Every book I read this month 📕 14 classics, romances & novels

hello it's a beautiful day to talk about books i'm so glad you could find your way onto my channel okay and that um you made it all the way here to talk about what we read this month uh this one's definitely going to be a long one i'm even thinking of splitting it in half just because like i'm in the mood to talk a lot and in may and that's what we're talking about today all the books i read in may i read a lot i read 14 books and so um i'm just so excited to talk about them all i've decided to split this video up into sections so you can skip around by genre i think we have classics i know we have romance we have some manga we have uh nonfiction sci-fi get cozy in bed grab a coffee grab some tea steal someone's cat so i think we're gonna start it off with classics because um i think we have to i think we all know what we've all been waiting for but we also had the dark academics read-a-thon in here this month hence why i got to read so so much but um i think we're just going to kick it off with classic literature that i got to read in may and besides that may has just been like one of the best i think the best reading month for me i had so many five stars in here which is insane i found some new favorites this one i finished last night at like 10 30 pm um i can't believe i can't believe i just can't believe born peace thank you i'm gonna try to talk the least about the book i think i want to talk the most about just because carolyn and i will have our live show debates on saturday the 5th i believe of june so if you're interested in that um i think she threatened me that it would probably be like five hours long so if you'd like to come see us talk about this book that will be on saturday the 5th at 2 p.m est carolyn and i and so many of you it's just been incredible like going on this war and peace journey with you all it's just been amazing seeing everyone read this together over the span of two months we've been reading this since april and it just feels like a huge portion of my life reading war and peace is like a life achievement i want to say a life goal so congratulations but like it's just such a big and it was such a big part it was a constant companion i got to read this every day for two months and it feels so surreal that it's over like it doesn't feel like it's over but i'm gonna try not to talk about my feelings toward this book and just give you a little bit of information um and do a little bit of a review so you know if maybe you want to take this kind of mount everest journey in your own life but one piece what is it it's not a novel it is leo tolstoy kind of trying to rewrite um the way that history writes itself and rewrite the events of the napoleonic wars through the eyes of real people and so many different things that touch on reality and aren't tinged by well of course they're tinged by his own um history's bias and his own historian's viewpoint bias but for him history is not what it has been defined as up until the wars of 1812 and especially how the napoleonic wars have been written on and written as by historians to him it's completely wrong this book is all about cause and effect but more than that breaking that down and saying that no there cannot be one cause um only for one effect it's much more complicated than that and so you get these stories and these narratives of these real people like pierre and andre and natasha who are these russian people who are going through their lives and through war and finding war and finding how difficult um it is to live in peace with yourself and finding out how hard it is to struggle with yourself to have a peaceful life regardless of the napoleonic wars that are going on and then it's people like nikolai and andre and pierre even who have these epiphanies like in the real war in this conflict between russia and france and napoleon and europe and strangely finding peace through death and violence and suffering and having these epiphanies that are only brought on by this extreme lack of peace about peace this book touches on so much psychology of an individual on what power means on even if there is such a thing as power this book is also so much about free will and how much free will a person really has especially through the eyes of history it's a really interesting study and i think if i ever read war and peace ever again i think i will start with the last epilogue there are two epilogues to one piece and i think i would start with the last epilogue and then go through the whole book with that in mind um it's been so rare for me to find such like a natural connection between the philosophy of an author and what they're trying to show and the progression of characters lives and actions to show that philosophy will also feeling so real so natural and maybe that just means that tolstoy's philosophy is life's philosophy i'm not sure and on the back it says if life could write it would write like tolstoy so i just think there's so much in this book on top of that you have gorgeous writing um as you can see i obviously fell just in love with this book i gave it five stars if that's not clear but um it's a life-changing book it is such a soul-wrenching book its depictions of everything is so real and so present and it just like comes out of the page strangles you pulls you into this book and essentially just like changes i think a little bit of who you are and especially how you see history and how you see people and especially how you see what your own history of the life you are living at the moment is going to look like and whether or not you can affect any kind of change in your life i think the last thing i want to say which was probably one of my favorite aspects to just kind of study while i was reading this book was tolstoy's um recognition that so many people are not their own people their autonomy is not what they think it is and so much of what they presume to be their free will and their free actions um are actually under this way of so many