I don't even know the order of books I read. What do we got...? Oh yeah! Hey guys,
it's Emily. For today's video I am doing my July reading wrap-up. In the month of
July I read ten books and they're kind of all over the place in terms of how I
felt about them. So let's get into it. The first book that I read in July was
Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. This is a sequel to Amberlough, which is book I
very much enjoyed. This series is fantasy...? It feels a little bit weird to call it that
because there's no magic of any kind. It's just set in an alternate world. I'm
not going to go a ton into plot because, obviously, since this is a sequel, to go
into plot would spoil a lot of stuff from the first book. Basically it's about
the rise of a fascist power in a group of states--not like the US, more like
the German principalities. It's clearly inspired by and informed by German
history. It's mostly a Weimar era kind of setting, but it does pull from some of
the late 19th century stuff and pre-WWI German history. This is
set in a different country, which is really cool because we get to
experience a new culture. The society in which this book mostly takes place is
actually a matriarchal one, which was very cool to read about. I love me a
matriarchy. This book felt much more plot heavy than the first book. The first book
felt a bit more character-driven. This reads pretty much like a heist book. I do
really enjoy heist stories, so that was really fun. But at times that was kind of
at the expense of some of the character development. At the end of the day I
still gave this four stars because it is just such a solid series. It's super
fun. The culture and history in it is great. This book looked more explicitly
at how racism and nationalism intersect. That was something I thought was
sometimes missing from the first book, so I really appreciated that. Really enjoy
the series I think it's so under-hyped. It is super fun. The characters are really
compelling. I had so much fun, and I definitely recommend it. Next I have The
Book of M by Peng Shepherd. This was some very cool speculative fiction. It's
a post-apocalyptic, kind of dystopian thing going on, but it has elements of
fantasy. This is set in a world in which people's shadows disappear. When your
shadow disappears, you lose your memory. What's really interesting is that Shepherd
plays with this idea of forgetting. So not only do you forget your family and
your friends and your history and all of those kinds of things, you forget that
things can't be. The first example that we come across in
this book (which is like super, super early, so this isn't a spoiler) is that
someone forgets that deers have antlers, and therefore also forgets that deers
cannot have birds wings on their heads. So you see a deer that has bird wings
instead of antlers. When people forget, especially en mass, the fabric of the
world just shifts, and it's a very scary thing because what if someone forgets
that an object isn't actually a weapon, or what if someone forgets how a weapon
works, but not that it is a weapon and so it's made stronger and more powerful?
It's just really, really, really cool. Sometimes the logic of the Forgetting
did not make sense and I read a lot of fantasy and a lot of fantasy that has
rule-based magic systems that we get really magic as a metaphor in this and
it doesn't really translate to magic with rules which is what I am used to
and what I really like I think because this book really does lean into the
fantastical elements that lack of logic or some of the logical flaws in this
fantastical thing going on become very apparent which takes you out of the
story so that was one issue that I had with it but I think ultimately the
metaphor is more powerful than its flaws so I liked that I thought it was a great
literary device even if it wasn't perfect I think I probably enjoyed the
first half of this book more than the second half the first half is a lot
slower it feels more character-driven second
half feels a lot more plot-driven the second half especially like the last
third feels like you're going at this breakneck pace all of a sudden the
ending of this was superb it was so heartbreaking and felt very fitting to
the book I did not see it coming but it was just so good next I run arabela of
Mars by David D Levine this was fun it was like kind of light and fluffy and
fun it is set in like an 18th century equivalent time in which space travel is
a thing and we follow a girly mirror a lot I think she's a teenager
in this book and she grew up on Mars and she's like a bit of a tomboy
Lexx going outside and fighting and doing boyish things Mars is like a
British colony in this world and so it comes with all the trappings of 18th
century British society which means that air Bella
doing those things she gets shipped back to England kind of gets wrapped up in
this murderous plot and to save her brother's life she has to figure out how
to get back to Mars so it's this kind of swashbuckling spaceship like literally a
ship for the cover adventure and it was really fun I liked that in the end even
though Arabella starts out seeming like kind of an annoyingly cliched version of
a strong female character and that she is strong because she exhibits masculine
traits and ends up not being those traits that like save the day and I
already said this is like fluffy so saying that the day is saved doesn't
count as a spoiler because if I say like fluffy that obviously has a nice ending
he plays a little bit with colonialism but like not a ton and so sometimes the
tone of the book and some of the lot stuff that was going on that's like
explicitly exploitative colonialism I was like this feels a little bit weird
that's not to say that Lavigne doesn't engage with that kind of stuff at all
it's just not at the forefront of the book before front of the book is really
Arabella and her adventure it was fun it was cute I enjoyed it and don't know
that I'll continue the series but this was like a solid three stories for me
next I went to sharp objects by Gillian Flynn I started that HBO series and
after the first episode I was like I am definitely going to read the Wikipedia
page and figure out what happens who did it because it's kind of a murder mystery
instead of doing that I decided I would actually read the book because like
there is a book and I was just being an idiot again and it was super addictive I
read it in like a day and I don't know how much I liked it I couldn't really
tell you it was addictive so there was that at times I thought that the
narrative voice was very inauthentic it felt like Gillian Flynn kind of being
