Hi everyone, it's Lauren and these are all
of the books i read in the second half
of January, if you would like to see the
reviews for the books I read in the first
half I will link my earlier video
up here and in the description box below
The first book that I read in the second
half of January was Kissing the Witch
which is a collection of short stories by
Emma Donoghue. I read this because this was the
pick for January for the Feminist
Orchestra book club, which is a book club
on goodreads run by Jean, I will leave a
link to the book club in the description
box below if you'd like to check it out
and join us and this is a collection of
fairytale retellings, but the way it's
structured is almost like a series of
Russian dolls because each story at
the end goes backwards in time so for
example the first retelling in here is
Cinderella. At the end of the Cinderella
story
Cinderella asks the fairy godmother 'who
were you before these events?' and the fairy
godmother tells her story and that might be
a retelling of Snow White, say, and it goes
back and back and back and the way it's
written
it's like you can't put it down because
at the end of each story you're just
interested to find out the next one. This
is definitely a feminist collection but
it's written in such a beautiful and
interesting way it doesn't feel like
there's any kind of agenda or it's
hitting you over the head with anything
but what it tackles is representations
of women and that you're not just the
beautiful princess or the disgusting
witch, it's very much about who is the
witch and who are these characters
really? Do they want to be beautiful and
rich or ugly and evil and what really
are their motivations? It's very much about the
women characters sorting their own
problems out and not needing s prince but
overall it was very magical and I like
the kind of links that she had, I thought it
was really clever and it's a very very
enjoyable read. The second book that I
have today is another Virginia Woolf
which is Orlando and I read this and The
Waves earlier in this month because I
went to see Woolf Works which is a series
of ballets on at the Royal Opera House and
I absolutely loved it, if you get to go
and see it I would highly recommend it
It's three separate ballets based on
Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and and The Waves
and each dance with so different because
Mrs. Dalloway is quite
narrative driven, that ballet you could
definitely see the plot of Mrs. Dalloway
happening.
Orlando was really modern, really
abstract and The Waves, which I think was my
favourite was just so beautiful there was loads
of dancers on stage making wave-like
movements with their bodies and in
relation to each other.
Just, fantastic would really recommend it but
getting back to Orlando this is
completely not what I thought it was
going to be, I knew the story of Orlando
was about a man who one day wakes up and
finds that she's the woman so I thought
this was going to be quite abstract and
modern but really it reads like a fable
or an old-fashioned tale
Orlando is born in like the 16th century
and we go all the way through the ages
and then we end with him as a woman in
the 1920s and it's very
abstract in that sense that some people
age and died and some people don't
I mean it's very much a comment on
gender and sexuality in society Virginia
Woolf is very funny, very wry at moments
in this and I really liked what she was
doing
however it's written quite, for me quite
clunkily, quite old-fashioned and it's only
about 200 pages, but I felt like it could
have been even shorter because it's not
easy to read and and since it is like a
fable or a moral tale I felt like that
could have been done a lot more succinctly
but looking back on it I did
really enjoy what she was doing with it
and yeah I'm really pleased I read it, I
wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a
first Virginia Woolf, but it's unlike
anything else of hers that I've read, which I
feel like every time I read a Virginia Woolf
that's what I think! The next book I read
is Mama Can't Raise No Man by Robyn
Travis, who is a debut fiction writer.
