BOOK HAUL✨✨ classics, new authors & old favourites

hello dear friends welcome back to my channel i have another video for you today i hope you're having an absolutely fabulous day and if you are not maybe this will cheer you up a little bit because i have a book haul a whole bunch of books that i've acquired from various different places in the last little bit so i thought i would talk you all through them have a little cozy chat um it's a very cold snowy winter day here to make this a bit easier i'm just going to say a huge huge thank you right now to michael tebow amelia topher and myself because i bought some of these books but seriously you guys thank you so so so so much um yes okay without further ado let's get into the books first up here i have the master of go by yasunori kawabata i read snow country by kawabada in january i'm actually currently working on a review of snow country that i'm putting together it's going to be a bit more of kind of not just a sit-down review i'm trying to do some more interesting um kind of visual things with it as well i'm having the best time of my life making it so hopefully i will get that out to you soon because i adored snow country i'm so glad the master of go was sent to me i believe this was kawabata's last novel um or at least the last one that he wrote before dying yeah i know this was published in 1972 which is the same year um that he committed suicide so this was i guess the last book that he wrote um i was reading a little bit of the introduction of this last night and it is kind of a work of fiction but the japanese word is a bit more encapsulating and better describes it it's called a shosetsu which is a more flexible and generous term than novel so it says frequently what would seem to the western reader as a piece of autobiography or a set of memoirs is essentially non-fiction all the same and is placed by the japanese reader in the realm of the shosetsu so that is what the master of go is because a lot of this is based on real things that took place with the game of go so yes game is a go where you have to surround your opponent's pieces entirely like wall them in blockade them in before they do the same to you but the master of go is a book about this really famous match that went down between the master of go which was this real figure um in japan he was like the best player of the game and then he is challenged by quite a newcomer to the game very much an underdog and so we have kawabata who actually i think reported on this match for two separate um newspapers i think uh describing it and then between this match of the old and the very young it's kind of how kawabata tries to capture that moment when the older and the more traditional ideas of japan met the 20th century and of course the younger generation and all the new changes that that would bring about so i'm really really interested in seeing the non-fiction and the fiction because i know kobata changes up a few things in here like names and certain details i think he himself is actually a character in the book as well because we have a reporter who's basically just calvata in disguise i think under a different name so i loved the writing in snow country it was so short crisp beautiful tragic i know the master of go will be different um and i'm really really excited to continue more kawabata so that is the master of go okay this one arrived yesterday i ordered this and it came in yesterday i'm really excited about it it is gorgeous look at this cover it is legend born by tracy dion this is the book pick for the dark academics book club hosted by myself and a whole bunch of lovely beautiful amazing people here on booktube i'll leave all the links and everything in the description and up above but legend born is our book pick for march it's an absolutely massive book i think almost 500 pages of young adult fantasy but in this one we are following a girl named brie um and her mother i believe dies in a tragic accident i don't know if it's a car accident or what but then she is sent off to this school and she very quickly starts to hear rumors and strange things going on in the school i think she's confronted by someone named merlin who tells her that she is a descendant of the knights of king arthur and that there's this magical war that is going to be waged in very much the same way of kind of the wars of old and of the sort that the knights of king arthur would have to fight so then this whole book is her preparing for this battle i think and just seeing and kind of coming to terms with like is this real um is this a joke and kind of what all goes down with that i believe the way that she first gets sucked into this the the group of these people is called legend born it's kind of like the secret society so i believe she at first just assumes that like it's just a school secret society doing strange things um but then as they're pulled kind of deeper and deeper into what this group actually is and what they're all about they start to find out that they are um about king arthur's descendants and stuff like that and protecting uh the world from evil forces i've never read a modern i guess retelling or reimagining or any kind of contemporary fantasy or anything like that with little drips and dabbles of arthurian myth and legend so that should be really interesting seeing it placed in the real world and yeah that is legend born if you would like to join along with us like i said we'll be reading this throughout the month of march so yeah next up i have the days of abandonment by elena ferrante this is another piece of italian literature i recently also hauled my brilliant friend by elena and yeah i'm really interested in this author because she actually apparently we don't even know if she's a woman or not but she has managed to keep her identity a secret um a lot of people were leaving comments about it and having conversations about it in my last book haul and i just thought it was so interesting so cool i think it's just such an interesting way of being an author and i would just love to know more about that but the days of abandonment is about this woman named olga and her husband leaves her and she is very much distraught it's about the days where she is alone it's a pretty short one and it's all about motherhood and a womanhood and what you are when someone leaves you i think the