like oh this is what an edgy said traumatized person sounds like as
opposed to just reading from the perspective of a traumatized character
yeah that kind of a name you roll my eyes at certain points it's also the
kind of thing where the book is like super fucked up I found it kind of hard
to distinguish like oh that's a really well-crafted plot twist versus like I'm
just shocked cuz those are two very different things I think something
similar happens sometimes in literary fiction when authors just go like as
bleak and sad and tragic as possible because that makes you feel things as
opposed to really trying to craft a good book a well-crafted book maybe something
like and I was also incredibly smelling that
I called one of the super fucked up plot-twists who said anything about the
plot this follows a woman named Camille she is told that she needs to return
home to her small town in southern Missouri in which one girl has been
found murdered and another has just gone missing and so she goes down to kind of
investigate it's very clear that there was a lot of trauma for her in that
hometown in particular her relationship with her mom seems to have a lot of
baggage and you go from there again I don't
mm-hmm I don't know what to say I think I gave it like three stars on goodreads
I read it in today that was cool the book also talks a lot
about female relationships but it feels very heteronormative so I was kind of
like this is very straight and very white
after finishing sharp objects I was like I need something light and fluffy so I
read the kiss quotient but Helen Wong dude my grandma please don't watch this
part this is a romance book about a woman who has autism spectrum disorder
dating is like too much to even think about I'm like how do you do that what
even so so she decides to hire an escort to like teach her how to date how to be
in a relationship at all of that other stuff so yeah there's a lot of sex
scenes in this that's not your jam maybe don't read it all of the sex in this was
super super consent heavy that was something I really liked it was all
about communication it was just great and it was also a fun read it was just a
great palate cleanser I really enjoyed it after that I went for some highbrow
literary fiction and I read there there my tummy orange this is as I just said
literary fiction it is very buzzed about and it deserves all of that buzz this is
basically Tommy oranges answer to the kind of monolithic representation of
Native American people in American society those images and stories are
largely crafted by white people this is on voices about 12 Native American
characters whose lives all connect through their relationships and families
and things like that and also from a plot perspective if they connect around
one event to be big Oakland Pow Wow every character gets two chapters I
think I might be wrong on that and each characters chapter has such a distinct
voice and an incredibly well-crafted voice so they all feel unique they all
feel authentic an orange plays around with
in more conventional ways so diction and sentence structure and like I've said a
million times voice but he also plays around with it in more kind of complex
literary ways in terms of switching up the perspective so we have some
first-person we have some third-person and I even think we have some second
person in here and they also plays around with tents quite a bit it's
really cool it's really well done from a craft perspective it's an amazing
examination of how the native experience has been so misrepresented we have
characters an ear very in touch with their native heritage within local
native community in Oakland where it's primarily set and with their families
and things like that and then you also have characters who were adopted and
raised by white families in the suburbs and they're trying to reconnect with
their native heritage and we have everything in-between it was so good
it's so so good I definitely recommend this next I read Sadie by Courtney
summers and the more I think about it the more I feel like this book does so
well what sharp objects kind of tries to do this looks a lot at women at female
relationships at the ways in which society mistreats women and the ways in
which society is obsessed with like the stories and looking in like a voyeur on
the mistreatment of women and it's why a which is the categorization that I feel
a little bit weird about because this is so incredibly dark I would say that this
probably needs a content warning for like everything under the Sun but in
particular child abuse sexual abuse rape pedophilia substance abuse and addiction
it's just a lot of very very very gnarly stuff going on and yet we don't actually
see any of the abuse against women on the page we know that it's happened but
it's never laid out in detail which was a brilliant omission like an intentional
omission in this we have two perspectives the first is a guy he's
like a producer on a fictionalized version of this American life and he
gets a spin-off series investigating the disappearance of a girl in Sadie
Sadie's 13 year old younger sister was found in a field murdered and that case
is unsolved and then while later Sadie goes missing and so this guy's
name I don't even remember he starts a podcast of trying to figure out what
happened to Sadie and his perspective reads like a podcast transcript Summers
does an amazing job of capturing like the vibe of a kind of scripted kind
of interviewee podcast like serial so parts of it are clearly him reading from
a script parts of it are live interviews with
people in the town and people in Sadie's life they're actually producing a
podcast they're producing the podcast that is within this book as an actual
real life thing first episodes out I'll leave a link to it down below I haven't
listened to it yet but it's so good in this that I'm really really really
excited for the second perspective is Sadie herself she's not kidnapped she's
up and left to try and find and kill the man that she believes maybe knows to be
the murder of her sister in that podcast thing we get this lens of society's
weird fetishization almost of murdered girls murdered women and the awful
things that are done to them through Sadie's perspective there's this really
cool reclamation of agency I really liked that I do wish that this had just
been explicitly adult fiction it doesn't really make sense to me as y-a because
Sadie herself is 1920 so if we're talking like age demographics that's
really new adult and then in terms of themes there's not really much I would
