everything i read in november: classics, romance & magical reads

okay so here is the deal today are you with me okay we're good we're focused so i have class very soon i don't want to rush this video at all i get very stressed when i have to film and like on a time limit so what i'm thinking is probably likely gonna end up being the case is that i'm gonna film like half of this video right now and then get out of my pajama pants and then run out the door go to school come back and then you'll see me in like a split second but i'll be like back from class probably looking very exhausted but that that's the situation we're working with so welcome to my november wrap up i read so much this month because there were so many heavy school readings i had two essays due i had a number of tests and so i'm not gonna go through everything i read for uni because that's impossible but like the major stuff i can show you is here but as well the fact that i had to write two essays meant i had to read so many secondary source essays anthologies just like random articles and books and that was so much so i'm actually very happy that i got through um the amount of like hobby reading and book collaborating that i did this month so let's get started i'm so happy you're here are you cozy are you okay how you feeling let's just talk about books all right so first things first i think we are going to start with a couple of spooky picks that slid over into november from october that i didn't get to finish in october and the first one is the murder of roger aykroyd by agatha christie so i believe that this is the fourth book in the poro series going in order and that's what i've been trying to do is read the series in order however with this one i'm not going to say too much because i also filmed a whole entire video trying to solve this murder of roger aykroyd book story detective novel wherein a man named roger aykroyd is stabbed and haircut poro has to try and solve what happened to him there's also some blackmail in this one but i will leave the video up above where i try to solve it it was so much fun and this video is getting really good um response from you guys thank you so much it's getting so much support and it's kind of like i think it's like kind of blowing up right now because every time i check on it so many more thousands of people have watched it so thank you so much i will definitely be making more because i've gotten so many requests so yeah overall i gave this book three stars because maybe three and a half i think three and a half because i love agatha christie books however i was a bit jaded and if you watch this video you will know why but i still really really did enjoy it don't get me wrong and i loved it i'm so glad i got to read another one in the series so there may or may not be another one maybe with some christmas vibes coming your way very soon um in the egg of the christie world in the agatha versus emma universe so yeah that was that one and then the only other one i have here from spooky season is the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson i've been wanting to read this book for forever i believe i found this copy thrifted and i thought finally for halloween 2021 i would start it i started this like a couple of days before halloween um it is a very short little book and i had previously started the tv show which is nothing like this book really it takes some bag inspiration but in the book proper we are following this man dr montague and what he wants to do is research um real you know supernatural phenomenon and prove that it exists or just see kind of what's out there and so he locates hill house which is supposed to be this very notorious spooky haunted house and he decides to take on with him three other people as his assistants two of them are women who have experienced somewhat questionable vaguely supernatural experiences or phenomena in their past and the other one is a man named luke who is um kind of the ancestor of this house it belongs to his family this book wow this is a very very slow burn um haunted house spooky setting where you're not really sure what is going on like you just don't know what's happening i had no idea where this book was going i never really heard of the story before it was such a delight to read one of my favorite things about this book i gave it four stars was the writing shirley jackson's like figuring of the haunted house and architecture that's like one of my favorite things and i got to like take a class on this kind of in uni that focused a lot on like space and time and specific architecture of buildings and what that does to your mind and how it can affect you and how spaces like what meaning like certain spaces have essentially and hill house is just so um incredibly complicated such a cool structure to examine because it's made of like all these wrong angles that don't line up and so while you're there it like messes with your sense of balance and what you think is like straight what you think is upright essentially are actually things that are slightly skewed um and it just really really resonated with me personally i think because i spent so much time with my world like literally skewed from a concussion and so it was just like it was just horrifying for me doubly i think on that front but the writing was just beautiful even like the first sentence no live organism can continue for long to exist saintly under conditions of absolute reality the writing was gorgeous it was just so cool i thought it was just so cool the way that this house was built like who would do that every angle is slightly wrong angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to and