causes and persuasions that they won't ever be able to know but also how there's a lot of beauty in that because everyone who exists contemporaneously as tolstoy says there is a connection between them and they all influence one another and so to see like that pre-deterministic outlook while also paired with the lives of andre pierre and natasha you see that maybe it's not as bleak of a diagnosis as a lot of what tolstoy's essays in war and peace would have you believe and how there's so much beauty in influencing and caring for other people's lives and getting attached to them and how intertwined and connected and however much of like a puppetry your life may seem to be you can affect like almost who is pulling the strings by who you choose to surround yourself with as well because everyone's kind of strings just get so tangled and while things may seem to be a lot of either happy or tragic mistakes um tolstoy kind of lets you know that those mistakes couldn't have been anything other than what they were and so they're not mistakes and it's just incredible it's so good if you haven't read one piece i highly suggest that you do it takes a lot of i think patience because there are definitely a few parts in here where it got a little bit dry in the end though it was well worth it for me and so i would highly recommend um one piece i can't believe i can't believe we're done all right the next classic i read was the alienist and other stories of 19th century brazil by michelle jayasis this was incredible this is my first machado book this is a collection of short stories but it was so good for me i think this was a really great starting point there's maybe about like eight i want to say seven or eight short stories in here my favorite was definitely the alienist but something that is so present through every story is his brilliant perception of people around him and especially like he's just so playful with his words and he's like kind of politely undermining polite society and making them laugh at themselves a lot like i think charles dickens does but in here there's so much irony the first like the first story is called um or the second story is called the education of a poser which is all about a father like educating his son on how to be a poser so it's very like satirical and it's just so good and also like i laughed out loud he's so funny um and his way of describing things it's it's so cool like it's a very unique distinctive voice and i just loved it so so much my favorite story was like i said the alienist which is about this man whose recent um obsession is science this is a story all about kind of what happens when our kind of hailing of scientific enlightenment and scientific progress goes the other way and science um or at least what calls itself science becomes a vehicle for humans to completely just go the other way and degrade and erode everything and all the progress that we work towards because this man who becomes the alienist he starts to study crime and criminals and what he deems the insane people of the town where he lives and so he builds an asylum in the town and eventually what goes on in this town how many people get committed to this asylum um it's just crazy and he's also trying to develop it literally is crazy he's trying to develop um theories of madness because he's trying to develop these theories and find out like what madness is and provide concrete um kind of examples and theories about it is insane there's lots of revolutions that end up happening in this town and it's just it's just so good there's no other word it's just so good um this is the edition translated by john charles chasteen i'm honestly not sure if this was the best translation ever but um even through this translator's words i was so swept away so impressed by machado's writing i thought it was incredible i cannot wait to read a proper like full novel by him because his short story is just really they're so impactful and they know exactly what they're doing they're so sure of themselves they have like at least one goal or many goals in mind and for me i think all of them just like completely hit the mark and like really did carry out those goals and besides that the writing was gorgeous extremely funny and just just honestly a wonder to read i adored this and i would once again highly recommend um i think i gave this either a four or four and a half just because short story collections aren't usually my jam but this one was as close to marmalade as we've ever gotten so good very very good so we got to read some more russian literature this month because i picked up first love by ivan targainiev and this was incredible so first love is an extremely short novel maybe it's like technically a short story or novella doesn't matter because it packed just everything in its suitcase that you need for a good five-star read and i did end up giving this five stars so first love is about the 16 year old boy named voldemore and he lives uh or at the time when this all begins he's living in a country house with his mother and father who are having some marital issues they're not getting along his family atmosphere is a little bit tumultuous but then he finds out that his neighbor has a daughter named princess zanida and she is i think 21 years old and he just is so infatuation infatuation to the utmost extreme this novel actually begins outside of the story because the novel begins many years later and we have a group of men who are all sitting around maybe after dinner or something and they are discussing love and then the topic of first love is brought up and one of the men says hey i have a story that probably tops all of your stories do you want to hear it and they're like yeah bro let me get a drink sit down and tell me your story and then the actual story begins already to it like this book has so many layers and i wasn't really expecting anything i was like yeah it's probably going to be some cool writing it's going to be very lyrical beautiful and it's just going to be a nice little flouncy