i went to europe and bought many books

hello everybody today i'm going to be doing a book haul i just got back two days ago from europe oh my the memories i used to go to europe all the time and then the pandemic happened and i didn't travel because that would be crazy but now that i'm double vaccinated now that we can take covid tests i was thinking when when's gonna be the time and then my boyfriend had to attend a conference for work in portugal and he asked me if i would come we did approximately one million cobig tests some of which cost over a hundred dollars but i was happy to do it because if i was gonna travel we were gonna travel safe we wore masks everywhere that was interesting other countries are not wearing masks as much as can and i bought a lot of books and that's the point of this video though so let's do that part i bought 20 books i think one of them i left in my boyfriend's apartment which is haunting me because i really wanted to show it to you guys and i just feel like maybe there's another book i bought and i'd well you know what it is i bought two books for a friend of mine and i'm not gonna show those because she'll watch this video and i don't want her to know it felt so wonderful to get to go back to my favorite book shops foils water stones and some new bookshops that i really enjoyed in portugal um it was a great trip i'm excited to relive the trip some of the memories through these books with you guys but first a word from our sponsor let's give a big thank you to today's sponsor book of the month book of the month is an online book service for readers their mission is to promote new and emerging authors and help readers discover books that they will love how it works is simple but effective every month their team vets hundreds of books and picks out five of the most interesting compelling new books for you to pick from if you're subscribed you pick one of those five books every month and it gets sent straight to you if for whatever reason you don't want to participate that month you can skip the month at no charge and you can do that as many times as you want if you use my link or my code down below you will get your first hardcover for only 9.99 let me show you this month's books the family by naomi krapitzki how to marry keanu reeves in 90 days by km jackson the collective by alison galen a little hope by ethan joella and the keeper of knight by kylie lee baker and the add-on books my body by emily radakowski and will by will smith with mark manson thank you so much to book of the month for sponsoring this video they are linked down below let's start talking about these books okay i i'm i think i tried to put them in order of how i bought them but then it got all out of order these were some of the first ones but i don't know where to start we'll just go through them together okay here we are the first two this is where already we're off to a terrible start this is where i bought a third book and i left it like i said at my boyfriend's apartment so this first one is the woman in the purple skirt by natsuko imamura so this was recommended to me by my friend raeleen who i run my podcast my book podcast with um she had just read this and she thought i would like it and i looked it up and i didn't like the canadian cover and so when i was over there i picked up the uk cover and these books were purchased in foils god going to foils at this point in my life makes me emotional it makes me want to cry i feel so much love for that bookshop definitely my favorite book shop in the world just so many good memories there it's so giant it's like a palace a modern kind of aesthetic palace to books this is japanese translated fiction and um raelian said that i would like it because i liked convenience store woman so here i am ready the next one is a sunday in ville davre vildavre by dominique barbarie damn it [Laughter] so this is another translated one this is oh god it's translated from the french but is she french why do i remember that she's finnish she's not she's from france this sounded like the kind of indie film a24 would make a little bit if you know what i mean so this is about two sisters who are in a suburb outside of paris one of them is visiting her sister's house and it's like just one long conversation i love that i love it when people like authors are playing with the with time scales right one conversation it sounds fantastic it's one afternoon or something like that so i thought that sounded wonderful and i'd also never heard of it but i loved the cover and i had to pick it up the other book that i forgot at my boyfriend's apartment has the most incredible cover this book i was drawn in by the cover astral season is that what it was called it had a very complicated title anyways you're looking at it it's about these two mega fans of this idol band that they're obsessed with and one of their favorite idol commits a murder and they decide it seems from the synopsis they decide because they're such fans of him and they want to help him they decide that they'll confess to the crime of this murder and so it's this interesting book it seems to be this interesting book i haven't read it this is a book haul i can't make any opinions um it seems to be this interesting look at fame parasocial relationships as the term has become very popular to use so i'm really looking forward to it this cover looked incredible i am so excited about it so okay let's let's talk about this one this is probably the greatest cover of