front cover says that olga's days of abandonment becomes a desperate uh dangerous free fall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love so this one's probably going to be quite the hard one to read but i'm just really interested in seeing ferrante's writing because um i haven't read her yet and i'm just really really looking forward to that so this one is the days of abandonment okay the unconsoled by kazuo ishiguro i had to i feel like every book haul now i just end up receiving more and more books for him which i am so excited about because i just i my goal this year is to read so much more from ishiguro this one is like i said the unconsoled the synopsis is completely vague which i love going into ishiguro works i know we're following a pianist and he is set to play a concert for a group of people a huge audience but then on his way to his own concert he's completely derailed by a set of very strange cryptic clues and infuriating errands um that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past we are in an unnamed i think a central european city um and he's just basically running around the city trying to find out why he's being derailed from playing um at his own concert and performing this night that he's spent running and zigzagging around the streets of the city so that's 100 completely all i know about this book but i'm just so excited currently on my shelf i have the buried giants and the remains of the day and now the unconsoled i'm now very conflicted about which one to start with i was going to go with the remains of the day which i got in the summer um but then i received the very giant and that one sounds completely phenomenal as well and now i have the unconsoled so i don't know if anyone knows which one i should start with please do tell me um i know the remains of the day is so famous uh yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know but very soon i'll be reading some issue girl and we'll be able to review some of them for you guys so that is the unconsoled this next one is so cool and it came with such a lovely letter thank you so much it also made it here all the way from france and this is relka's musician so i'm so excited if you can also see this it came with its own set of tabs i adore this i adore this so much thank you so much for sending this book to me with the tabs still in it with your tabs in it i think that is such a cool idea um if anyone does send me books anytime anywhere please feel free to leave any tabs in i don't mind at all i actually like really welcome that and especially any highlighting writing i would love love love love to see it in my opinion it makes the book and the reading experience a thousand times better um so thank you so much but to say a little bit about this this is a collection of letters that rilka was writing in french i think while he was in france yes i'll read the back i'll read it in english i'll try to translate it into english so on the 26th of january 1914 relka who is living in paris at the time receives the letter of a stranger she is a pianist and her name is magda von hatting hattingberg and their correspondence sets off at a rapid pace in the space of a few letters the stranger becomes the sister the confident and a tender friend during a month they write each other almost every single day and even multiple times a day letters of many pages monsters like rilka calls them i'm very much excited to read this this is the french edition thank you so much this will also let me practice my french and reading it and stuff like that so i am so excited i'm trying to collect all of rilka's letters as well we actually have i think at least one more rolco work in this haul so that is letters to a musician if you'd like to find in english maybe i'll try to link an english edition down below but i'm just over the moon to have this so thank you so much the lottery by shirley jackson this is a collection of her short stories uh the lottery is i guess the title but it's uh called one of the most terrifying stories written in this century powerful and haunting horrible superbly contrived cancel my subscription knights of unrest are typical reader responses to the lottery i have absolutely no idea what this short story is about but but i'm very much interested in reading all of shirley jackson's work i've only read we have always lived in the castle but that was one of my favorite books of 2020 i loved it i have the haunting of phil house up on my shelf as well so really really happy to be able to add a collection of her shorter works and shorter stories to myself as well so that is the lottery okay this one is an absolutely stunning stunning looking book the cover is beautiful also has a very nice texture and this is the book of longings by sue monk kidd um i've seen this around a little bit but i hadn't really known what it was about i think i saw like the the cover because it's a very memorable cover it's got like wonderful stars on it and then a bit of papyrus in the background but i saw this on libby i think and then it was sent my way so thank you so so much but um this is about the wife of jesus actually which is so interesting it's historical fiction it's just absolutely this whole thing is absolutely gorgeous but it is a work of historical fiction in which like i said we are following the wife of jesus anna the fir i read the opening page of this book and it like blew me away because i wasn't like too sure what i was getting into what to expect from this i know nothing pretty much about this topic but the first like paragraph i just said i am anna i was the wife of jesus joseph of nazareth i called him beloved and he laughed and called me little thunder he said he heard rumblings inside me while i slept a sound like thunder from far over the nahal zippery valley or even farther beyond the jordan i don't doubt he heard something all my life longings lived inside me rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night that my husband bent his heart to mine on a thin straw mat and listened was the kindness i most loved in him what he heard was my life begging to be born what what wow anna is raised in a pretty well-off and wealthy family with ties to the ruler of galilee and i think her family has basically her future mapped out for her she's set to marry a very old widower which she is horrified by she spends