How much caffeine is too much
caffeine? Does the limit exist? See, y'all always think i'm playing at the
end of that video but look, I walk the walk okay. I'm trying to keep y'all hydrated and moisturized okay? Put on your chapstick and your lotion. Oh my god hold on. Stay Ah look at you, sit down. Look at that, I done forgot my
sunscreen. I was almost a hippocrip. But i'm going to put it on right now if this heathen will backup off me. This
is my favorite, that works best for me, it doesn't make me look
like Casper the friendly ghost. And I try to put about, well I just made
a mess but usually two fingers worth but that kind of just became a glob. Oh, we're gonna put on our sunscreen right here. If if you can move sir. The chaos that this
dog brings to my life is unmatched honestly. You're a mess. Okay, I think it was slightly less than I normally put on but whatever we're gonna make it work. I'm gonna make it work. Oh yeah, I've tried the 70 [SPF] in the same one and it's too thick, it definitely leaves a cast. Okay, all right. So lotion on the hands, we got chapstick on, we got our sunscreen, okay. Let's get it poppin'. Nigel, can I have some room? Can I sit?
Can you, can you move to the side at least? Can I get in? yYou don't need the whole
chair.. like can I get in? Okay, thank you. Hey, hi, hello. Welcome or welcome back to
my channel. My name is Jess and hey, welcome to part two of Book CommuniTEA: where I keep you abreast or I try my best to keep you updated on the goings on, the shenanigans in the
book community. Hey, hey. So the first thing.. Okay. I feel like this half is less juicy than
the first half and maybe I should have spread up the juiciness but I thought I was. But
I put like real heavy juice over there and over here just getting mild, I'm sorry. Okay, this happened last week and it is with Jenna Bush Hager, who is the daughter of former president George W. Bush, so she has a book club um and it's Read With Jenna and as all book clubs it seems or big popular ones like Reese's book club, Oprah's book club, they come with stickers. They put stickers on books which the majority of us book nerds do not like stickers on books. I know there's a small amount of people who don't care but anyway they usually have a new book that's coming out in their book club that they're going to read together and they get editions of that
book- I don't know if it's all the editions of the book or they just get a certain amount that are printed with their sticker on it for the most part, it's like a permanent one, not even one you can remove- my least favorite. So the December pick for Read With Jenna is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, rest in power, and obviously that is not a newly published book. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 and this just happens to be the book that she or her readers, I don't know how they choose books, chose for December. And it was reprinted, I believe with the sticker on it. "No ma'am". So she's holding up a picture on her instagram which i'll insert here, showing the book that's picked for December and it's The Bluest Eye, it has a little sticker on it and I didn't see anyone on Twitter talking
about this, for the most part this was mainly on Instagram. And so someone shared it and said "this is not sitting right with my soul. I have so many questions. Where are the Black people on these teams? Who's leading this book discussion? How is the discussion going to be framed? Why didn't you just do a recommended reading list of your favorite books? This is just wrong." And someone else said that sticker needs to go. I get it for a new book but what we're not gonna do is act like this Bush lady is helping Toni Morrison. This the Christopher Columbus of book clubs." So yeah it was just upsetting people because obviously like I said: it's not a new release. So it's not like it needs promoting, you know like. I think it's great
that that's her choice for the book club but I think it is a fair point of who is going to
be leading the discussion because as much as you can go into that book with good intent, I don't know if she could be the best person to lead the discussion about that book um. And then really printing it and having that sticker on it as if like "oh i'm putting my name on this, i'm giving this book recognition" because I think that's a big thing in those book clubs with the big names like Oprah, Reese and Jenna, to get even more recognition and attention brought to books. And it's like Toni Morrison didn't need that and so I just scrolled through on instagram, her post and all the
comments under it and the majority of them are bookstagrammars who are just like not happy, very upset and then of course there's like a random one from like a publisher like oh this is we're so
