Everything I read in March 🐌🌿 classic lit, sci-fi & 5 star reads

hey what's up welcome back to my channel it's emma um yeah it is it is emma i can confirm let's speak about some books i read in march let's actually just talk about all of them because that's what i do every month in march i read 12 books so i'm not gonna lie to you this morning i'm in a very slow meandering thought process about these books and i'm probably gonna take um quite the bit of time to talk to you about them all so that was really hard sentence to say but let's just get started alright so i also have my journal here for new words that i learned which is amazing because we almost have a word for every book which is exciting and it's just an extremely cozy day in here today it's very dark gray gloomy dismal outside so let's talk about some books to brighten our day i would love to know what you guys favorite read of the month or maybe your least favorite read of the month was for march so let's just get started the first book i read in march was remote control by nady okorafor this was really good i gave this four stars i would highly recommend remote control is a sci-fi i guess it's a novella we're set in futuristic ghana and we're following this i think she's five or seven when the novella begins girl named fatima and during a meteor shower she climbs up into a tree and after that her life is changed pretty much for forever i thought this book was super entertaining i was i had no idea i wasn't sure where the story was going to go what it was going to be about i was just very interested in more sci-fi this year and this one sounded absolutely incredible i know a lot of people have been raving about um i think binti and a few other books by this author as well so i decided to pick up remote control but it blew my socks off it blew my socks off i have no more socks um they're gone i thought this was incredible it was extremely entertaining it kept me on the edge of my seat i loved the commentary and it was a kind of commentary about technology and colonialism and post-colonialism in the future with sci-fi elements involved that didn't really present itself until you get to the last few pages of this book and then it just completely blows your mind is absolutely crazy the commentary on technology what's going on in ghana what america is doing and stuff like that is just so well done and like i said i didn't even realize it was kind of there until you get to the end of this book and then it's one of those endings that makes you go back and reevaluate everything you've just read which is so rewarding so mind-blowing and i just really loved this book i really did it has so many wonderful elements and after fatima is kind of touched by this meteor shower and has it affect her life she basically gets these powers um these aren't spoilers these are in the synopsis but she changes her name and she becomes known as sankofa as the kind of adopted daughter of death and like i said she has these enormous strange powers everyone uh starts to fear her and she basically wanders all around ghana going from place to place searching for something that i'm not going to tell you about and she's also accompanied by a little fox the whole way and so you just follow senkofa and her fox as they go on this journey and it's just it's just really good honestly i'm so excited to read more by nadio codafore i thought this was brilliant and it just really worked for me it was everything i wanted and i would i just really honestly anticipated and was really happy to return back to the novella again and again to pick it back up and keep going with senkova and her fox and i loved it i loved it so much four stars highly recommend unfortunately this next sci-fi did not live up to my expectations this is also a very short story it's part of the series of books i believe it's called disorder or something like that but this one is called un girls by lauren bucaz and this is also set in a not so far in the future africa this time we're in south africa cape town and this one follows a whole bunch of different people um and something i want to say right off the bat about girls is that there was just too much that tried to be jam-packed into this very short story about technology and sci-fi and sexuality and everything like that in this book there was kind of a lack of focus but there was also this bloating because lauren bucha has tried to write about so many different people and i wanted to know so much more than i got because some people are only there for a little blip of time on the screen and then they disappear not to be talked about again but our main character in this one is this girl i think her name's natalie and she's just graduated with a degree in psychology but she's been unable to find work and so she has decided to get a job in the recently kind of new growing and huge boom of production in cape town i guess i would kind of categorize it as like a techno kind of sex market because natalie starts to record her own voice to be used in these kind of sci-fi constructions of these like almost real um life dolls there were honestly some really good ideas in here because we learn so much about these dolls that are being created to look and to feel and to act exactly like humans but they have no voice of their own and so now the industry is kind of relying on people like natalie and other real women to supply their voice um as living humans and living women for these fake women these dolls and then of course we have this whole kind of android and uh talk about what is human what our feelings and at the same time we follow a whole bunch of other people other sex workers in cape town and honestly there were some really good things in this book i just wish first of all had been longer and more fleshed out because i think there was too