argue around coming of age or finding yourself or finding your place in
society which I generally think of as the larger thematic threads that tie way
books together but at the end of the day why it is really just a marketing
demographic term I have some feelings about that I wish that Sadie's chapters
had leaned in to like adult literary fiction and been a little bit more
avant-garde almost but they're still super super strong like I said there's
no explicit grotesque violence on the page you know things are have happened
or are happening there's references to them happening but like it's explicitly
stated that they're not gonna go into details and now something I really
really likes what I was talking about with sharp objects where it's like oh
there's all this fucked-up shit that kind of I think sometimes can trick your
reader into conflating shock with a well-crafted book this is just a
well-crafted book because none of the shock stuff is actually in there so all
of the sense of foreboding of anxiety of horror and anger are not crafted using
shock tactics it's a lot harder to do that I
think and so I just think this book is a lot stronger because of that I
definitely recommend it it's coming out in September I am excited to hear what
other people think about it next I read a green and ancient light by Frederick s
turbine I enjoyed this I have some feelings about it
so I started out reading it just assuming and this is on me and I think
this is like an intentional thing that Durbin was doing that this was set in
England it's about a boy who lives in a city and had to be sent to the
countryside to avoid bombing so he goes deliver this grandma and
that's like straight Chronicles of Narnia stuff so for me that's what I
immediately associated the story with then an enemies plane crashes and the
main character in this who is never named
and his grandmother find the soldier and so I given the context that I was
putting on this book assumed that it was a Nazi soldier and I was like this is
very weird that they are caring for a Nazi soldier and we're just not
acknowledging the Nazi part and then I realized that I was being an idiot
because there were no names no places none of that and it's intentional and so
it's set in like who knows where kind of place it's almost like the fantastical
and reality or switch we have these kind of archetypal places and names for
things when it comes to fantastical fairy type stuff which is what this book
plays around with and then we have like reality which is like there's London
there's Germany there's Nazis there's the Allied powers those the Axis powers
so this book kind of flips it where the fantastical style feels more like
reality sometimes the one named character in this book is a faun
everything else is more archetypal we have the boy we have the grandma we have
a town's person I think it's interesting but ultimately when you lose that sense
of place when you strip back that context I lost interest and I wasn't
able to connect as strongly with the book it's still a nice story so I think
I gave this three stars it's very well written so that was nice
like a risky literary like craft decision to strip back context
ultimately for me that was a negative rather than something that made this
book super cool next I read sourdough by Robin Sloane and I really didn't like it
this book yeah I didn't like it everyone felt like a caricature rather than a
character I couldn't tell you what the main character's personality was like
douchey tech lifestyle caused her to have like an existential crisis and so
she literally is introduced to culture aka sourdough starter sometimes called a
culture and that is what resets her life I was like okay hello very heavy-handed
metaphor on top of that the people that introduced her to this culture are these
coded Roma characters like they're a made-up ethnicity and that was really
weird to me because I was like okay I think you're trying to get around
fetishizing any group but you still are clearly pulling from existing groups and
you're not like actually making this some magical mythical made-up race it
just looks like slightly tweaked version of existing cultures and so it still
feels kind of weird and exploitative and very other ring so that was strange
I really didn't like it none of the characters felt real to me the San
Francisco in this book didn't feel real to me and I think it was going for a
fairytale vibe but fairy tales when you're reading them in novel form like a
fairy tale retelling they work when the character feels real Viktor lavalla does
an amazing job of this in the change language I would a million percent
recommend that's more of a horror fairy tale that's the other thing I have I
keep using fairy tale because I think that's what the author was going for and
some of the motifs and images that he uses but what he's really crafting is a
heavy-handed fable fable with like a moralizing story fairy tales are very
similar to folk tales the Grimm brothers kind of made them into fables but
they're not really they're much more about fear and anxiety and that kind of
stuff and I didn't get that sense in here and so I was like oh I don't really
think that you're doing the right thing it just was not very good I didn't hate
it though which is why I gave it two stars versus one star I saved one stars
for books that I hate with a fiery passion and this I find annoying
not good but I don't hate it and lastly I read paper girls volume one by Brian
cave on and cliff Chang this is the first in a comic series about a group of
paper girls in the 1980s who stumble into some time-traveling stuff this felt
very very very introductory in a way that sometimes was a bit off-putting
there was so much new stuff introduced in this I think the book would have been
better served to have oh you've won be a little smaller in scope and then
introduce some of the other stuff going on here into volume two I'm going three
so it feels like this is a more complete story arc and I'm not saying that the
entire story arc needs to be in one volume because obviously not this just
didn't feel complete to me it felt very introductory that said I love the
characters I love the art style it's super fun I am very into the kind of
nostalgia factor that's going on I am still super excited to continue reading
the series so that's it for everything that I read in the month of July let me
know what you guys read down below in the comments if you liked this video
give it a thumbs up hit subscribe to see more of my face you can find me on
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next time
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