excited but everyone else's comments are like no, this is, "it is very colonial and disrespectful to place your branding sticker on an influential writer such as Toni Morrison. She doesn't need your advertising. Take it off um."While i'm happy to see Toni Morrison's work be exposed to wider audiences and The Bluest Eye is more than deserving of special notice, it's very disappointing to see
your book club stickers stamped onto such an iconic work of Black fiction. New readers just now encountering this book may not understand that Toni made enormous effort throughout
her writing career to avoid the white gaze and white approval. Since a lot of us
here are wondering, can you disclose how this decision to permanently stamp this sticker onto a reprinting was come to and who was consulted?" So I didn't see any replies from her account um
of course and then in the following posts, I didn't see anything. So I doubt that she
or whoever handles the instagram for her book club will say anything. But that was
just disappointing. It's just like it really does not need that. I mean on any work that's being reprinted but not especially not a book club led by a white woman on um such an important fictional work written by a Black woman. So i'm just gonna sigh. So I did look up why Jenna chose this book and she said it was because it had meaning to her. In this article she talks
about talking to her sister about when she first read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, that it was assigned to her sophomore english class and at first it was just another homework assignment and then she said it quickly turned into "reading a book I felt I had chosen for myself. I remember marking it up like I had never marked up any books before." So she was saying that while she couldn't necessarily relate to the main character, there was no way you didn't empathize with Pecola. Thematically she had never read anything like that because the book talked about adult subjects um with the underlying themes of racism, otherness, and feeling not good enough. And she knew those were things that her classmates of color were dealing with. So she said it's the
first book that really opened her eyes to how "literature can create understanding
and take you into worlds you don't know." At the time, The Bluest Eye was banned across some Texas schools and so it made that book more special to her because she knows some people couldn't read it and now "as this debut novel turns 50 years old, it still holds incredible power to
spark current conversations. While this fact is heartbreaking, it also shows how complicated and complex some of these themes are." So um I am happy that she has read it before and um has you know she already has a perspective of what the book is about. So it'll be good for her to reread it. I just hope that there are people of color in the book club who can also add to that conversation because I think the book club members would get the most out of a diverse conversation, discussion about the book. So this is a comment from a video last week, obviously there's been a lot of discourse
about the Sasha Alsberg situation, where someone sent me more photos of evidence that she was traveling between Boston and London um which seemed frivolous, like it didn't need to be and that she obviously was not quarantining when she was getting to London and so that's area upsetting but i'm not going to keep going on about it, we know we've addressed that situation. I just wanted to add in that I then saw um the first tweet I saw was from Courtney Milan, the romance author, who said selling ARCs isn't illegal. And um so I didn't know that to be honest. I thought like it was but I guess it's not illegal. It's looked down upon from what I have um
learned from twitter but it's not illegal. So it's just weird this whole discourse because
there's been so much negative um tweets and conversations before about bloggers hoarding ARCs, selling ARCs, stuff like that from authors and now there's nothing. And this is, I mean I did see a smaller author talk about the situation but from anyone larger, that's the only thing that I've seen. Like it's not illegal and it's like okay, girl. So hopefully they keep up this
mentality if this comes up again um because you can't have it both ways. You can't be upset this person is selling ARCs and then when this person is doing it, you're like "well it's not illegal so". It's just like keep that same energy, we've got the screenshots, so if this conversation comes up again um, we will pull out the receipts, okay? So kind of similarly to that with ARCs, I
saw an article that was shared by Publishers Weekly about BookCon/BookExpo and it
said "BookExpo and BookCon are no more." So BookCon and BookExpo is like the biggest US book convention and it's usually end of May and it's usually held in New York City um. So the article says"US book publishing's biggest ttrade show is being 'retired', show organizer ReedPop announced today. BookExpo along with BookCon and Unbound will not be held in 2021 after
being cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic." So they said "given the continued uncertainty surrounding in-person events at this time, the company has decided that the best way forward is to retire the current iteration of events as they explore new ways to meet the community's needs through a fusion of in-person and virtual events." And so they did do earlier this year, they had six days of free virtual programming from May 26th through the 31st, that were the
original days of BookExpo and BookCon. So they also said "the pandemic arrived at a
time in the life cycle of BookExpo and BookCon where we were already examining the restructure of our events to best meet our community's needs. This has led us to make the difficult decision to retire the events in their current formats as we take the necessary time to evaluate the best way to move forward and rebuild our events that will better serve the industry and reach
more people than we were able to before. We remain committed to serving the book community and look forward to sharing more information in the future." So it did say that they would continue to host the BookCon facebook group and keep um doing virtual content at least. So like I said Bookcon is like the biggest US um book convention and I feel like one of the biggest. I don't, I feel like people come from outside the US to go to it. I've never been. I've always wanted to go and like meet up with bookish friends that I haven't met before and it seems like that is not going to happen, at
least anytime soon. There are other conventions that um are in different parts of the US,
i'm obviously not even in America right now, can't even travel but hopefully at one of those events, I'll be able to meet some of my bookish friends. But I just wonder what this will do to, what effect it will have on the publishing in the book industry because I know that's where a lot of advanced reader copies or ARCs are given out, um lots of promotion for publishers and authors um and all their panels. Obviously they can do like panels and things online. So it's just interesting. I mean i've wanted to go and then also kind of not because i've seen the chaos that ensues at BookCon and Book Expo but I don't know. They saying "retired" so I don't know if they're going to bring it
back revamped, maybe 2022 or something after/ if we ever get through COVID but for now it looks like that's not happening, so sad face. So next was an author being a little messy on twitter. So you know on twitter you can link like your twitTer and Goodreads. So if you're doing updates on Goodreads, it'll link to twitter, I think. I don't have mine linked, so I don't know. But you know you always see people like "currently reading or 55% into The Way of Kings or whatever on twitter. So a reader did that, her status says "75% done with The Daughters of Erietown by Connie Schultz." And it says "I don't care about this book..." because it like cuts off the rest of whatever your status was. So the author, Connie Schultz, replied
"well thanks for sticking with it as long as you did, Laura. I do care about it." So the reader did not tag the author in this um and Goodreads doesn't automatically tag the author in this. So she either was searching for her name or the title of her book and then replied to the reader and that is so cringy and so weird. So the person who tweeted this said "authors: stop searching your names/ titles on social media. Stop
jumping into reader spaces. Just fucking stop." Um and it's like, I always feel like anything you say about a book when especially when you're not tagging the author on twitter, Goodreads, instagram, all these platforms even youtube, are for other readers. For them to know how you feel about a book, see if they like it, see if they won't like it. That, they're not for authors and now I imagine it's
probably hard to refrain from searching your name um from giving yourself giving yourself a quick google or putting your name into youtube but it also is not good for your head space or to go searching out reviews. Now granted you're probably going to find some great ones but then you're obviously going to find some ones that are less than great. So it's it's just awkward um she did apologize though. I don't know if she saw other people's tweets about not doing that but uh Connie said "Laura, I want to apologize to you. I was really glad you lasted as long as you did but I should have kept that to myself. I wish you only the best." So I'm glad that she realized that and hopefully going forward she doesn't make that mistake again but if you're an author, thinking of being an
author, don't do that because it's weird. Don't, try not to search for yourself but if you're going to please don't like directly come at a reviewer. Now obviously, if it was positive and you're like "oh my god thank you so much" that's different and I do not agree with anyone tagging authors in negative reviews um but yeah that right there, when you weren't tagged and you obviously went searching for it and then replied, super cringe. But she did apologize, so good for Connie