much that tried to be jam-packed in and it kind of lost focus and also so much of this little short story i think was just shock value because like i said those moments and the scenarios and those characters and those really shocking factors were there and then all of a sudden they weren't there and it was really frustrating not to kind of have more said about those things and yeah i just honestly felt like there was too much shock value in this book but at the same time there were some good ideas so i gave it around two and a half stars so i think i would be interested in reading more from the series because i think the series is aimed at topics and at stories that are meant to kind of make you feel uneasy um or maybe it's called dis-ease it's either called disordered disease it's one of those but um yeah i think i would be interested in reading more but just this one kind of missed the mark for me so that is un-girls the next book i listen to is micro magus by voltaire this one was really fun i don't actually have that much to say about it um i've this is my second voltaire now i've read candide as well but this one is about a giant named micromegas and he is from uh sirius the star and he comes to jupiter he starts to make his way through our solar system he goes to saturn and he encounters other people who are smaller than him but of course astronomically bigger than ourselves and so they go across the planet looking for sentient life looking for people who are smart looking for life itself that can discuss huge philosophical ideas and by the time they get to earth they can't see anyone they are so big that they are unable to see us they can't see touch hear feel humans and we are so small that we don't matter at all to people like micro magus voltaire had some really beautiful writing in this one honestly which i wasn't expecting i just i really loved it i thought it was so beautiful and after reading it it does really make you feel like you're an insignificant worm crawling along this floating rock in space unable to affect change or do anything meaningful or worthwhile in your life or in anyone else's but um you kind of feel okay about it at the same time and it's kind of a freeing thought as well thank you voltaire i gave it four stars i think it's a quick fun easy philosophical read to get under your belt and it was just a really fun time as well in commentary and beautiful language so loved it gave it four stars also recommended okay and then we have a book that i am just blown away by so blown away by this one i think actually only exists as an audiobook so you might want to get your hands on it as soon as possible because it is just incredible it's so good it's also a very short audiobook it's told all through phone calls and voicemails and emails and texts and it is so powerful it's a full cast audiobook and that is evil eye wow i picked this up because i saw it was tagged as a kind of supernatural thriller and it sounded really interesting and this one freaked me out so badly um i haven't been like kind of properly spooked or scared or really unsettled by a book in such a long time i listened to this one in two sittings i like curled on my side into a ball on my couch listening to it and like furtively like sneaking glances over my shoulder and looking out the window because i listen to it all at night too which was so spooky and it was just so good so evil eye we have a mother and a daughter the mother is back home in india and she is calling her daughter every day to check up on her love life she really wants her to get married she is continuously frustrated that her daughter is not following kind of a traditional route her daughter's living in california i think and she wants to be a writer so she is currently studying for i think her master's at college so finally one day paulovi the daughter agrees to meet a man that her mother has set her up with in a coffee shop and she goes but the guy actually ends up being a no-show and instead this other guy at the coffee shop strikes up a conversation with her and they make a connection and you follow their relationship i think that's probably all i actually want to tell you i don't want to give anything away at all but as you can imagine there are some really evil things in this book lurking under the surface and just the way that the story is told it's extremely well done like the narrative is just exquisite the way that it leads you along as a reader it's constantly keeping you on the edge of your seat constantly giving you like those little snippets and morsels of story and of background and of like spookiness that you need to kind of enter very slowly into this horrific terrifying world that this mother and her daughter are going through um while one of them is completely unaware and unwilling to believe in it just incredible just honestly incredible i finished this book and i was just like wow that was amazing um and when i finished it i was like this would be an incredible movie like this would be such a good movie i can see it so clearly and then i i looked it up and it is a movie it exists it is a movie someone did make this movie i think it is an amazon original maybe um i think it's fairly recent but when i can finally watch movies again i am so excited to watch it because it freaked me out so good so creepy i just i loved it so much and the word i learned is pugnacious which means having a quarrelsome or combative nature which comes from the latin verb pagnare which means to fight all right two i did give evil eye a four and a half star i think i almost gave it a five honestly let's just bump it up to a five do you wanna bump it up to a five yeah let's do it okay so i actually had a bunch of five star reads um this month which is so exciting and the next one is a reread and then i did actually end up finding