the year award to orwell's roses by rebecca solnit so oh god when i heard about this a few weeks ago months ago i was absolutely excited it's a non-fiction book by rebecca solnit about uh gardening and how gardening is reflective of george orwell's life and his work and nature in orwell and we all know george orwell is my favorite author and i love to see him still being written about still being popular there's so much to learn there's so much to look at and not only was this cover stunning but i thought the book sounded genuinely great so i thought great i'll pick that up eventually okay then an instagram advertisement got me good it said if you order this book online you can get a free tote bag and i was like that's fine i'm happy to do that but then it said only within the uk and i saw this like two weeks before i was going to the uk so i was like that's fine i will pretend i'm from the uk so i mark this is one of my greatest book hacks book wins of all time i marked myself uh to just i'll pick it up in store i live in the uk haha and a week later i got an email that was like cool your book is ready to pick up at foils and i was like and so i went there and they gave me the book but they also gave me the tote bag look at this it's so beautiful oh my goodness oh my goodness so this is probably my new favorite tote bag of my life i don't think it can get better than that but i thought this would be a fun little intermission to show you a few of the random other things i got on this trip that were not specifically books but that i thought you guys specifically would like you know i got a new pair of corduroy pants but you don't need to see that here are the things i got i thought you'd care about i got this mug oh my goodness this is a jane austen mug and it has all of the main jane austen characters illustrated throughout it is so adorable i loved it i absolutely loved it i can't believe i didn't smash it what else do i have in here oh yes uh we went to minalima because it's right next to my favorite restaurant in all of london fa cafe on mordor street in the tottenham court road area um and so we went into minalima which is the people that designed all the harry potter graphic design stuff and i picked myself up this journal that looks like the dark arts uh defense against the dark arts book textbook from the movie i thought that was super adorable that is mine now okay back to the books so i then went and hung out with my friend lena this was so meaningful and lovely not to be cheesy but um at some point in the pandemic lena and i started calling every two weeks i don't i don't know every two weeks we call and we talk about work and we talk about life and we just it's they're long those are long long calls um and actually i'm gonna be in a video on her channel so if you're interested go check lena out she's incredible but um i went and visited her it was so much fun it was it was so beautiful like after a year of calling maybe longer than a year of doing these phone calls it was so beautiful to just finally get to see her in real life and of course we did a little book shopping i bought this beautiful edition of sandishin by jane austen beautiful beautiful internal rhyme there um but it's not just syndication it's also lady susan and the watsons these are the three unfinished jane austen works and i loved this bind up of them so i had to get it i had to get it okay then i picked up hamnet oh hamnet i don't know why i'm excited to talk about this i just this is a book um that won the women's prize as this giant sticker would suggest but this is a book about shakespeare's son hamnet of whom hamlet was based um and what's interesting when i was checking out at the store the bookshop clerk was very excited that i was getting this and she was like it's so interesting because they never name shakespeare in the book and i was like oh that is interesting i didn't know if he was going to be a main character i just heard really good things about this book and i thought ah this is the moment this is the moment to grab it um but i guess he's not really a main character in any in any way so anyways i thought this sounded really cool whoa the next book oh my goodness this was a book okay this one and one other one i was like ariel don't buy this not because you don't want it i really did want it but because carrying this in a suitcase is ridiculous it's this giant hardcover book but i just loved it it's so beautiful so it's called a trillion trees how we can reforest our world by fred pierce it is obviously if that didn't sell it a non-fiction book about trees and forests look at how beautiful this spine is wow this is this is beautiful beautiful book production granta is making some beautiful i mean stunning to put the title like that down at the bottom 10 out of 10 10 out of 10. they also did the orwell's roses book and i think i got another granta book somewhere in here they're nailing it it's also big but like the font is pretty giant and the margins are pretty big so i don't think that this would actually be that daunting of a read um all right let's move up the next pile i then went and hung out with my friend claire ah again just getting to see my friends that i haven't gotten to see in two years that i used to see fairly regularly it just that it made my heart a lot better it made my heart a lot better and i picked up a bunch of books when i was with her and actually i did a book haul on her channel so if you want to check that out please do um