have every right to expect are true are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another of course the result of all these tiny aberrations of measurement adds up to a fairly large distortion in the house as a whole and so like when you leave hill house all of a sudden your world like changes again because you got used to hill house but essentially we're following eleanor principally who is probably the most troubled young woman in this house she had a very abusive relationship with her family and she definitely brings that into the house and essentially what this book asks of you as the reader is to kind of determine is this house haunted or is this house being haunted our house is haunted or do you haunt the houses essentially i don't think i'm gonna say any more than this but i thought this was so well done the ending was just wow i wouldn't recommend this if you are not a fan of kind of ambiguous endings or like ambiguous questions like that but i thought this was brilliant and i really really love this i did enjoy we have always lived in the castle by shirley jackson more than this actually because i gave that one five stars but this was still amazing and i'm so glad i read this for halloween i loved it then i read a very popular romance and that is get a life chloe brown by talia hebert first of all i i just want to say thank you to this book and thank you to talia hibbert because this gave me so much um that i knew i needed but i didn't know where to get it from this follows chloe who's in i think she's in her 20s late 20s or so but she's never moved out of her house she doesn't really think she doesn't really think she's done much with her life and one day when she almost gets hit by a truck or a car um she decides enough is enough and that she's going to make a life that she would like be proud of life that she thinks is interesting unique and full of adventure and so she drops up a list of things she's going to do to help her get a life one of these things is moving out and so she moves into an apartment building and she meets the superintendent of her building who is this man named redford morgan red and so you follow their relationship chloe also has fibromyalgia chronic pain all of that ah this book like i i cried at this book i cried so much it gave me so much it really spoke to me and just everything that chloe it was just done so beautifully just like the affirmation that yeah you can be sick you can be in pain but that doesn't mean you're unhappy that doesn't mean you don't have a full life that doesn't mean you can't do things or appreciate things or fall in love or blah blah um it's just a part of your life and that is who you are and this book just like prompted me to like not necessarily make a list of my own but like just confront just confront like sickness and trauma and stuff like that and like go a little further on that journey and not be so afraid of it um because chloe is just like she's so cool and just i really really appreciated her as a character um in terms of the romance i really loved it i really loved the romance i thought it was so great um i was not expecting this like cutesy cover to be so full of steamy sections but they were definitely there's definitely a lot of steam we were steaming a lot of broccoli um steam was everywhere i loved it so much i loved red red is also a painter um or he wants to be a painter he's an aspiring artist and he's also going through a lot in his life um that was really nice to see as well i just thought this was beautifully written so realistically done the only thing the only reason why i really didn't give this five stars because i was considering it which is very rare um was the ending i always detest the like third act of romances because i just hate i hate that structure that there has to be you know some falling out some fight some difficulty some miscommunication and then you know they have to get over that final hurdle essentially it's just it's overdone i think it's stupid um it doesn't need to be there especially when red and chloe had already like faced so much in their relationship and getting to know each other and being friends i just really really detest the third act fallout in romances um and it makes me almost like hate the whole thing honestly so that was the reason i had to bump it down a star but i would highly recommend like i just i really really really really really love this and i definitely think it is worth all the hype that it has gotten so that is the romance that i read this month so happy about this i will definitely be continuing on with the series for sure all right then okay let me talk about this book because i'm gonna try not to go on a rant right now but i am so angry i finished this book about like half an hour before sitting down to film this and that is resurrection by leo tolstoy i hated this i hated this i hate it it feels so good to say that though oh my gosh it's been so long since i've so passionately hated a classic um and this is gonna be such a fun live show like i can feel it right now carol and i will have our live show for resurrection by the whole story for the dickens versus tolstoy book club on carolyn's channel um we'll probably have a date announced below in the description box so definitely tune in for that because i i'm getting my boxing gloves out like i said i absolutely i detested this um one thing i will say is that it feels really good to have read all of tolstoy's major novels now and if you're a part of the book club as well we have done that we've done that this year this year 2021 we read all tolstoy's major novels childhood boyhood youth anikrenina war and peace and resurrection and it