and hopefully she stays in her lane. So Epic Reads, I'm pretty sure most people in the bookish community know what that is but I think they are under HarperCollins, not
exactly as a subsidiary or a publishing house, they're like an online community
that hype up um promote the young adult books published under HarperCollins. If I
have that wrong, please correct me. But um every year they have their Book Shimmy Awards. So they have different awards like best debut, best thriller, whatever kind of
like maybe their own Goodreads awards but um specifically just for the books published under HarperCollins. And they also in that award, have a Book Nerd of the year category, where I don't know, five or six people in the bookish community are nominated and then obviously you could vote for them and then all the other categories. So per the theme of 2020, there were no um book nerds that were of color nominated um or at least not when you look immediately at them. I can't speak to anyone's you know um ethnicity, they could just be white passing but there were none. So then of course they had to be called out on it because they couldn't use their eyes and look and see there was no diversity there. So the thread on twitter is "hi everyone. It was pointed out to us that there's a lack of representation in the Book Nerd of the Year category in our
Book Shimmy Awards and we agree, we can do better. We ALWAYS want to ensure that we're reflecting the vast range of readers who make up the YA community. The Book Nerd of the Year nominees have all made positive and amazing contributions, which which is of course why they're nominated to
begin with. Moving forward, we are taking even more steps to advocate for creators from diverse and underrepresented groups because that's who YOU are and who WE are and we wouldn't be EPIC without y'all. We love hearing your feedback and we always welcome it, whether it be via social media, email, or in person (remember what that was like?) We appreciate y'all always and forever." So I, here just some things that bothered me it said that it was pointed out that there was a lack of representation and we agree we can do better. So just, why did it have to be pointed out
though? And then though we always want to ensure we're reflecting the vast range
of readers who make up the YA community. If you were, then this wouldn't even be an issue um and then the Book Nerd of the Year nominees have all made positive and amazing contributions
which is of course why they're nominated... are you saying you couldn't find
any creators of color who've made positive contributions? Maybe i'm reading into it and then moving forward we are taking even more steps to advocate for creators from diverse and underrepresented groups. Now, what steps are those? I, just it's fine you say that but then usually
they never added what steps those are. So that's what I would like to know. Someone replied "so maybe y'all should scratch that category this year and bring it back next year when you all have a more diverse selection of nominees. Also why not leave the nominations up to us the readers and not y'all staff if you're really committed to doing better?" Which is excellent idea um. I didn't
know about these awards till this year but yeah i'm assuming that their staff does the
nominations? So that also would be helpful if you actually ask the community because maybe you would get a better representation because I personally know and follow/ watch many creators of color who love YA and promote it on their channel, promote it on twitter, so on instagram, so it's it's weird. So yeah, I don't know if is that something you could vote on? Obviously, I would have missed the deadline by now but I don't know if that was something they put out-- like a link to vote or if you could even like nominate and then they chose the people who had the top ones? So that would be interesting to know but it's still, it's just you know and i'm not gonna i'm not going to say it... I'm going to say it: how in 2020 are we still doing this? It's just, it's just a mess and then
there were some great threads on twitter about it. There was a great there by Ashley at Bookish Realm and she said: And, I mean I don't need to see say anything else on the subject because that is exactly it. There's always that "we plan to do better, we're making steps to improve" but it's like what? If we are your target audience, you need to tell us. It's not some internal, just some internal meeting. Like you do need to have those and have those discussions internally to plan how you're going to do better and make those steps and rework you know, your whole system, your mission statement, all that stuff but then you need to tell your audience what your plans are to do better, not just we're going to go we're going to do better, trust us. It's like okay, we are going to do better then you go and you have these meetings and you come back you're like we've talked