a whole new favorite book this month as well you guys know i speak about rilka all the time but i did actually have the absolute pleasure of rereading letters to a young poet in march um just incredible i have not returned to this book um cover to cover in a really long time uh i do dip in out of all of rilke's work so frequently like not every day but maybe every day uh this time i fully annotated this one which i hadn't ever done two letters to a young poet and it was just so nice more than that it was so rewarding to see um like my little 15 year old's underlines and notes that i had made and then to kind of see like what emma at 15 had like underlined and pointed out and then what me now so many years later have underlined and what uh now resonates with me and how much more of it resonates with me now and how much more i can get out of this now so if you don't know ryan maria relka the poet he wrote and he had a correspondence with this man who was attending the same military school that rilka had dropped out of and so they write back and forth about life about solitude about art about criticism of art which is really interesting and to see rilka's um ideas in this about that topic are super interesting as well also really cool that rilka puts so much of his philosophy and his kind of mission as an artist into his letters which is something that's just i think brilliant and more than that it discusses like love and human connection and nature and the importance of childhood and being alone and solitude and having time to yourself and it's just like it was just so good so um yeah i have a whole video on rilken where you should start with him if you are looking to get into him because this is one of the books that i would recommend to everyone um everywhere on the planet so i just it just got me every time it really did i cried i laughed i smiled and i'm just so glad i got to return to this this month as well uh the word i learned is dilatory which means tending or intended to cause delay which comes from the angle of french dilatory from the latin de faire which means to postpone next up i read a collection of short stories which some of them i liked some of them i really didn't like um i find that's one of the reasons i really don't gravitate towards short stories collections in the first place because they're always so hit or miss and um yeah it's just kind of like a trial run of a whole bunch of books but shorter books and you're not always sure if you're going to like any of them but anyway this one was the lonesome bodybuilder by yukiko montoya this one i first heard of from kate file a booktube i really love i think we have very similar taste and she was talking about this like a long long time ago so i finally decided to pick it up this one has a lot of stories about the abnormal of like the normal most of these are set in modern japan i think all of them are said in modern japan and they chronicle issues a lot of women's issues in japan and they just really show how ridiculous um some of the things that we put ourselves in that society has set up for women and for relationships how detrimental and how destructive some of them are the title story the lonesome bodybuilder is about this lonely housewife and she has no purpose in her life she's really drifting she's not sure what she wants to do but then she starts to get obsessed with muscles not really on other people she wants them on herself and so she starts to go on a path towards being a bodybuilder that is her passion that's what she wants to do but unfortunately it's not something super approved of um everyone is just not in her favor not on her side with this her husband doesn't notice a thing as she starts to like grow and develop and get super strong um and he's just like he doesn't even register that anything is happening in her life or developing within her other stories involve this kind of fantastical strange commentary on everyday issues for example we have this one story where a woman seemingly a woman enters into a boutique and then she stays in this boutique for days trying on and retrying on every single clothing item in the store some stories are much more fantastical and strange than others we have a story about this couple who starts to become each other and some of them are just so creepy and like they really like allow you to take a step back and to look at what's going on around you and different ways of looking at what's going on around you and by placing kind of these everyday occurrences and everyday stereotypes and everyday roles and destroys like this i think yukiko matoya really really hits on so brilliantly like a lot a really important conversation unfortunately for me like just a lot of it didn't really hold my interest i wasn't a super big fan of the writing i really liked the play and like what was kind of being written about and the way that she decided to incorporate these issues into fantastical scenarios and structures i just wasn't a big fan of the writing a lot of them seem to drag on and yeah so i did like some of them didn't like some of them so i decided to give this collection three stars the word that i learned from the lonesome bodybuilder i've been under the impression my whole entire life that the word anorak is a type of chair and i've decided to look that up and make sure that was correct and it's so incorrect an anarch is a pull over hooded jacket that's long enough to cover your hips it's not a type of chair i might have been thinking of like an aderon adirondack anyway an anorak is a type of jacket this one's really cool it comes from the inuit and iraq with two n's and two a's and now we've got anorak be trying to clothe myself with chairs anymore okay next up we have a book that like i just don't know how to talk about i really don't know how i want to talk