feels really good to have them ticked all off as you can imagine this was my least favorite so this is tolstoy's final novel and to me it just felt like the desperate attempt of a man who knows he's not going to be on the planet much longer trying to make one final plea for humanity to get their stuff together because this book is a big examination a big condemnation of the justice system and the legal system in russia at the time and how they basically just imprison everyone and anyone ship them off to siberia to do hard labor or just to be convicts and exiles over there essentially how the trials are super unjust the conditions are literally created so that people just go to jail and can't get out of jail when in reality a lot of these people are innocent a lot of them are there for no reason and a lot of them just shouldn't be there based on the crimes they've committed if they've even committed them and so in this one we follow a young man named nekoladov and when he was younger he seduced schloost he seduced um another young woman who was staying at his aunt's house named maslova um and basically kind of ruined her whole life and from there we know that maslova slid into prostitution her life became extremely difficult and one day when nkladov gets called to be a jury man he's just come back from working in the military he is sitting as a german and the prisoner who comes up for trial is none other than masloba herself who has been accused of committing a crime that she basically had nothing to do with um however because the legal system is so corrupt she is sent off to do hard labor in siberia nklanov at this point realizes that his whole life has been a big bad thing he's just been doing awful things that he should not be doing and he essentially awakens and has this moment of resurrection um coming back from just the absolute debauchery and crime and nonsense realm he thinks he has been living his life in and so he goes on this journey to redeem maslova by marrying her even though she wants nothing to do with him basically and he is determined to basically follow her around follow her all the way to siberia in order to make her life better this book i'm not going to say too much here because i'm saving all of my punches for the live show but i absolutely detested this number one this was so boring so boring very boring one of the driest books i've ever read um for me this is kind of like a middle man between war and peace and anachrena like bridging that gap between fiction and i'm kind of like this non-fiction research examination book that warm pieces because war and peace isn't technically a novel but this was just so dry you just follow knuckle nekoladov going around essentially hearing everyone's stories people who aren't in prison like what they've done and then he goes to you know law officials policemen clerks or whatever and he gets their stories of every bad thing they're doing and how they really shouldn't be in their position of power but this was just a relentless driving repetitive um concept throughout the whole book was just nekledov talking to people who were either in poor positions when they should not be or in high positions of power when they also should not be for me this book um didn't didn't do anything it didn't make me feel um anything do i agree with everything that was like speckled speculated do i agree with pretty much everything that tool story you know is like saying this is wrong yeah of course do i think this book did it well or presented it in a way that was engaging made me want to read compelled me at all made me feel anything no i wanted to throw this book out the window this book was an absolute chore to read there was no no nice writing for me in here the whole thing was just so cut and dry and the ending so throughout the whole book when i got to the ending i was like i am so done i'm ready to throw this book out into the snow and leave it there let it sink into the frozen icy wastes it made me so angry by the time i got to it because throughout the whole thing um the first the last like 100 pages finally you go to siberia because up until then it's just necklace like trying to get maslova's case um re-examined and give her like a lighter sentence or get her out of it but then they finally go to siberia um and then by the end of it i'm not going to spoil it but nekolodov's like whole journey is suddenly um reversed and he starts off on like this new journey on the very last page and it is just so silly to me to me this book did not accomplish anything other than you know showing you the real life conditions i will say that it's very it is a very good look at like the actual injustice system injustice system that's what i mean of russia in this time period published in 1899 but wow the whole last few pages of this book where it just made me i'm just like you've just made the whole thing so pointless and like i thought we were gearing up towards at least a plausible solution or at least a discussion of a solution or some thing you know because necklace has been spinning this idea of how do we fix things how do we fix this horrible mess we've created it demands the question like how can people punish other people when they themselves are not free of you know bias and crime and violence and all that stuff how can we condemn our fellow people to these lives or to these punishments ourselves when we don't have that power and i was like okay cool let's see it let's see some reform let's see some solutions but the ending of this book and what he clings to as like the solution and the answer is just so it's just so silly and for me it just made the book seem so pointless so anyway two stars i