most of her time i think writing um and reading and writing specifically about women who don't really have a voice or who can't write for themselves and then the the synopsis says that she has an encounter with 18 year old jesus and it changes like everything in her life and then of course they get married which is what this book is about so it follows their life their marriage um and obviously the troubles that they go through anyway i'm now super interested in this the the what i read was just so beautiful and i've not read anything from sue monk kid before that is the book of longings uh i'm longing to read this book okay we also have a couple murakami books in this book haul because i think it's an unavoidable thing now but the first one is the elephant vanishes this is another collection of short stories i'm slowly growing and learning to love short stories because i used to hate them and avoid them so so much but i'm at least coming to embrace them a little bit more especially when it comes to authors that i know i love um because i'm just not a super big fan of the short story as like a literature a literary thing um but like i said there are exceptions so the elephant vanishes is a whole host of short stories by murakami we have a man who loses his favorite elephant and his life is just completely derailed because he's lost an elephant a couple's midnight hunger pains drives them to hold up a mcdonald's a woman finds that she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden an insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible even death so these are very strange stories that completely just tear apart and rip up to shreds what we perceive as like the normal um especially the normal in literature and kind of what can be discussed in terms of reality and stuff like that yes so i've now accumulated enough murakami books to actually stack them um horizontally on my bookshelves which i'm really excited about because now they almost reach the top so yeah at least now i'll be able to make a little bit more room on my bookshelves because i am i'm out after this one we're gonna have to do some more rearranging but that is the elephant um vanishes i'm really excited about that one as well okay this one i've started reading and i've also started to film or i'm about to start to film i haven't started filming it yet um a project that i am really looking forward to i think it's gonna be quite a journey um i started reading this yesterday and this is a year with rilka a year with rilke a whole year with relka a whole year with my man um so this is daily readings from the best of uh maria rilke his name his name is so nice look at him this is a portrait of him in moscow um beautiful gorgeous absolutely stunning i love his work i really do love his work yeah so i've started reading this and as you can imagine this is kind of like a daily um kind of calendar thing where they've taken selections from absolutely all of his work from his poetry from his letters from his novels his one novel um short stories i'm just looking at like my collection what else they could have pulled from his journals his own diary entries and journals and every single day for 365 days you have something to read from him so i'm slowly trying to catch up with this because i'm currently on january 14th and today is february 12th yep february 12th yeah i just think this is going to be incredibly special i've known about the existence of this book for a long time but i've just never gone out and given it to myself so having it sent to me was just absolutely wonderful thank you so much it's gonna stay on my desk now for the rest of the year probably for the rest of my life i'm gonna read this every single day and um i just could not be more thrilled about this honestly it's just really nice having like these kind of bite-sized pieces of something to read every day and having it be something quite small and contained that you can kind of think about and mull over more more did i just say mole over i'm all over every day um and just kind of like think about it all day crap i can't stop laughing um so funny to me um and just kind of think about everyday and like think about and break apart um and mull over um yeah so i've highlighted a few and it's just been really nice because my goal this year is to read so much more of rilke and of course i'm going to read bigger works from him and expansive things that he's written and i have so many volumes now to to rifle through but to just have this as well as a constant companion every single day and to kind of have another excuse to insert rilka into my everyday life and then yeah it just i think it's brilliant i love having these small snippets of things to read every day i've i've tried to do that in the past as well with some other things um even just like poetry books i love doing it with collections of poetry just reading one poem every single day and really trying to get the most out of what you can get out of it um and not even in a single day even though of course you can choose to read like a poem every single day i was doing that for a little bit with um a collection of keats poetry and it was just such a nice thing to have and to wake up every day read a poem um and then like to have it kind of sit in you all day and to think about it and to take up space in your head and then to try and see the world or to try and see the day through that one poem it was just like a really good experience and um yeah i mean obviously that's what we do with bigger books as well but sometimes it's just a lot easier and it comes more easily and flows more naturally to do it with quite a shorter bit so let's read let's read today's um seeing as i'm not there yet and i haven't read it yet so today is february the 12th i hope you're having a good day obviously it won't be february the 12th when we see this okay okay so february the 12th um is a poem from his collection of poetry called new poems and this one is called in the asylum garden let me put my glasses on nope i've lost my glasses let me not put my glasses on okay here it is uh in the asylum garden the abandoned cloister still encloses the courtyard as if it were holy it remains a retreat from the world for those who live there now whatever could happen has already happened now they are glad to walk the trusted paths that draw them