about it and we're doing this, our employees are doing this, we are hiring this, we are making sure we have more Black and POC people in these meetings, in these board rooms, um working in these groups and uh reaching out to readers and having more readers of color involved in things that we do that involve the community. And I want to see it like, I just don't want to see your tweet. I
want it on, I want you to tweet your action plan and have a link to your website where we can read it and then when you fuck up again, we can be like "oh well you said you were going to do this" and that's being held accountable. You need to apologize, make a plan, tell us the plan and then we can see if you actually hold to that. And then keep you accountable that way. And obviously Epic Reads, like I said, I don't think they're a direct I don't think like a publishing house but
that's just for any company and you have to start deciding, like you have to make a choice when a company says you're going to do better they let you know how they're supposed to do better and then they continue to not. Then you have to be like okay, I can't support this company any longer. Look what happened with Book Outlet and well for a while was Book of the Month, but that's gone and then just different things like this There, you have limited power obviously, we can spread awareness but if it's something where you can directly stop purchasing from that, stop promoting, stop using something and it doesn't happen in every case-- some things are more complicated than that but sometimes you can make that choice and we need to. So this isn't just directed at Epic Reads, this is all these companies that said you know, that posted a black square that said they were going to do all these things, they were listening and learning. So what did you learn and what are you going to do going forward because I want to know. I don't want to see those bullshit things and that goes into apologies from creators also or authors, Jess Cluess. What are you going to do, how are you going to be better? how can I believe when you just went on this racist rant, when you do this racist shit, that you say "sorry" and then I'm just supposed to believe that you're going to be better. How?? I need to see you put in work and then you need to let us know what that works supposed to be and then i'm going to watch you and see if you hold up your end. I, you know, I'm not a well-versed person this is why, this is why I read tweets by other people who can explain it better like Ashley and also Marines from My Name is Marines. Always incredible, she explains everything so much better than I can. But it's just frustrating time and time again. How have you, it's December and you haven't learned anything. So that's just... I'm tired Jesus. But anyway, that was with Epic Reads. So, I don't think they're scratching it and they're probably go ahead with their nomination and whoever will win. Who knows what they'll do next year honestly, I don't have high hopes but we'll see. Okay and lastly, I'm not even inserting screenshots this time because I'm tired. This is the same conversation this keeps happening, especially lately. So, I just want to talk about it in case you were confused on what was happening on twitter on Wednesday night, Wednesday day, whatever time it was for you. So, I'm gonna explain it and then i'm just gonna i'm gonna stop. So
again there was a tweet by a fellow booktuber, Jesse, that was referencing book hauls again. So, I don't know what has been happening with them, if somebody has messaged them or commented on their video about book hauls. I did see a tweet from them that also said that they had friends that had been, I don't know attacked or people made comments about their book hauls but again it's coming
up because this came up like two weeks ago and then I feel like there was a discussion last week and now it's here again. So they made this comment and then people were getting upset just reading that comment and so then there was the team of why are people still getting mad about how
people spend their money, let people live and why are you mad we're buying books. Like when we buy books, that doesn't affect you, like don't be mad you can't buy all these books. I'm going to buy all these books if I want, yada yada but then there was the other side where the conversation, I guess actually started that was the context before, behind the whole thing. So, I mentioned a couple weeks ago in a video that the Philippines were hit by um some really severe tsunamis and so they have been struggling. Obviously they are also in the middle of a pandemic, like we all
are and then they've been hit by these massive um tsunamis, so there's been massive flooding and some places are just like underwater and people don't have food and resources and all of these things. And um so I do have links in my description, I just want to point that out.