flounce through the fields of first love and infatuation no this book had like it was like the world's biggest onion i just kept peeling and finding more things there's so many layers this book was like an ogre because ogres are like onions this book just absolutely floored me like i was never sure where it was going at times it seemed to be like a piece of poetry it seemed to be like a staged play or farce it seemed to be an extremely romantic idealistic little painting or vignette of voldemort and his feelings for zanida at times it was an extremely dark stormy ocean of like jealousy and voldemort was constantly being tossed on these waves because zaneda entertains many guests most of them men and so they would have like these soirees where they would go and play games and they would play like truth or dare or cards and then everyone would have to maybe like come up with a poem dedicated to her or something like that or act out a story um and also zenaida herself was such a fascinating character i loved her since most of first love was from the perspective of voldemort i was really feeling like we wouldn't really get an in-depth look into any of like the other characters like zaneda they're the other suitors there's like a whole host of these men who have different backgrounds um and varying tempers and jealousies and feelings um and kindnesses and voldemort as kind of the new um newest addition to zenith's little group of admirers and the way that he's treated by all the mostly older men around him was also very well done but you do get such an insane look into everyone in this book not just voldemort but his parents zanida zenite's parents all of the men that appear at the soiree like i said this book had so many layers to it because as you're like going down and reading this book it starts to take on this like semi troublesome a little bit scary tone because the way that first love is being experienced in here you start to realize that it's not only voldemort the man telling the story and recounting his infatuation with zaneta as his experience of first love as the only instance of that love that's occurring it's actually about multiple people's first love i'm not going to say too much else than that but i was just incredibly blown away by the very taut suspenseful kind of maddening atmosphere that turgany have created with these um kind of on the outside innocent looking and very like nice first love feelings but it's just so much darker so much more tormenting than that and especially what ends up happening in the short story and then the ultimate kind of end to it and the commentary on how fleeting feelings can be and how bottomless they can end up really being especially after you know you grow up and you're not 16 anymore and you're older or you're looking back on these feelings and what they might have meant to you at the at the moment back then versus um what they've become now but just like in the moment reading that book um it was just so it was like this like coil that was just so taut and it was incredible five five stars five five five stars um highly highly recommend and finally the last classic that i read in may was also five stars we just had a freaking spectacular reading month but that is the prophet speculated on this was so good just incredible this is my second chapter on oh also side note i think starting with first love by tragenya if that's your first work by him um i thought it was a great place to start for me because that was my first three genie of so good but on the note of the prophet this was my second jupiter on because i read the broken wings last year one of my favorite books of all time now and this one was just also so impressive so while the broken wings is a tragic love story and it's very much a novel albeit a short one spinning out of control the prophet is more poetry extremely lyrical a lot of philosophy and essentially a lot of advice because there's no central plot or happening to this book it opens with this man the prophet about to leave and set sail away from the land where he's been staying for a very long time and all of the people who have grown very attached to this fixture of the prophet in their daily lives and homes and observing them come out first of all beg him to stay and then ask him for advice and ask them to tell them what he's been observing and give them advice on how to live their lives essentially and so each chapter then becomes advice on things like love sorrow grief possession marriage living work food drink literally everything you could ever probably want advice on and it's really good advice um it's gorgeous on top of that like gibran's writing is just like it is magic like it's like a magic trick every single time i'm like how can you make your words do that how does your language live like that this one also comes with illustrations by jivron that he did himself so that was just really nice to see and i think this is also an extremely remarkable starting place if you would like to get into the works of gibran because i think honestly i just wish i could recommend him to everyone because this was incredible i don't have too much to say other than just being in constant like jaw-dropping awe of his writing because it was phenomenal so that is the last classic we read this month and man was it a good one so very glad to have it take this off of my shelf all right next up i think we're going to move into the category that i'm going to call well i don't know probably something like literary fiction slash historical literary fiction slash coming of age or something the novel how about with a dose of kind of mostly literary in there i don't know so the very first book that i actually completed in may was in watermelon sugar by richard broad again whoa wow um okay let me try and see this is an extremely short book and i do remember everything that happened but i'm not sure how i want to exactly talk about this book um you probably heard you know the song watermelon sugar by harry styles this is the book that gave him