apart and bring them back together so simple and willing some on their knees beside the planted beds are absorbed by what they are tending when no one can see there is a secret little gesture they make to touch the tender early grass shyly to caress it the green is friendly and needs protection from the rose whose red can be too fierce and can overpower once again what they know in their hearts to be true still the inner knowledge is always there how good the grass is and how soft oh okay yes so this one is going to stay on my desk for the rest of time memorial immemorial rest of time and memorial it's just gonna it's gonna stay on my desk okay all right moving on to middlesex by jeffrey eugenides um very much excited about this jeffrey eugenides is a writer that i've heard like little bits and pieces of but like i've not been kind of too sure where to start with him or anything like that but middle sex i believe is kind of like a generational family saga is what i'm getting from it but um it's mostly following our protagonist calliope and three generations okay it is kind of a family saga of the greek american family her family who travel from a tiny village overlooking mount olympus to prohibition era detroit witnessing its glory days as the motor city and the race riots of 1967 before they move to michigan that is all i know i've heard his writing is like just such a wonder such a pleasure to read and that's basically all i know about this i know jeffrey gennady's himself i think was born in detroit yes um so yeah i've heard a lot about the virgin suicides which i think is like his or at least maybe it's his [Music] most well known i tried to say it all in one go um book at least the one i've heard the most about but that is middlesex okay i bought this one um a while ago because i've just heard so much about it it sounded like the perfect middle grade book and my middle grade shelf i think is like the smallest is it the smallest section on my bookshelf which is surprising because i love middle grade books but i've read every single middle grade book i own except for anne of green gables i have not read ann free gables and i also have the amber spyglass by philip pullman which i think is the third book in his dark materials series but i haven't read the second one i don't have the second one so those are the two i haven't read so i thought i would gift myself um another one and this is green glass house by kate milford i've heard so much about this recently especially because it was quite recently polar thon which is hosted by jade from jd ray reads that's actually where i first heard about green glass house from but this sounds like the absolutely like coziest snowiest book ever because we're set at green glass house which is like this very remote isolated place and we are following our protagonist who is a 12 year old boy named milo and he is the innkeepers adopted son i believe he thinks that he's going to have quite a quiet boring winter as the snow starts to fall around green glass house and the environment they're surrounded by but then a whole bunch of people turn up in the middle of the night because the door the doorbell keeps ringing and people keep coming in and all of a sudden he's surrounded by all of these people that might be a little bit um sketchy and might be up to no good so him milo along with i believe um the cook's daughter yes must uncypher clothes and untangle the web of deepening mysteries to discover the truth about green glass house and what all these people are doing there it sounds like it's going to be such a good time i'm very much excited to get into this one i've heard so many people just absolutely love it so i had to pick it up so that's green class house okay this one was sent to me um after one of you guys watched my december wrap-up where i was talking about neil gaiman and the sandman um because i accidentally read uh i think yeah you said it was the uh it's a sequel it's a sequel series the one i was reading so whoops but thank you so much because i was sent the sandman preludes and nocturnes which is the one that i need to start with this is absolutely gorgeous so i'm very excited to now know where to start and to have um somewhere wow look at this it smells amazing it smells so good you know like plastic inky book smell yes yeah but i'm really excited to have another comic to read because i've read almost i think all but one of the graphic novels in comics uh oh i know i have a few mangas that i haven't read but um yeah i'm very much looking forward to reading this and like having the right place to start so thank you thank you thank you so much this looks amazing i'm so excited to uh actually one of the characters in here kind of looks like neil gaiman um maybe it's just me but i think it really does let me show you where did he go this guy does that not kind of look like neil gaiman come on i don't know who this is i mean maybe i'm just missing because i haven't read it maybe it's kind of like a you know but i thought that just really looked like neil gaiman it totally looks like him all right moving into some more sci-fi very excited to have some more sci-fi because i finished all the sci-fi i own oh except for red rising but i have read rising on audiobook coming in soon so this is artemis by andy ware weir whit ear it's got to be one of those so he famously uh wrote the martian but artemis is a little bit different i believe this is about we're set on the moon i think um and our protagonist is a girl named jasmine and she lives on artemis which is humanity's first um and only so far colony on the moon a lunar colony she's always wanted kind of more for herself and more for her situation than she's had she wants to be rich not like crazy rich but just you know well off on this moon because i think um she's going through a lot on this lunar colony and she is having to be kind of a petty criminal but then she's offered a chance at kind of a bigger job and to do something a bit more risky but for a bigger payoff i guess so she goes on this job i'm not sure if it goes disastrously wrong or what but regardless of how this this plan goes it basically leads her into discovering this um kind of scheme and plan and wrestle for control of artemis of the colony itself on the moon and she's kind of in the middle of this little war and fight for control so i've never