think a generous maybe not a generous two stars but um a jaded two stars for sure so anyway that is resurrection anyway tune in for the live show for sure because i'm sure that will be fun but i'm so happy to be done this book and if you're wondering for december we will be reading a christmas carol by charles dickens so something extremely different but yep that is that that is that goodbye all right let's let's just let's discuss something light something that's just like fun light silly just a good companion i saw this book on libby on my audiobook app um my local library app and i picked it up it's a fairly older young adult i think it's it's a very very young young adult and that is princess academy who is this by shannon is your name shannon shannon lahail shannon sherry sherry shannon it's probably not even shannon anyway so this book this book just ended up being really really fun if not a bit um young one thing i will say is that it was just a little bit too young for me um and a little bit too annoying at times when i was i would have loved this book if i was like probably 10 or 12 even this is a fantasy and we're following this young girl named miri and we're set up on a mountain this was so nice because i had no idea that this book was going to be so full of winter and snow and all that imagery that i was just like so craving at the time but it was this whole book pretty much celebrated the snow and the winter um and the lives of these people who live up on this mountain and essentially what they do up here is they work in the quarry they um cut stone they get stone it's like this very special stone and they also have their whole language actually that they speak like in the quarry it's called quarry speech um and only people who are born here can do it you know you have to learn to do it it's essentially like they can communicate without words um a lot of it has to do with song a lot of it has to do with community it was just like a really cool thing um in this young adult book that i was not expecting to see was like this whole discussion of language super cool like i said we follow miri who has never been allowed to work in the quarry she's the only girl in this village who has not been allowed to work there for some reason she doesn't know why all she knows is that she is forbidden from stepping foot into the quarry and she's not allowed to speak query speech either things change when one day delegates from the prince and the king of this kingdom come up the mountain and they're like yo this year our priests have selected your village for the princess academy and the princess academy is essentially a school that is built in one town or city or village of this kingdom where every single girl from the ages of like 12 to 17 or something um are taken and taught how to be princesses and at the end of the year once they've kind of got their education in you know lady-like things but also politics conversation poise um kingdomy stuff the prince will come up and choose one of the girls studying at this princess academy to be his bride to be his princess and so mary along with every other girl in her village gets taken to this princess academy that is built on their mountain and there they train in everything to make them a princess it was fabulous it was great i really like this i gave it three stars um just because it was like midway enjoyable do you know what i mean i probably will never read this again i don't think i'll continue on with the series but just at the time for what it was it was a really nice companion um it was very cozy because we do follow them just like in their day-to-day things like going to lessons learning how to read because none of them know how to read singing and making food and learning the politics and the trade and the economy of the kingdom and it was just like really sweet honestly as well you get to follow and know pretty much all of them i would recommend if you just want something super light super fluffy uh with some cool fantasy elements and some cozy princess vibes i would give this cup of coffee to go to a princess academy all right then i read this guy isn't this like fascinating um this is one of like the actual books that i can show you that i read for uni for one of my essays this wasn't on our course syllabus but i had to do a lot of reading for the essays i was writing and it did pay off because i did i did do well on them and if oh no that video is not going to be up yet i do have a whole video coming um about the essay that i was writing and this is one of the ones i read in that video so this is called um virgin mother maiden queen this is by helen hackett um and as you can imagine this is all about queen elizabeth the first um which is what my essay was on specifically like in relation to the representation of mothers in book one of the fairy queen and how they either comment relate or just create discourse around the titles that queen elizabeth basically um employed for herself being both the virgin queen and the mother of england like how she can simultaneously be these two things that should realistically cancel each other out um this was interesting this was interesting it was just a great piece of information goes over like her coordination the imagery the symbols that she basically took on and molded into herself her court um her marriages the marriages that didn't work out possible marriages that would have occurred it just discusses like basically everything to do with queen elizabeth the first so this was a great resource but um yeah all right then i read a book that i just absolutely loved i picked up snow and rose by emily winfield martin this was a gift from a