i think a lot of that inspiration for this song in watermelon sugar um is a utopian vision we have this world it could possibly be post-apocalyptic it probably is to an extent there's also once again a lot going on in this very short book because we have our protagonist who is also the narrator he is writing a book about watermelon sugar which hasn't been done for a number of years um and so you're reading the book that he's writing about his life and about watermelon sugar watermelon sugar is this place where most things are made from watermelon sugar this is an extremely difficult to conceptualize book but also an extremely pretty book like this book is just pretty and sparkling because this world has a lot of different things in it that are just really pretty for example this place has a lot of little rivers and streams but our narrator lets us know that he calls things that are like two feet wide a river um and when people die when you die in watermelon sugar your body is put into a glass box like a glass coffin and then you're put at the bottom of the stream and you look up and you are buried with fox fire or something the flowers that like glow at night and these rivers are filled with trout extremely curious cute trout to come and like swim over you and look at you um and it's a little bit morbid but also extremely glowing and pretty there was so much about light in this book as well which was really really beautiful but like i said there's a lot going on in this place because we are told that before a lot of these people existed here this town and this place and this locale where these people are living used to be inhabited by tigers talking tigers the tigers talked and so when these people moved in the tigers were extremely violent sometimes they killed our narrator's parents and ate them in front of him and then right after they finished eating his parents they helped him with his arithmetic homework so kind of a weird one some drugs were definitely being done yeah this was a book that like you could definitely delve a lot into but it was also a book that was just like an experience that you're wading through and i didn't really want to look that much deeper because it was just a world where like you look around and you're like oh my gosh what is that and you're like okay i'm just gonna take it as it is and roll with it for example there's statues everywhere of vegetables around this place watermelon sugar for example our narrator has like a seven foot statue of a potato outside his house gotta get me one of those we have invoil who's like the leader of this gang and he goes to like the works which is where probably like the post-apocalyptic world potentially maybe our world or something like that they store everything all of the junk and garbage from the past from like the ancients and stuff like that and so we have like this competing um kind of ideology about what we should do with the past in watermelon sugar very quickly becomes extremely violent and very gory um because there's a lot of different problems going on it's also a lot about the counter culture generation and stuff like that this was honestly fascinating definitely a book i would love to read again and i did listen to the audiobook which was really well done so i'd recommend that but um honestly just one of the weirdest funkiest little books i read in a while but also a really good one so i gave it four stars and i would recommend it as well next i listened to my brilliant friend by elena ferrante this was really good i was not expecting to enjoy this as much as i did because i don't really love like contemporary or historical novels where not like a lot happens and you just follow them growing up i'm not the biggest fan of just like kind of the average building's roman and stuff like that but this one was incredible this one is set in 1950s naples and we're following mostly two girls but this is one of like the most intricately peopled books i've read in a while because it comes with an extremely full cast of characters in the neighborhood that we're in like we get to know absolutely everyone their jobs their family and stuff like that but like i said we're principally following lila and they knew and they are two friends and their friendship is definitely very interesting to analyze because it's not the healthiest at times it's extremely competitive they're both insanely gifted and very smart girls and so they find themselves constantly competing with one another leela is definitely kind of the star everyone falls in love with her everyone just she just has like this like just something about her that's so different um and also so like fierce and she knows what she wants in life she doesn't really let what anyone else thinks of her do very much to her but um leno or elena is the one narrating this book and it was just so strange because she is the voice that we're getting we're seeing through her eyes and her friendship with lila but it's almost like leela is like the main focus of this novel and so all of a sudden lenu our protagonist kind of becomes us it was like a really weird blending between like the reader and lei nu this book was extremely immersive like just crazy it just it was like a movie like i can just see everything um i think ferrarante just has such a wonderful talent of like first of all reality of course this is an extremely real place but just like the terrors of childhood that she shows to you um the way that leinu starts to blend in with you the reader and you feel like you're in her place even though a lot of it i felt like i couldn't identify a lot with leinu because she is kind of like this weird mirror funhouse mirror image to leela but you the reader just suddenly like fill and take her place and so this book becomes even more real to you um there's so much violence in this book there's so many conflicting families and emotions and traditions and of course what's happening in 1950s naples and italy and stuff like that was also just such a playground for this novel as we're following