about this book to you like i just don't think i even can so i'm just going to give it my best shot and i think if you've read this book um revved if you've revved up this book if you've read this book you probably know why that is because that book is the god of small things by aaron dottie roy wow wow wow wow um i first heard this one actually because so many of you screamed at me to read it and so now i've read it thank you so much this was a really lovely gift there was a really lovely note with it from a subscriber named sonia so thank you so much she said enjoy this beautiful and heartbreaking novel and sonia i really did i really did i gave this four and a half stars um it was just brilliant i think i might go back like i said and bump it up to a five again honestly march was a really good reading month but this book it's not even a book it's like a whole new art form honestly this one we are set in 1969 in india in kerala which is a town and we have these two twins esta and rahel and their mother and their family and their cousin who comes over from the uk to stay with them this is a book that like the delivery of the plot um is super confusing and super intense because this book skips around in time we have this like one tragic event that we know is coming it's always alluded to it's like at the forefront immediately you start this book you know that something tragic something awful is going to happen but you're not sure what until the last few pages of the book and it's just always spinning around changing timelines changing like the sequence of events as a reader and as these characters because we're not going through this book in a linear fashion anymore it's very much distorted and changed so it's a little bit confusing to try and piece together all those parts of different time into one cohesive storyline which is a brilliant thing in and of itself for this book because this book is about so much history and tragedy um in 1969 in india we have so much going on there's so much um different political strife that's happening there's a lot of tumults there's a lot of um strikes and riots and other important conversations and issues happening and this family gets swept up right in the middle of it all if you've read this book you know that absolutely the first thing that needs to be said about it is a little discussion on the writing it's not even writing it is like an acute dissection of detail it's just incredible like roy's writing she's not like a oh god how am i gonna go about saying this she's like an observer of the smallest things she she is the god of small things aaron tati roy is the god of small things i've said it she is just so good at describing every single little thing the god of small things is just such a study of detail and how every single little detail leads up to these huge catastrophic cataclysmic circumstances and eruptions in life um and in fate and destiny and human existence and it's just incredible like she will show you how one um frog eating a fly leads to heartbreak it's just i think i said in a vlog that she isn't used by language at all she never reverts or relies on or leans on or uses as a crutch any single cliche or trite saying or anything like that she doesn't use any adjectives that would be traditionally paired and have been paired over and over again with things she won't ever say something like she said sharply like if someone is saying something a bit attacking she won't ever supply you with like she said sharply as an adverb to that and it's just so good like this i feel like is what you should always be doing like you see language evolve in this book and it's so exciting watching roy like be a part of that and be the one supplying that evolution she takes language to a whole other level she uses language she's never used by it and it's so refreshing like this book literally feels like spring rain falling on you um it's just gorgeous this is a little blurb that i think just really really gets it well um heaven opened and the water hammered down reviving the reluctant old well green mossing the pigless pigsty carpet bombing still tea colored puddles the way memory bomb still tea colored mines the grass looked wet green and pleased happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush further away in the wind and rain on the banks of the river in the sudden thunder darkness of the day esta was walking i promise you every single page is like that and i think one of the only negative things i have to say about this book is that it can be a bit overwhelming um but i think with the style and with the intent that aaron datty roy has with this book like that's exactly what she wants you to feel she wants you to get so caught up and so stuck in every web of detail about describing something about how you should go about describing something about what one little thing can mean and about how one little thing can change um everything that you do get a bit covered in it all honestly this is a book that like comes out and just like changes the way you look at the world which is so important so incredible such a gift um and it just like changes the way people can talk about things and what um language can do to things because what we think about when we think about language in terms of describing things in terms of our everyday relationship to things and existence to things like the way that we kind of conceptualize that in our words like when i look at this coffee cup and think like i'm holding it there's coffee inside it aaron datty roy would probably be like drops of coffee held the cup this book also has so much to do with water and rivers and streams and rainfall and stuff like that is just um incredible like i said there is a tragedy there's multiple tragedies at the heart of this book and we follow estha and rahel primarily