There's like a link to a card with different ways to donate um to the Philippines
and i've tried to retweet on twitter some Filipino booktubers who have ways to donate, that that you can donate directly to them and then they're showing you proof that they're donating it to different resources or organizations um. And so the the conversation really was that you can continue to go on and post about these hauls, continue to spend your money on all these books but not um at least even retweet a donation link. So people were us upset because when a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests were happening this summer, that they were supporting us and um supporting donation links and and talking about it on twitter and they're feeling um forgotten about and you know left out and basically pointing out a lot of us readers, people in general are very
self-centered and only focused on the West and I guess you can include the UK in
that really too um. And that so we're not supporting them enough and and basically they were referring that to hauls. Like you can sit on here and keep arguing and defending your hauls or buying on your books that's fine, but at least a retweet, that's free. Like at
least talk about it, bring it up, bring awareness to it. So I totally
understand that frustration and I at the beginning um was retweeting um and sharing and I will admit that I fell off. I'm not going to say I didn't because I obviously did know. I saw a lot of people tweeting about it and I could have been more vocal. I don't always remember to tell people about the links in my description. I try to switch them up to keep them updated with the latest thing that was going on like SARS in Nigeria um that information which I don't think i talked about either. So I definitely can do bette. And in being more aware in using um this platform that I have to share that awareness. So at least that you know and you can go look at those resources, you can share them, you can donate if you have the means. So that was really the conversation last night on twitter and so there were people who didn't understand the actual context of the conversation and they were like why are we talking about this shit again, like mind your business, I do what I want. I buy my books and then people are like we're literally just saying
that you're not supporting us how we supported you. And so then of course the consumerism thing came in there and it's just like i'm so tired. I just want to say "stop it. Get some
help." It's just it's just frustrating and I don't, I'm not gonna have a conversation in
this video because then the video is gonna go up and then it's gonna just be comments. So it's definitely something I would be interested to talk about in like a live so there could be
actually like a conversation but anyway if you can please um go, if you're on book twitter then
you've you've probably seen it, so at least just retweet a link. If you can afford to donate,
great ,if you can't at least retweet links so someone else may be able to donate. They can see that information and and then that's at least you doing something because in this community of readers, it is very easy to think we're just all in our home country. Especially me it's um a lot of us booktubers are American so it's very easy to just focus on what's going on in America because America is a disaster but so many other countries also are. Also going through so many things
and I know that it's very hard to keep up with everything, especially this year has already
been really hard mentally for all of us. So I'm not saying you have to be up to date on
every single thing going on. I know there's a lot of things I don't know that are going on
but if you do see it, if it does come across your twitter bio and people are asking you to reach -your twitter bio, your twitter timeline- and just retweet information, to at least get it out there. Maybe when you do see something you're like oh this is the third time I've seen it, maybe click
on it read it, just get a a brief idea of what's going on. But I know it's overwhelming because it's just like the world's constantly on fire. So just do your best within your you know your ability your but don't like burn out mentally and share things when you can, if you have the means donate but if you can't at least awareness is always free. And spreading that awareness. So that was mainly the conversation. Like I said i'm not putting in screenshots, i'm not i'm not just not bothering with it because it's going to happen again and that's just it's just not
the point. It's deeper than "don't watch book hauls" which I did say in
a video a couple weeks ago just because I didn't want to have the discussion on it again. And deeper than "it's my money mind your business" but we're just not going to go into
that conversation right now because I'm tired. I'm sure there's more, I'm sure I missed something. I'm sure there's something happening right now so that there'll be another
video for Tuesday. But, yeah I'm tired. I'm tired physically, mentally. I'm just
exhausted. Anyway, per usual: if I missed anything, misinterpreted anything, you want to add anything to this conversation, please do so in the comments below because I love the discussions that we have down there. And please check out my description for links to information about things that are going on in the world um. There's alternatives to Amazon: links to Bookshop.org, which I am an affiliate so if you did buy a book through my link, I would get a small commission. Libro FM instead of Audible and then there's my social media and just always look at the description, pretty please. So take care of yourself. Like I said earlier, to stay hydrated, stay moisturized, put on your sunscreen, wear your mask, wash your mask wash your hands, stay home if you can don't need to leave the house, please, don't go out places. I'm so freaking sick of COVID. And um give this video a thumbs up and subscribe and I thank you so much for your support and for watching this video. So take care, i'll see you in my next one, bye! you know left your bed and you left the toys, now you squeezing in this chair
with me. okay so i'm gonna need you to sit down jesus be a fence. Is this is crooked?
i'm not changing at this point okay hey no hey sit down sit down please nigel