these two girls growing up all the way from like when they're in grade i don't know kindergarten or something up until um they are of marriageable age like i said just i think the friendship between lila and leinu was the most compelling thing to follow especially because it's so complex they go through so many ups and downs um and it is such i think a hard atmosphere for these two girls growing up in to have a kind of healthy relationship with one another and ferrante just really shows how the outside stressors and the outside like implications of everything that's going on how that merges and how that affects and acts as a little bit of toxin to their friendship and stuff like that so this was just incredible i gave it four stars i finished it and i was like no no i need the second one i need it right now where is it so um i will definitely be continuing with the neopolitan novels because this is book one um so i would really really recommend this again my brilliant friend and the book i read next are also really good to talk about i think together one after the other because this one was also extremely real and so raw and like it just was so immersive yet again and like it just you just like went into the book do you know what i mean like it's not very often that um i feel like i'm like in the book and i'm not just like reading the book like observing and analyzing and like appreciating the writing but it just feels like a story where less the language matters than like what's happening and what images and feelings you're getting from it it's not a book that has gorgeous writing by any means it's not a book that's lyrically beautiful or flowery it's not a book where the writing is trying to bombard you with metaphors or astound you with its like academic accolades in its writing or anything like that it's a book where it's trying to show you something that's happened and something that is still happening and someone's life that is extremely important and shouldn't need and doesn't need any embellishment or beautiful writing to matter or to draw your attention um and that is girl in translation by jean kwok i think this accomplished definitely the same feelings in me as when i read my brilliant friend because once again our narrator is this girl named kimberly and this girl in translation is semi-autobiographical of our author's life jean kwok because when she was probably around the same age i think she was born in hong kong and as a child immigrated to brooklyn where she worked with her family in a sweatshop so that is exactly what happens to kimberly it is just her and her mother and they moved to new york with kind of the promise from their aunt and uncle that they will be given a good place to live and they will find work but what ends up happening is that they live in brooklyn in a very unsafe harmful apartment where nothing works everything is broken down it's not the american dream that kimberly's mother had imagined at all it's dismal it's awful and even worse than that they end up essentially working in their aunt and uncle's sweatshop in chinatown every single day and that becomes their life for years and years and years we follow kimberly who is narrating this and when she moves she's just about to start elementary school and so you follow her through all the difficulties that she faces she works in the sweatshop with her mother by night and by day she goes to school and a lot of this is about education and kimberly is an extremely gifted smart resilient um curious girl but you see how a lot of like her mother's weight of the american dream and what she wanted and expected by moving to america is crushed and kimberly becomes essentially not only a translator for her mother but a lot of the adult in that relationship and so like just seeing her grow up in america and with her mother and having to work um in this factory and all the relationships that she builds and stuff like that like it was just so compelling you just get to see like so much like because it's from her point of view you get to see both sides of what she presents and what face she shows to people that like she's going to school with during the day she's an extremely gifted student but then also she hides so much of her life from them um and then when she goes to the factory at night she's also a completely different person so she just she's just constantly switching back and forth between these two lives and these two people essentially and it was just incredible all right next i think we're gonna move into probably a category i'll be able to talk a little bit quicker through um and that is gonna be manga and then we'll move right into romance because the manga that i did read this month were romance so um that was my goal for me i wanted to read more romance and i wanted to read more manga and we did it we did do that some of them are great some of them were awful some of them were just okay the first manga i read was an incurable case of love volume one by mackie and joji this the manga i read i don't know they just they're just absurdly funny to me i don't know this one we are following a young nurse she has just graduated with her nursing degree and she is placed at a hospital but we quickly understand that the reason that she's asked to be placed at this hospital is because like five years prior she was walking down the street this woman collapses in front of her and starts having a heart attack and so she's like what the heck do i do obviously you call 9-1-1 and help the person but um because she's scrambling and not sure what to do it's very lucky that a doctor is also walking down the same road where this woman is conveniently having a heart attack then our protagonist sakura falls in love with the doctor who ends up being dr tendo just right there on the spot love at first coronary tragedy unfortunately when she gets to the hospital she realizes that dr tendo first of all he says he doesn't remember her he's like is your head okay i don't even know who you are um and she learns that his