read anything from andy ware we're we ear but um i'm really looking forward to this because so many people um love the martian of course and i haven't heard too much about artemis so i'm interested to see what i'll think of it but um that is that one the stack is dangerously close to falling apart okay this one's really interesting carolyn and i were talking about this and this is mr dickens and his carol by samantha silva this is historical fiction about charles dickens struggling to write his famous um story his famous story a christmas carol he's not doing well he's kind of down on his luck he's not in the christmas spirit shall we say his newest book is an utter flop the critics have turned against him relatives near and far hound him for money and his publishers tried to blackmail him into writing a christmas book and he says no so he's having like the worst time of his life but then he meets this woman named eleanor because charles dickens a lot what he would do when he's trying to get inspiration when he's going through writer's block he would take walks he would just walk for hours and hours and hours take a little notebook with him through the streets um and just walk and see what he would see and write down any observations or any ideas that would come into his mind actually i think there's a whole i don't know if it's a book um there's a whole book about his journal entries um forget what it's called maybe i'll leave it here if i find out but carolyn and i were talking about it and his like book of inspiration and ideas that he got from just taking these walks at night so he that's where he meets eleanor on one of these walks and then she kind of takes him on like a scrooge like journey where he's essentially scrooge um and they talk about his life and stuff like that so i think i'm very much looking forward to this i think this was recently turned into a movie because carolyn was screaming at me about it um and yeah this is just gonna be so interesting especially to read when we get to a christmas carol for the dickens versus tolstoy great debate um in december of 2021 so i think i'm gonna save that one for then and yeah i'm very much looking forward to this as well all right the second last book here is more murakami we have killing commendatory um yeah this is a huge one this is another big big one uh this book just sounds so essentially murakami i'm not sure if like i like love all the things that murakami writes about um but they definitely do tend to get quite repetitive i don't know if they'll ever get boring um because the repetition of his themes and what he loves to write about doesn't necessarily mean it'll be boring for me but i'm just interested to see if like there's new spins on these old things that he loves writing about because this one's about a 30 something portrait painter who is abandoned by his wife left alone and he's kind of lost and he eventually comes to stay in a isolated home of a very rich artist one day the young painter hears a noise from the attic and upon investigation he discovers a previously unseen painting by unearthing this hidden work of art he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances which one of them is a journey into another world so of course it is yeah killing commendatory is i think one of the murakami works i've heard kind of the least about honestly but nonetheless i'm super excited to read it like i said i'm trying to read murakami's works uh chronologically now because i know there's just so much that like um just isn't the best in his works and like i do know that but i just want to see him grow i know he's releasing a new book i think this year right i'm pretty sure he's releasing a new book this year but um i think it is possible for writers to to change and adapt and grow as authors as people as observers of human nature and i think what i've heard of his more recent works is that murakami's doing a lot better with those things at least i would hope so but at least what i remember from reading norwegian wood which i read ages ago i read that in high school um it just wasn't the best but other works i just i really do love of his like after dark the wind-up bird chronicle um i've also read a collection of his short stories called men without women that one was all right um but yes anyway that is what i would like to do is read chronol just read chronologically and just witness the good the bad the ugly and hopefully the best as we draw closer to to present murakami so anyway that is killing commendatory all right and the last book on this book haul is one that i found from a little uh community library box and that is brideshead revisited by evelyn waugh i think i'm saying that right please yell at me if i am not but this one um i i think i said in a vlog this sounded kind of dark academia but someone said it's really not um it's about someone who goes back i think to his like alma mater his school his university um and starts to reconnect i think with people from his past and his classmates and stuff like that and that is it that is all i know but this one is always on those like essential kind of academia or books about academia books centered and um finding themselves in the middle of academia and stuff like that so i'm really excited i i know carolyn read this recently as well and she really liked it so that spurred me to want to pick it up as well sooner rather than later i really do i really love this cover as well i think it's really nice um so that is the last book on this book haul thank you ever so much for watching um i hope this provided you with a little bit of relaxation or interest or little break in your day no matter what you are doing um i think right now i'm gonna just go for a little walk because the sun is finally starting to come out and yeah just once again a huge huge thank you to everyone who sent me any of those books at all thank you so much i love you so much i appreciate it so much um i guess the first thing i need to do is put them all back on my shelves now but regardless i hope you are doing wonderful and i will see you very soon in my next video thank you thank you thanks for being here [Music] okay ciao

Channel: * e m m i e *

Views: 39,598

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Id: MPiBYLHxrQw

Length: 34min 6sec (2046 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021