Robyn Travis did write a book
previously which is about his time
in gamgs and coming off of the street and
so this is his first foray into fiction
This is about the young man called Duane
who is in prison and the way this book
is written is that it's court
transcripts and letters and phone calls
between him and his mother, sister,
friends outside of prison and the themes
are very interesting, it's ponderings on
what it means to be a man
because Duane was raised without a
father he had no male role model growing
up so he's talking about he learnt to be
a man on the street but all the
different characters in here disagree on
what masculinity is or what being a real
man really constitutes and the different
viewpoints and the different discussions
that are had in this book I really enjoyed I also
liked the theme of being a young poor
black man in certain parts of London
and how easy it is to fall into the gang
culture, how easy it is to perpetuate
that stereotype of getting a young
girl pregnant and not necessarily being
with her and more children being raised
in single-parent households, I really
really loved that. One problem that I do
have with the book is that I feel like
it was only written as a series of
letters in order to hide the fact that
Robyn Travis isn't the strongest
writer but what I think he's very good
at is writing the characters that he
knows really well and then when he's
writing perhaps the court judge I didn't
believe in that characterization and the
things that the judge was saying I just
don't feel like that would happen in court
but then when he's talking about the
everyday people I feel like I was really
on board with it. So I think that's gonna
happen when someone first starts
writing fictions so that's not necessarily
a criticism, but I would go into this book
if you are really interested in the
themes that it raises I wouldn't go in
expecting something like an amazing writing
style necessarily. And then the most
recent two books I've read were for
DiverseAThon, which was back again the last
week in January and the first book that I read for
that was The Good Immigrant, which is a
collection of essays curated by Nikesh
Shukla and this is full of BAME writers
in the UK all of whom are first or
second generation immigrants and it
talks about all the different
various forms of immigrant experiences
specifically in the UK. You have people
from all over the globe and there's
topics which look at the differences in
Asian, South Asian, East Asian Southeast
Asian and kind of the way we like to
compartmentalize people, there are essays
on the different shades of colour
that you are and therefore which
communities welcome you, so for
example you could be perceived as being
too pale to fully participate in some
aspects of African culture even though
you might have African heritage and it
kind of the way everybody's perceived. What I
really enjoyed about this is that
there are big issues of race that we are
aware of right, like we know racism exists but
this is about everybody's nuanced
experiences and how everybody
experiences things slightly differently
depending on what kind of heritage they
might have, people might have mixed
heritage, people might be from
different parts of the UK so in that
sense I feel like this really achieved
its aims in giving you a very broad
overview of the different people's
perspectives and making it very clear
that and there are unconscious biases
and prejudices in all of us and it is
hammered home the need to understand
people individually and so yeah I would
really recommend this, I think it's a
very interesting collection. And the final
book, which I just finished today is a
collection of short stories which I
really, really enjoyed and that is Whateve
Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen
Collins.Kathleen Colling was like a writer
and activist in the sixties and seventies, she died
really young at 44 in the eighties and
these stories were written in the sixties and
seventies but never published, this is the first
time these are published and I was so
surprised I feel like these read like
really modern short stories and a lot
of them are very short, there are couple
of long ones but overall they do tend to
feel like a snapshot into a wider story
and because there's so many of them
and they're all quite short, I feel like
each story is just solidifying a piece
of Kathleen Collins's personality into
me and I feel like overall I'm just
getting like a general theme of what
she's writing about so I really enjoyed
this experience and unsurprisingly race
plays a major part of a lot of these
stories and but it's about a lot of
things, about class and there's
definite, definite themes of colourism in here
which is that kind of superiority
from being a 'light-skinned Negro'
compared to being of s darker
person who looks like any 'other colored
girl'
she uses phrases like that which is
really interesting. The title story
is quite a long one which is about a
group of black and white and mixed
people, young people in New York in 1963
and she's looking back on this and it's
quite witty the way that she writes
this story, talking about it being the
melting pot, we were post-race, everyone's
getting along it was fantastic, racism
was over, it wasm'y an issue anymore or
that's what everybody believed which we
obviously know is not the case and
despite the length of the stories, what I enjoyed was
that each of her characters felt very
very real, very fleshed out, I felt like I
believed all of them and yeah I think
it's very short, I read it very quickly
because I was really engrossed in it and
overall really impressed. This is a new
release by Granta and I would
really recommend you check it out. So
that was my January, I would love to hear from
you if you have read any of these books
and have a bit more discussion about
them in the comments section and I will
see you in my next video, bye!
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