Hi guys, welcome back to part 3 of my Christmas/
December book haul. As I said in
the last one,
these are all just novels so I'm not
going to put them into any sort of order.
I'm just going to pick them up and briefly give
you a synopsis. The first book I'm going to mention here is one
you will have heard a lot about on booktube
and that is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi which is
the large format paperback and I think the
cover looks really beautiful on this.
I don't have very many orange books and this
looks great on my shelves. That's why I bought it.
I think this starts by focusing
on two sisters who go in different
directions in their lives. One is sold
into slavery and one becomes a slaver's wife
and then it follows generations of their
lives on from then. I've heard nothing but
amazing things about this. I saw it in lots of
peoples' 2016 favourite books.
I would like to read this one as
soon as possible to try and stay kind of current.
I often find that by the time I get around to reading the book,
everyone's finished reading it two months
beforehand. So it would be nice to be
reading this at the same time as everyone else
but we'll see when I get to it.
l also picked up a very new release a few days ago and that
is Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg
I think it's quite difficult to describe what this book
is about but it's about a young Catholic
girl who is raised in Poland in a very
superstitious family so there's a lot of
elements of fables and myth in
this because of what they're basing their superstition on.
It says on the inside flap that "Swallowing
Mercury is about the ordinary passing of
years filled with extraordinary days."
I think this might be a really good
mixture of and weirdness and also very
mundane everyday. The cover is absolutely
beautiful and I love these small, little hardbacks.
This one should be an easy one to pick up at some point
because it is pretty short.
Another beautiful book; I also picked up the
Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church
I was initially drawn
to the cover of this before I started reading what it
was about because it has panels of
different types of birds and these are
how they would be printed in old
Ornithology guides and if you
don't know I am really interested in birds.
My PhD focuses quite largely on predatory birds.
Just generally i'm really interested and
intrigued birds and the species.
I come from a family that loves bird
watching. Some people have been known to
call me the bird girl,
I'm not sure if I should admit to that or not but it's one of
my interests so the cover of this
immediately drew me in.
Then when I read the blurb, I realised it sounded like something
that I would be interested in reading.
This is about a woman who's called
Meridian, which is a great name and actually
one of my last surviving
rats was called Meridian so I was very
intrigued to find that name in here.
She is an ornothologist and I think she has won
a place at a university to study
ornothology. Then she falls in love
with a guy who is a physics professor
and ends up deferring her career and her
life plans for his. So I think it explores -
there are some elements of ornithology in here,
I think she's studying the social
behavior of a crow colony, but at the same
time there are feminist elements in
terms of what it means for a woman to give
her career up for a man. This is set in
1941 so it is historical.
I think there are lots of
interesting themes: birds, feminism, relationship dynamics that I am very
interested in so I'm hoping this one will be
a winner for me. Carrying on with the theme of
really beautiful books I picked up Fell by
Jenn Ashworth. I've seen this on Simon
from SavidgeReads and Mercedes from Mercysbookishmusing
channels. Ever since I heard of this book
I've been really intrigued largely because
it is set in the area where I live and
I believe that Jenn is actually a
creative writing lecturer who
lectures at the university where I do my PhD... hopefully
will not be there for much longer! This
is about a young woman who goes back to
her family home, in Morecambe Bay, that's been empty
for quite a few years since her parents died.
As she goes back to this old house, she
reawakens the spirits of her parents and I think
it follows kind of all of those different
characters, mainly trying to figure out
what it is that the spirits need to do,
what unfinished business is it that they have to fix.
Because it's that that has brought them back. So as well
being really intrigued by story, I'm also
looking forward to reading
a story that focuses on my local area
and seeing what it'll be like to read about
places I know well. So yeah very happy
to have this one. I think this is the last of
the beautiful hardbacks, this is
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey.
This is set in 1885 and it follows
Lieutenant Colonel Foster who is taking
a group of men on a mission into newly
acquired Alaska. So I think it kind of
follows them as they go beyond the
boundaries of what is known about so far,
they're going to like uncharted territory
in a way. So it follows their expedition and also
focuses on his wife who is left at home
and she's newly pregnant and she has quite
an adventurous spirit herself. I'm really
interested to see how this one.... erm....works
out. I do have the author's previous book
The Snow Child which I've still not
read and I'm hoping to get to as soon
as possible. So I'm hoping to get
both of those quite soon.
The next book that I picked up is
Euphoria by Lily King and this is one
that's been on my wish list for quite a long time
now so I was happy to finally get it.