these two twins um as they're separated they're brought back together they go through all the stuff together and this was a book that like the end of it happened and i was kind of like okay and then literally one night later as i was trying to go to bed in bed this book just like literally burst into my mind and i was like oh oh my god oh like it was one of those moments where i was like that that's what happened um it was like the sudden shocking realization that didn't like kind of come until a day after i'd finished the book and the book had just like gone into my brain and was swishing around in there um and then i just like woke up in the middle of the night and i was like speechless just speechless so i would highly recommend um yeah i think this is a book that will change your life so i mean you got to be careful with books like those so anyway that is the god of small things um wow the word i learned from the god of small things is asafetida it comes from the latin asafida which comes from an amalgamation of the persian atsa and latin fetidus which means fetid all right next we've got a cure a catastrophically disappointing book we have kingdom of the wicked which was wickedly bad kingdom of the wicked by kerry maniscalco let's start with the word the word i learned is scampi which means a big lobster just a big lobster it just is the plural form of the italian word scumple which means a european lobster so that makes sense anyway kingdom of the wicked is a young adult book about witches and about the seven princes of hell we are set in italy um i still honestly don't know what year it is i'm so sorry this was really bad for a number of reasons um we are following these twins again we have emilia and vittoria and as the novel begins vittoria's heart is ripped out of her chest she is murdered and so her twin amelia is now on a mission to get revenge find out who murdered her twin and protect her family in the process because she like her family is a witch she is a witch and in this world there are witch hunters and they're trying to keep their identity a secret and so she accidentally summons a demon prince of hell uh he is wrath that is the kind of sin that he embodies and so his name is prince wrath and so she is trying to form a kind of alliance with him to figure out where his his sis her sister how she was murdered and stuff like that i was really excited when this book began because i was honestly loving it the atmosphere was great it started off super strong i was interested in the plot i was super anticipating the romance between wrath and emilia because i know that that was kind of the main reason i was reading this book was that it was a little bit fantasy romance in there um but honestly this book had quite a lot of problems number one i'm do i just don't know what time it is i have no idea what year it was that was super confusing i started off thinking we were in modern day and then suddenly we weren't in modern day because i just i couldn't figure it out um this book scenes were way too long way too long um i said in a vlog that every single scene seemed like it was filling just a quota of words like they all had to somehow be the same length but because of that none of the scenes hardly ever presented you with new information valuable information i feel like i kind of learned nothing about this book this book was super predictable um about what happened about what was going to happen about who the bad person was the villain um which was super not rewarding super anticlimactic um the relationship between amelia and wrath what relationship what romance there was almost nothing there they definitely got a lower grade in chemistry than i did in like my grade 12 chemistry class and i'm too embarrassed to admit what that was there was nothing there i have more connection with the bread in my kitchen than amelia and wrath had with each other and i actually have i do have quite a connection with my bread i love bread it was just bad the whole way through and i was so disappointed because like i said in the beginning i was really loving it i was loving this kind of spooky witchy italian restaurant environment because amelia also runs her helps run her family's italian restaurant which was interesting but it just completely lost focus it was so mundane and so boring which was incredible given like the topic matter and like the fantasy elements in this book that should have kept me on the edge of my seat but the way that the deliverables were delivered um completely missed the mark the writing was tropy it relied heavily on everything that aaron dottie roy worked so hard to abolish in her novel which i love and i know when you're writing young adult the goals are completely different but that doesn't mean you have to not be creative um because you are literally creating a work of art and you should be creative you shouldn't rely on like these used and recycled um words and language and sentences so this book was weirdly confusing i had no idea what was going on with like prophecies or how magic worked or how witches worked or how summoning a demon worked or really what the general goal of this book was which is really frustrating i don't know how it happened that like this young adult book was somehow more dense harder to understand and really hard for me to wrap my mind around the plot than like the 700 page charles dickens book i also had on my march wrap up i think that tells you something about kingdom of the wicked so i'm not gonna say too much about it i gave it two stars super disappointed would i read this one no no i wouldn't okay jumping quickly from that disappointment into now one of my favorite books of all time oh this book i read for invisible cities the invisible cities project which is a really wonderful group and project and endeavor hosted by