover grew up in a very
conservative Mormon household in Idaho and her parents, but her father more
specifically as she grew up, got more and more wary of the state and they took
their children out of school and they said you can't go to doctors because
they didn't trust doctors and it kind of got worse and worse it sounds
like to me as she grew up, in terms of their fear of I guess of the government and
wanting to be able to heal themselves essentially, I think that was kind of
part of their their faith as well but they felt like if you were ill, God will
heal you and so she grew up in this situation and managed eventually to get
out of it and not only go to school, like she went to Cambridge and Harvard I
think as well at the end and she's kind of she's a PhD student now and it also
just made me so angry because there's so much abuse happening within her family
both intentional and both not and not really as well because some of
it is emotional manipulation some of it is very physical abuse some of it is
just her father just not caring it's it felt like to me when his children got
hurt and not sending them to the doctor when they had very serious injuries and
just trying to just letting them heal so it was fascinating to learn about her
family and her mother and father's beliefs and also really interesting to
see how she got herself out of that situation what her relationship with her
family is like now and I got so into it I read it all over the course of a
weekend because I couldn't put it down so that's me for November I actually
really enjoyed this month because I read quite a lot more than I have in in ages
I actually like I didn't read very much over the summer at all so I really
enjoyed reading something like such vastly different types of books this
month it's been really fun I've also really got through the TBR that I set
for myself in October so I feel I feeling kind of smug about that as well
as always I'd love to have another chat with you in the comments if you have
read any of these books or if your interest in reading any of them and I'll
see you in my next video bye