reputation among the hospital and the nurses is not a good one he's a very harsh severe not very nice or polite but she knows that like when he's with like the actual patients and stuff like that everyone adores him and so you follow her like training she goes through all the different departments she's thinking about what department she wants to be placed in and of course always having this tumultuous relationship with the dark lord as she's dubbed him you just follow like her trying to be like a complete nuisance in his life um getting him to admit that maybe he does remember her from all those years ago and essentially trying to like break down um you know this persona that he's built up at work it was fine like it was just fun quick extremely easy which was what i wanted especially while i was reading more in peace i think for both of the manga i've read though like the male leads in the book have just been like too nasty like they cross way too many lines to the point where like it's just unfathomable to me why our female lead would keep pursuing or would keep feeling what they're feeling for them i get it and looking past that it was fun it was cute sometimes it was quirky and i think what i actually enjoyed way more than the romance in an incurable case of love was the portrayal and like secures dealing with becoming a nurse for the first time like to me that was just way more incredibly realistic because it shows like everything that she has to go through with certain patients but working in certain departments looks like the physical toll and also the mental toll of her line of work um she goes through a lot in this book and like i thought that was just like really well done and i was actually very invested in her and her like battle with herself like figuring out is this actually what i want to do am i okay to do this it's a huge mental strain it created a few mental health problems for her as well and i just thought that was like really well done actually and what i was way more invested in because i don't think i've ever read a book about a nurse or about nursing or about hospitals or anything like that i did pick up the second one because i think i want to read a few more volumes before i decide if i want to continue on with this series or not but that is the first one the next one i read is even more funny and just so much more bizarre to me and that is midnight secretary volume one once again atomu omi this is about um a vampire so our two leads in this one we have kaya satozuka and she is a secretary she's like so good at her job she is so competent so intelligent when the notorious director tomah once again goes through another secretary they always inevitably end up quitting because once again he's kind of the same caliber of nastiness and obnoxiousness and meanie he is a meanie um as incurable case of love um kaya kaya gets assigned to him but unfortunately she finds out that he is a vampire hence midnight secretary because she has to work very odd hours of the night um since he works primarily in the night so he essentially blackmails her into keeping a secret that he is a vampire and because she's such a good secretary she ends up like scheduling in even his blood feeding times slash dates but of course they kind of both start to develop feelings for each other this book definitely just had so many tropes i believe this is an older manga maybe like 2004 or something like that 2007 but on the whole like this book just made me laugh i think so much more than it probably should have and so that was really really fun and just so so absurd so bizarre but also very funny to me so i gave it three stars just because it was like once again what i wanted and what i needed but i don't i honestly don't know if i'm gonna continue on with this series but that is that one all right now moving into kind of more romance proper we had a really bad one and a really good one so the first one um was the ruthless gentleman by louise bay um right this wasn't great but honestly i was really looking forward to this one because it started off pretty strong actually so basically um i wanted to read this because it sounded cool because we were sat on a yacht it was like summer we were cruising we were on the open sea and we are following our head stewardess avery um and she's working on a yacht and then all of a sudden she gets booked for like this one guest only yacht excursion that's like eight weeks long so the guest in question ends up being this guy named hayden wolf and it's just him and he books the trip and as soon as he gets on board he like takes everyone's communication devices he's extremely private he has booked this as like a work trip because at his company okay problem one we've introduced problem one i actually have no conception whatsoever of what this man does i listened to this whole audiobook from page one to the last page and i don't know at all what his job is what his company is what he does and every single chapter that hayden was in almost okay a lot of it was devoted to talking about his work talking about how he's trying to find a leak that's occurring at his company because it's impacting his sales or his business transactions or his deals with another company it was a lot of useless circular trite lingo about the business world well at the same time we never freaking know or at least i didn't what business this man works at what does he do no one knows he doesn't know that was incredibly frustrating i also hate when romance books have an extremely easily solvable conflict or reason why it's a little bit like forbidden romance or why two people can't be together in this case of course avery is not supposed to really like you know be friendly or interact or form relationships with her guests on the yacht however as soon as the yacht docks when the the little sea shanty is over he's not going to be a guest and you can be together and so like just the whole struggle and like her feelings and his feelings on board and stuff like that i was just like this is ridiculous