The cover I think is actually quite
quite brash but I quite like it,
I think it's quite striking. This is
set in 1933 and it follows three
anthropologists who are isolated working in
the jungle of New Guinea and it focuses on
the relationship dynamics between
these three people which I think wavers
between being very good and quite bad
and how those relationship dynamics
function when they are isolated from
anyone else and they don't really have
any space from each other. So I'm hoping
that will also be interspersed with details of
their anthropological work so yeah I'm
really interested by this one. Next book
that I'm going to talk about is Eve Out of Her Ruins
by Ananda Devi and this is translated
by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Ananda Devi is
a Mauritian author I think and this book is also
set in Mauritius. This follows a young girl
called Eve who gives her account of what
it's like to live a marginalised urban life in
Mauritius and I think it focuses quite a loton
how there is two sides to Mauritius. So there's the tourist side
and the tourists that turn up don't live the
same life as the people who actually
live there day in day out and often
live in quite a lot of poverty. I read a couple
of pages of this when I was in the
bookshop and some of the phrases and the
writing is really beautiful, really
lyrical and striking so I'm excited
to read this. I don't think I've ever read a book
by a Maritian author or one set in Mauritius
so yeah excited about this one. And the last two
books are books I bought myself with my
Christmas money based on a specific sort
of theme that I was looking for. As you might
know, I think I mention it in one of my videos from
before christmas, I recently bought and
read Night Waking by Sarah Moss which is
set on an isolated Hebridean island.
I've mentioned this before in my videos, I love
isolated rural locations, I particularly love
anything set on islands and Scottish
islands are great. It's something that I've
always been interested in, one of my
first kind of research obsessions that I remember
having as a kid was looking up
Shetand and the Hebrides and the
Orkneys because I couldn't believe
that people lived lives like that, I was
obsessed with the idea that people lived on these
isolated island. So reading Night
Waking really kind of reminded me of
how much I love reading books like that
and I decided to pick up a couple of books
of my wish list that are focused on
islands, isolated island life. The First is
Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg.
This is set in 1830 and it follows a young
couple who've just got married and the guy
is a minister and they're going to live in
St. Kilda which is a now abandoned
archipelago quite far off the
coast of Scotland. Again another one of
my kind of pet areas of research when I was younger.
This young couple
I think they are going to take their
religion to the people that live there
but it focuses on the life of the people and
the harshness of life in St. Kilda but
also on the relationship between the
two people. The woman is pregnant and
also doesn't speak any Gaelic so she's very
isolated and has no one to communicate with
apart from her husband and just
focuses on how they get along in this very
isolated setting. I'm really
interested to see how this one turns out.
There are quite a few books which I found
there are set like on isolated
Scottish islands, both fictional and
real islands, and some of them I read the
first few pages on Amazon and the writing was
appalling. But this one seemed, the writing
seemed okay. So I'm hoping it will be
alright and it won't fall into the same trap
because as much as I enjoy certain
settings, I'm not going to put up with shitty
writing just to read about it so fingers crossed
for this one. The last book I'm going to talk
about is The Summer of the Bear by Bella. Pollen
This is a really beautiful cover but
it was quite expensive to pick up new so I decided to
get it secondhand and it's not in the
best condition. It's one of those ones
where they say it's nicer than it is. It's quite creased and
bashed about and yellowed on the top but I
figure it's of unknown quality to me so
if I don't like it then I haven't wasted as much money
and if I do really enjoy it, I can
always invest in a new copy that's more
expensive once I know that I like it. In this book
there are apparently Cold War tensions
rising and there is a reason to
suspect that there is a mole in the government so
when a prominent diplomat dies, the
government start digging into history and his wife
and kids decide to escape and go to
a remote Scottish island. When they get
there they start to realise that actually the
rural remote setting might actually be
serving to further the distance between the
members of the family rather than bring them closer
together. Then they find some
common ground in going to find this bear
that they think has been abandoned on the island.
So I have hopes that this will also focus on
the like family story and
also on the remote island setting
and that will be a really perfect blend for
me so we'll see how this one turns out
as well. That's all of the books... that's a lot!
I always tend to get quite a lot of books at
the beginning of the year because my
birthday is also at the beginning February so
I will get some more books but then tend not
to buy a huge amount for a while and it
kind of evens out over the year.
Thank you for watching as I kind of
poorly explain what a lot of those books
are about. I'm really excited to read them all
also hopefully you will see them in more detail
in wrap-ups and reviews soon. Thank you for
watching and I will see you in the next video. Bye!
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