a whole bunch of booktubers here on youtube i will leave i think probably some announcement videos or some information down below you can go check out but every single month they draw three countries and then they try to read a book from at least one of those countries a month so for march i decided to join in along with them for a rock and this was incredible i'm so glad i did i got this recommendation from the curious reader um oh thank you thank you so much is all i can say this was incredible i hadn't ever heard of this and i think you can tell copious dog earring wow yeah i really should have tabbed it because that's almost like every single page guys but this this is frankenstein in baghdad this is frankenstein in baghdad by ahmed siddali wow wow five stars i had really no idea what to expect going into this book i had very little idea about the plot but it just sounded like everything i wanted so i decided to order a physical copy i did half and half with this one listened to the audiobook and read it myself um the audiobook was great if you are wondering and the book was just fantastic so frankenstein in baghdad is a retelling of mary shelley's frankenstein set in 2005 baghdad we follow a whole cast of characters who are living their lives in baghdad surviving trying to stay alive waiting for family members to return we have some people who have missions of their own we have reporters we have mothers we have government workers we have officials we have security guards students um different religious figures and it's just incredible i may have even enjoyed this a little bit more than the original frankenstein if you can believe that it was just so good the first thing i need to say about this book if you read the english translation i wish i could read it in arabic so badly because this one's translated by jonathan wright and unfortunately like i can tell it's like kind of translation where you can tell it's not the best and where you can tell that's not really the way it would have come across or been delivered in its original language which is a shame because it does take away a little bit from the experience there's a lot of really awkward clunky english sentences in this book as if something was kind of run a couple times through google translate like that's what it kind of feels like some of the sentences are kind of off is the only word i can describe it as and i don't think that's how it is in the original this was also a finalist for the man booker international prize which is exciting in 2013's show the ideas are so impressive the scope of this novel so impressive all the ground that it covers incredible this book begins with um an elderly mother named elisha waiting for her son daniel to come back home to the house that he was taken from he was taken away to fight i think around 20 years ago unfortunately during that time her husband has died her sisters have left baghdad and she is the only one waiting so adamantly and so firmly for her son to return even though everyone believes him to be dead also staying in a rundown portion of elisha's house is this man named hottie potty is kind of our victor frankenstein of this book because his mission is to get the government and different people and americans to see the people that are being attacked and assaulted and who are dying in all these explosions that are taking place in baghdad to recognize them as actual people give them a proper burial just like the gravity of this book is incredible it's such a hard-hitting book and especially with the context of frankenstein and something like this because what hottie does to recognize this goal is he starts to visit these places where people have died in explosions take their body parts and stitch them together as in frankenstein to make one whole person one whole body in order for people to recognize them as one whole person and all of these people as their own individual people and lives that were taken away what happens as you can imagine is that this corpse is animated i'm not going to tell you how but it's just brilliance and then not only is uh haughty on his own mission but now the what's its name as um the monster is called in this book we have the what's its name what his mission is and what he's trying to do and now you follow him and all these different people as their lives intersect and intertwine in baghdad and what's going on in the city what different people are doing how these issues are affecting them because the what's its name starts to go on a murderous spree of its own in the city and it's just incredible i loved seeing all the tie-ins from mary shelley's frankenstein the commentary the description the issues that this book dealt with and just how they talked about it and really let you see different angles different sides all of the body parts that make up all of these problems and all these little parts that come together to create a hole was just incredible also the end of this book is just insane i'm still trying to like work on it and think on it a little bit more it affected me so much i just cannot recommend it was absolutely heartbreaking um absolutely incredible i cannot praise it enough and it's just such a well-encompassing book about war about evil versus good about what that even means about different countries about different people about different people coming together different people splitting apart about innocence versus criminality and stuff like that and what even that means and it was just insane so really good what i learned from frankenstein in baghdad is minaret which is a tall slender tower of a mosque having one or more balconies from which the summons to prayer is called which comes from the turkish word minore uh which also comes from the arabic menara which means lighthouse and we have a book that i think a few people