subscriber so thank you so much this is from jordan i love this this is also a beautifully illustrated um retelling of the fairy tale snow white and rose red and so essentially we follow the two little girls i think what i might do is actually like take an exact knife and frame some of these i'm not i'm not above that so we follow two sisters snow and rose and their mother and father and before this book begins they had been living in like a very beautiful luxurious um basically mansion um and they were very well off they had a really really good life but then one day their father goes into the woods that are near where they live and he never returns and so all of a sudden basically everything is taken away from them they have to move into this tiny little cottage right on the border of the woods and snow and rose eventually start to wander into the woods and each day they go further and further both trying to just see what's out there for themselves but deep in their hearts trying to find their father they encountered so many new friends and like foes and it was just so sweet i loved it it gave me that like cozy woodsy oaky oaky after birth that i wanted it was a little dark it was a little spooky you had those fairy tale elements in there and it was just really really sweet as well there's so much about winter you do have christmas in here as well so if you're looking for a wintry book perhaps or just a book to keep you warm this one will definitely do it one thing i will say i wish for this book was that the writing was a bit more lyrical and more fitted to the story because at times it just felt a little bit awkward a little bit stilted i don't know if this is her first book this is definitely a middle grade that's truly one of my only critiques is that i just wish the writing was a little bit more magical itself but um i really loved all the little nooks and crannies of this book and i would highly recommend i gave it four stars um so that is snow and rose also for class i read astrophyll and stella by philip sydney this is a sonnet sequence by philip cindy who is basically like not the not necessarily the founder or the father of english sonnet writing but pretty much um i had never heard of this work until i saw it on my renaissance lit class syllabus um and wow this was actually so good um the writing in here was just gorgeous phillips sydney like went off let me just tell you a little bit about this because i truly think that anyone could enjoy this especially if you wanted to like dip your toes into renaissance poetry or sonnet sequences saunas in general so essentially astrophyll and stella we have astrophil who is this dude who's kind of maybe a representation of philip sydney to some degree and as well we have stella who is also a representation of this real woman named penelope now philip sydney was in love with penelope however they both married different people and so these sonnets are sonnets of frustration of fruitless love love that will never come to be because they're both married they're never going to get together but phillip sydney is still very much in love with penelope this sonnet sequence is composed of 108 poems or 108 sonnets and what's really cool is that these 108 poems mimic the 108 suitors from the odyssey and if you've read the odyssey you know that penelope is the wife of odysseus and she is like that very faithful wife stereotype who waits and waits and waits like 20 years for her husband to come back from the war and she never gives in or marries one of these 108 suitors that are really just harassing her um for marriage and so like he knows that his 108 sonnets of love of like pining of suffering um are going to be as those 108 suitors in the odyssey who eventually all get killed um pretty much by odysseus so that was a cool timbit a little bit extra but that's okay these were just so so so so gorgeous maybe i'll put some like quotes on right now from a few of my favorites because they were actually so so beautiful but they're a little bit whiny at times but that does come with the genre and the time period because a lot of this is still very much in the petrarchan tradition petrarcan convention um and a little side note on that petrarch was an italian poet very famous and he essentially was the first to come up with all these metaphors all these images and essentially this figure known as the petrarchan lover who is always usually a man who is suffering in love and doesn't ever get his wishes women are so disdainful of him and he will never find their love i want to say no should i say this kind of gives me original like the original in-cell vibes um is that a completely fair comparison i don't think so but you kind of see that you kind of see the resemblance anyway i really loved astrophyll and stella i thought it was beautiful um just the writing is really really what i loved and like so many of these lines were just gorgeous so i gave this four stars very surprised and i would definitely love to check out more of philip sydney's poetry on my um hobby time so yeah i actually need to run to class now but i do have about four more works to get through so i'm gonna go to class and then i'm gonna come back and you will see me in like five seconds so see you very soon i am back from class oh my gosh i am exhausted but let us finish off talking about the last few books that i read so i don't know where we were let's start with something nice and easy i decided just to pick up on a whim one of the last manga that i had on my shelf that i not yet read through and that was happy marriage volume one by mackie and joji i actually heard about this one because it was like advertised for in the back of one