you can literally wait a couple weeks okay things i liked about this i liked avery i think she had a pretty compelling backstory and stuff there was definitely a lot of investment that louise bay tried to put into her character and her reasoning and stuff like that i gave it two stars and like it just didn't accomplish anything i felt like there wasn't um that much connection the writing wasn't great the plotting wasn't great these chapters were insanely long i think this was a no for me i think this one's a no for me but we're gonna keep looking and it's okay because the next romance i read was one of the best one of the cutest i loved it it was stunning and that is heart of the fae by emma ham this is a fantasy romance and it's also a retelling of beauty and the beast and we're also following so much nature and so much coziness there was so much comfort like i listened to this book so slowly because it was so gorgeous and so spectacular and sorca who are following is a human girl and her adoptive father and sisters are all suffering with what is known as the blood beetle plague where little beetles go in your skin and stuff and so sorka is a very gifted healer but no one in the town where she lives is listening to her because they all think she might be a witch or a changeling or something like that her mother was burned at the stake because the people at the town thought that she was a witch and so when kind of a deal is struck between two fae that sorca knows because circa is very connected to the fae she is shipped off to this island that is only visible once every seven years where a turdana named eamonn is said to live and apparently he has the cure for the blood beetle plague as you can imagine he is kind of the beast in this beauty in the beast reiteration i honestly felt like the retelling of this fairy tale it was super spot-on sometimes a little bit too much but i think i said in my vlog that i didn't mind that at all because this book just had like a whole life and a whole world of its own that like the very obvious retelling elements from beauty and the beast were totally okay for me because i just loved both of our characters we had a really nice side cast of people as well of course you can imagine like everyone from beauty and the beast was in here and i just loved the world so much like this magical island that circa gets to go to there's so many like quiet scenes i love like this kind of theme of like slow living through fantasy books where they just take you very slowly through like sorca baking a loaf of bread or going for a trip foraging for flowers in the woods or sewing or something like that like it was just everything my little cottage core heart wanted this book built a cottage in my heart um so good i just really really liked it and i know there's a sequel or maybe it's a trilogy or something like that but i'm very interested in continuing and now i'm very interested in the rest of emma hamm's books so four stars love this romance i'm really glad that i picked this one up this month so that is that one except i read one sci-fi this month which was the obelisk gate by n.k jemisin this is the sequel um in the trilogy of the broken earth trilogy so good four and a half stars really really really thoroughly enjoyed this i was a bit concerned that i wouldn't like it as much as the first one but i think just like the topics in this book if you are unfamiliar with this fantasy oh no it is fantasy i guess it's like fantasy sci-fi um ceres we are following a world where earth can experience a season where basically everything goes berserk there's tons of natural disasters a lot of times in the form of like earthquakes and extremely um terrifying and destructive kind of geology-based destruction if that makes sense i don't want to like spoil anything so i don't think i can talk about this over much but i just think like the elements of geology and earth sciences that n k jemisin included in here of the different elements like that that stem from that branch of science and earth sciences i just think it's such a cool way to analyze like kind of politically and socially what is going on in this sci-fi as well because we're following a bunch of people who are trying to survive we have people called origins who have the power to control the earth to an extent we have another group of people who are known as the guardians um who can who can control the origins to some extent and then the origins are very much like not approved of um in people who don't have power and stuff like that and it was just like such a good commentary on everything and then especially to analyze that through like rocks actually proved very very cool and i don't want to say anything but i just think that was like a topic that i really loved reading in this book on top of that nk jemisin is just a genius she's just a genius and this was incredible so four and a half stars i can't wait to finish off this series the one non-fiction i read this month was are we smart enough to know how smart animals are by friends duvall i gave this three stars which is definitely a little bit disappointing because this book has been on my tbr for years and i was very excited to pick this up but just i think the way that this book was organized and what i wanted out of this book i think i would recommend this book definitely to a lot of my friends and family who aren't like kind of already in the same parallel headspace and mindset as me but like just for me personally i didn't end up getting a lot out of this book i didn't end up getting a lot of new information or new insights it didn't really shift my perspective anywhere which i think this book could definitely do for other people but because do you know what i mean like because i was already kind of in the headspace that this book was coming from it didn't accomplish anything for me um this book is all about animal cognition and also about how we as humans we just like our whole superiority complex to other species and the way that we just group between humans and