have been waiting for me to uh say why i didn't like it that's the ocean at the end of the lane by neil gaiman i kind of hated this i really kind of hated this i gave it two and a half stars and it's not first of all neil gaiman is very hit or miss with me i've read a lot of his works by now i absolutely love i give like five stars to coraline and the graveyard book unfortunately books like the ocean at the end of the lane neverwhere good omens norse mythology was okay but this one is definitely probably my least favorite of any neil gaiman i've ever read which is surprising because i should have liked this book but i didn't and this isn't a book where i don't know why i didn't like it you know you have those books that you're like why didn't i like this book for some reason it just didn't gel with me but the ocean at the end of the lane like i can exactly pinpoint the reasons why i detested it so much it's actually a little interesting i think the word i learned from it kind of helps to describe the way i feel about it because the word is scrim also interesting this word has no known origin we have no idea where this word came from but it means a plain woven cotton fabric that's used for clothing or curtains it's kind of like this useless floppy plain cloth that you can just use and throw out um kind of thing it's kind of how i felt about this book i felt like this book was a curtain and then you pull back the curtain and there's nothing there so the ocean at the end of the lane is about this man who returns to his childhood town for a funeral and while he's there he starts driving down the lane and he sees a duck pond and then he starts to reminisce about his childhood and his memories and more than anything else his old friend lee hemstock who convinced him that this pond was an ocean and from there we just catapult back into the past and we get his whole childhood what was going on for him some really scary things that go on his ch in his childhood his friendship with letty and everything that that could possibly mean for him as an adult man now to talk about the writing because that was something i just didn't like about this book and the way it was delivered through its language i feel like a lot of neil gaiman's books but most specifically i've kind of got the vibe from it in the ocean at the end of the lane the writing is weirdly like i don't know how to describe it kind of show offish and condescending is the tone that i get from it like neil gaiman's books and especially this one it's like i can like see him writing the book and see exactly what sentences he's laid out why he knows a sentence like that is going to work how is going to be impressive the way and that is going to be impressive um and all of it seems just like a little bit too manicured for me it seems a little bit too perfect and it's not that you can't have perfect language like aaron dottie roy is incredible exquisite perfection but she's not um doing it in order to be perfect or in order to impress you with that perfection um she's doing it for an end goal um with these descriptions and which and with this lovely language but in neil gaiman i feel like it is there to just dazzle in the way that he sets up these sentences and unfortunately it is this kind of repetitive cycle of his writing style and the way that this kind of like weird i don't know maybe it's just me but this weird condescending tone in the writing kind of seeps into that repetitive cycle of these phrases that he'll use of the way that he writes if you've read neil gaiman i think you know what i'm talking about like the way that he describes how a person is the way that he does dialogue especially it just seems a little bit too perfect and in that sense it ruins the illusion that this is fiction because it very much lets us see that no this is just a guy writing a book obsessed with making every sentence perfect um to a neil gaiman standard and style of writing i've noticed this in neverwhere as well but everything just seems too much in place for it to be enjoyable anymore like it seems not so much a story but a series of sentences where someone has labored so intensively and like that's super impressive for someone to spend so much time on every single sentence but it seems unnatural is what i'm really trying to say it seems unnatural it doesn't seem like a story anymore this book didn't um give me anything i didn't feel connected to any of the characters i didn't really care about any of the issues this book felt like it had a lot of flashiness um i had a lot of gaudiness like in order to kind of tie what i'm trying to say about the writing and with the plot it felt like this book was just relying on that like impressive writing to deliver this plot where there wasn't a lot there like his writing and his words seems like that curtain and then you pull back that curtain and it seems like there's nothing there there's no substance because a lot of what was going on it's very fantastical it just seems like that fantasy element and this weird supernatural thing that's going on because this book deals a lot with things like that um and different monsters and different things that are going on this book just like fell like a little pancake it fell so flat for me which was really unfortunate because i could see how there could be so much emotional weight and value behind it but um our narrator seemed like he could have been anyone i have no idea who he was and his relationship with letty and what he goes through in his childhood um it is heartbreaking and it is sad at the end of the day i didn't get anything out of it and it is a book that like i did try i did try to go in deeper and like see what was there and like what was being talked about and stuff like that but it just it didn't work for me and i know so many people love this