of the mangas um that i was previously reading so the advertisement worked i bought it this is about a woman whose father is in extreme debt like her family is an extreme debt and to help her father and her father's business she agrees to marry the son of the businessman that she is working for like she works at their company and the ceo who is this guy's i think grandfather actually um is like oh my gosh like i knew your mother we were really good friends or your grandmother um the it's a bit fuzzy honestly the the reasoning why but anyway they get married and she does not take this marriage very seriously like she doesn't think too much of it he on the other hand is like extremely committed thinks it is super legit and is going to act as such i think i would definitely continue on with this one just because it's so fun and ridiculous and silly they're just so good to sink into when like everything gets a bit overwhelming i don't know it was fun i enjoyed it so i think i give this like three stars-ish then i read the marriage of heaven and hell by william blake this was a reread for me this is an assortment of strange um words and sentences um basically talking about how we need to break down the binaries that we've created um and before daredev the um theorist and the critic who talks about deconstruction which is the work of breaking down binaries because he says in every binary one side is always demonized and you know good and evil man and woman um light and dark everything you think of can be thought in binaries it's one of the ways that humans you know think but william blake in the marriage of heaven and hell is arguing for more of a harmony between these things we need to be balanced with both instead of just splitting two sides of things apart in this case have it in hell on what they embody um he takes on the role of kind of the prophets the voice of god in here and he is very angry at the church for demonizing the body demonizing energy and it is just a huge critique of everything that has basically come out of society and religion and stuff like that and i really liked it i really liked it um definitely not my favorite thing i've studied at uni but i did enjoy it and i did just have to write a test on one of the lines in here just one of the lines which was just one thought phil's immensity what mean the last physical book i have to talk to you about here is thus where their faces by sylvina ocampo this was the dark academic book pick for october and november it was my turn to pick so i chose this one because someone actually left this as a recommendation for me when i asked for recommendations for countries around the world and so they left this for argentina if i can find out who it was thank you i'll put you right here but if i can't thank you anyway so this is a collection of short stories and i'm so sad to say i didn't love this as much as i wanted to i gave this three stars i just i really thought having a collection full of dark spooky fantastic strange occurrences um would kind of redeem the short storyness of it because i'm not a fan of short stories i really do not like short stories for one reason or the other um but this didn't but i will say if you are a fan of the grotesque there's a lot of gothic stories in here we've just got weird things going on and a lot of these stories have like one big twist at the end which i really enjoyed because when you go back and then read the story you can kind of see maybe some clues that would have alerted you to the twist on the whole i thought these were really unique and interesting stories they just weren't fully like i just didn't fully appreciate them didn't fully connect to them and i think it's because of the nature of the short story and i ultimately like i just don't like short stories um but yes the live show for this is going to be postponed it will be on my channel but we are all so so busy at the moment especially with um december coming up so we'll let you know when that will be but probably towards the end of december or even the beginning of january it's looking like but yeah if you did read this or if you have read this please let me know your thoughts because i'm really actually interested to see what people make of a lot of these short stories one of my favorite things has to be like the running theme of like dolls and women and like aging and growing up in this collection that was just so creepy and haunting so yeah i think this was actually the last book i read in the month as well aside from all the other university things so there you go yes i hope you enjoyed this video as always let us know what you read um or what your favorite book was i will have my december tbr video up on friday which is literally in a couple of days right so um yeah a couple of you guys said that you missed that from last month and i was like i missed it too i was just really busy so decembers will definitely be up because i'm most excited for december's reading so i am going to go have some food i might even take a nap it's going to be wild nights it's a very gloomy evening so yeah thank you so much for watching thank you for being here um for the second last wrap up of 2021 in the description you'll find links to all the books mentioned in this video along with links to other things i believe some social media and book club stuff potentially and maybe i don't know who else there's other things down there isn't there anyway i hope you have a really great day or night or evening and i hope you give yourself a big hug from me and i'll see you very soon so ciao [Music]

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Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021