non-human or just we group all of the animals together as animal and human it delves into kind of our testing how we test animals how we merit their intelligence and their levels of kind of articulation of that intelligence and all the different ways that we test them but it just like highlighted how absurd sometimes that testing and that research can be because most often we test them based on merits of our own intelligence which is just so silly because we do not have the same goals we don't have the same lives my life the purpose of my life is not trying to find as much food as possible to survive and if you tested me on that i would 100 fail because all i know how to do is walk to the grocery store and buy expensive oat milk animals lives as they are now especially if you take squirrels or dolphins or dogs or wolves or horses or octopi they're all living very separate lives and to test them based on some strange merit of our intelligence to see if they can count or if they recognize themselves in a mirror does this matter to them is this beneficial to them and so a lot of this book was shifting like our perspective and our headset into their minds and seeing from their perspective and just seeing how ridiculous the ways that we've tried to bring out and measure this intelligence in animals really is also this book does really demonstrate our really horrific and violent perception of animals as mindless machines that just wander about and have no feelings and have no thoughts and aren't self-aware and don't plan for the future and don't recognize each other and don't remember each other and just really throwing that out the window through literally hundreds of examples examples are needed and these ones were so interesting and so fascinating don't get me wrong but i think just for me i didn't want to read example after example of apes being able to do this or corvids being able to do that especially because i was already aware of so much of that information i wanted kind of a more deep down scientific study um whereas honestly i want to say 85 of this book was just listing examples of different things that animals can do that we've tested them on which is valuable but that's not what i wanted out of a book called are we smart enough to know how smart animals are i wanted more of a commentary i wanted more of an essay i wanted more of definitions of cognition and animal cognition i wanted maybe even like a history of these fields and subjects which we do get a little bit but definitely not what i wanted or expected out of this book unfortunately so i gave it three stars even though i 100 do agree with everything this book said everything this book talked about um i think it's an extremely important book and i don't want that to um seem like well like what i rated it is diminishing that because it's not but as me the personal reader it didn't do very much for me so three stars finally the last book i read and i were finally here i read the traveling cat chronicles by hiro arikawa this was um also a cool book to read in conjunction with the non-fiction because this is all about a cat who definitely knows what he's doing who definitely has an emotional range longer than a couple of teaspoons who affects so much change in the lives of those he is participating in more than that this is about a man named satoru and he is going on a trip all around japan in his van with his cat nana and he's trying to get rid of his cat he's trying to find a new home for it but it's very clear that tutoru loves his cat so much and so throughout the whole book we're like why why is this man getting rid of his cat trying to pawn off his cat on his friends this book is a tour through his past because he goes to a number of different friends houses that he hasn't seen in years and this cat is like the kindling to that reconnection between them and it's very heartwarming very heartbreaking i ended up giving it three and a half stars just because i found it a little bit boring honestly um and i didn't really like find it as humorous i think as i should have or as heartwarming as i should have but i just thought it was beautiful seeing how like this creature meant so many different things to so many different people while also um having the author supply this cat this creature with its own life and its own thoughts and his own feelings and everything like that um i think it was a really good blend of those two things and also a lot seeing how like animals connect our lives but also different ways that we use animals everyone in this book from satoru who is like that pure animal spirit who just loves his cat and wants to cook nana dinners every night and stuff like that to his friends who use cats as a way to cope with like trauma with his family or something like that and kind of use cats as an object to his other friend who just wants to use cats for their job as hunting mice in his barn and stuff like that it was just really interesting seeing how different people relate to animals and in this case specifically cats um so that was really really well done i think and it was heartbreaking i did cry so yeah three and a half stars alright so that is finally the big tour of everything i read in may this was an extremely long video thank you so much for coming along with me i had a really really great reading month clearly definitely comment below what you read what you got through if you read for the dark academics read-a-thon or anything like that i would love to hear about it love to know and thank you so much for watching this was so much fun um i had such a good month and i'm so excited for june because i think i have some more good picks lined up but as usual i will see you next time with more books and things so thank you so so much for watching um and i will see you so soon ciao [Music] you

Channel: * e m m i e *

Views: 107,582

Rating: 4.9784832 out of 5

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Id: rDxzI-opt8I

Length: 50min 22sec (3022 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021