book so of course it worked for them which is incredible um unfortunately it just didn't it just didn't click with me like at all i had no connection to this book it felt like a kind of shiny rock and then you turn the rock over and it's just like a it's just a rock it's just a plain rock those reasons it didn't really work for me like the writing really graded on my nerves um combine that with like the plot that was just kind of focused on um this one kind of fairy tale aspect that's very like let's go on this one straight journey and like there are opportunities to veer off and to explore different things but so unfortunately this was not a neil gaiman novel that um did anything for me but like i said other than others of them really do which is um good all right coming up to the last year i'm not going to spend too much time talking about this because i have a whole reading vlog as well as a whole debate up with carolyn this was our dickens versus tolstoy the great debate book club pick for february and march so in the last few days of march i managed to finish this chunky man off and this is the pickwick papers by charles dickens this is dickens first novel and i honestly had a good and bad time with this i ended up giving it like a 3.75 3.8 stars but um by the time i did get to the end of this book i was like sad that it was over which was nice and i did really like it if you don't know what this is about um we are following mr pickwick and three other men who form the pickwick club and they go out all over england they go on adventures they take their notebooks with them and that's all they have and so they start to write down everything they see their encounters with these people they make friends they make enemies they get into disasters there's a lot of legal abuse there's a lot of social injustice um and that's basically all it is but i just think it was so interesting seeing dickens first ever baby um and it was it was really interesting this book did have a lot of problems and it was quite a lengthy time to devote to it but at the end i do feel very accomplished for having finished this and i did um more often than not i'd say like enjoy my time with it i learned so many new words that i don't even know which one i want to share with you oh okay no this one this one i really like so the word is splenetic which means bad tempered and spiteful it comes from the middle english when it was used as a noun for people with a diseased spleen which comes from the latin spleneticus and from the greek splen um i just thought that was really interesting like now splenetic means bad tempered and spiteful but it was used for people who had like a diseased spleen um which is why i don't know language is so cool but um dickens of course was so funny in this book i laughed so much i don't think i've ever laughed out loud so much as with the pickwick papers honestly the hat scene the hat scene so that is that if you would like i have recently created and so is carolyn um a whole playlist for the dickens versus tolstoy universe the cinematic universe so you can find that on my channel or on her channel and i will leave a link to the debate up above as well so that is the pick papers all right and the last book that i listened to in march was the poetic edda as tales of i think the norse heroes and myths this is the translation and edited uh version by jackson crawford um one of you guys actually let me know that jackson crawford has a whole youtube channel where he talks about everything norse language myth anything you could possibly think of under the sun i would highly recommend checking that out because it is super informative and interesting so um thank you so much but the poetic edda i like i said i've read norse mythology by neil gaiman and i would 100 prefer this one and recommend like the original poetic edda or the prose edda um to you because i i'm just someone who really likes having like as close to the original of something as possible it's like this paranoia of kind of missing out on something that someone's a new adaptation or new reiteration or retelling of a thing might have missed and on top of that like i just found the poetic edda to be so much more powerful um than what neil gaiman accomplishes in norse mythology which is a bit of like a frolic of folly and stuff but the poetic edda i was just really blown away by the language by like the gravity and the intensity of these stories um and these poems and stuff like that i thought it was so interesting um [Music] definitely a book that took me a while to listen to because there was a lot there but at the end i gave it four stars really interested in reading more about these topics and these myths and stuff like that because like i said really really powerful and it just i don't know it's just so good and really interesting as well so that is the poetic so you've now come to the end of this very long little ramble um thank you so much for being here i've just had i had a really good morning this was a good way to spend my money just chatting with books with you guys so i hope you're doing well i hope you read some fantastic books this month and if not maybe next month but i'm gonna sign off i'm gonna go enjoy the rest of my rainy day and thank you guys so much for watching um if you've read any of these let me know what you thought because i'm so interested in hearing um what you think about books um and sharing thoughts with you guys and recommendations as well please if you have any recommendations always feel free to leave them below sure yeah i hope you're doing fabulous and until next time ciao

Channel: * e m m i e *

Views: 48,385

Rating: 4.9784055 out of 5

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Id: 2_8i38tcujo

Length: 47min 15sec (2835 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021