i showed off a bunch of these books but you can also see the books that she got and they were very interesting pics and because there's so many books here today i am trying to go a little bit quickly so go check hers out because i'm sure i talked about them in more detail there uh link down below so anyway i got the perfect world of muako sumida by clarissa goniwan this looked and sound phenomenal it's about a young woman who's been murdered and her friends in a japanese it's it's set in japan her friends and her family are trying to figure out what it was but the thing that really compelled me it says that she had a true identity so clearly there was some big secret going on and i really don't read crime stuff like murder stuff or anything like that but something about this book pulled me in so i thought let's go for it i then picked up the pillars of the earth this is the other book that i was like ariel don't be ridiculous do not buy this giant tome carrying that home in your suitcase guys i don't know how i got all these books home genuinely have no idea uh i think i teleported some of them because i don't understand how i brought these all back but the pillars of the earth is a book i've been excited about for a while i was interested in and then claire was buying it who i was book shopping with and it just looked so beautiful with this edition and i looked it up and i was like okay well ariel buy that in canada looked it up canada didn't have this cover and i like this edition way more so here we are then i bought stasi land by anna thunder stories from behind the berlin wall again this is a book that i um picked up because of claire she pointed it out and she's like have you read that i've heard such great things about it and i hadn't and i started flipping through it and i was like right this sounds phenomenal the berlin wall is one of those situations where i'm like i know about it because it's a knowable thing everybody knows there was a berlin wall and it came a crumbling down but do i actually understand all of the ins and outs of it absolutely not so i thought it would be so cool to um read this i have read a couple of books that are like uber specific non-fiction books and they are so rewarding you learn you it's so fun to go down a rabbit hole with someone who is very knowledgeable about some some topic so this sounded phenomenal i also pick i am going to go through these a bit faster because i talked about them in her haul so go watch her video starling days by roland hisayo buchanan loved this cover was definitely sucked in by this cover but also um loved the the initial premise so you have this woman who is standing at the side of a bridge and she's clearly not well she's very contemplative it seems like she doesn't even know if she's considering jumping or not but some policemen go past her and they think she is so they get her off of the bridge and take her into custody and stuff and she's and i read the first few pages and i was like wow this is a really really cool place to start a book so i bought it and then i bought the last children of tokyo by yokotawa this sounds so much like uh children of men if you've seen that movie it's about an old character who's over 100 years old and knows that he's going to live for decades and decades more but then also this like i guess his grandchild um this young child character who is very sickly and it's this world where all of the children that are being born are are not surviving and so because of that it sounds like children of men but i don't know how different it is um this is a book i saw in the book shop in foils actually for years and every time i'd go in there i'd be like should i buy it this time this time i did okay then i went to portugal in portugal i went to two different bookshops i well i went into a lot of different book shops but i ended up buying books from two different bookshops uh was it two no it was three i can't be tamed okay so the first one was in porto i loved porto what a beautiful beautiful city we went to the really famous bookshop there and i'm guessing it's pronounced livraria leo but maybe that's incorrect beautiful bookshop what's really interesting is that it definitely reminded me of shakespearean company in paris in that it's a very old famous book shop and very like iconic but you have to pay to go into this book shop so clearly they know they're a tourist attraction people are taking so many photos in there it was like super hectic whereas in shakespeare and company you're not allowed to take photos you shouldn't take photos if you're taking photos it's because you're being cheeky and hopefully you're doing like one quick snap and then putting your phone away whereas this was like people were doing full-on photo shoots um i partook i got my snap but what's good about the ticket is that you can then um like they can scan your ticket and take that money off of any book so what we realized in there this it was genius um tourism planning is that they publish their own editions these are made at their own press and they're so beautiful and i bought two of them because i couldn't decide between this edition of the jungle book and this edition of dracula i loved them both so i bought them both and then and then uh the rest of these books i got in lisbon so i wanted to go to a bookshop and i looked it up and there was one that was open near where we were staying and i was like let's go here and as we're walking in there was like a guinness world record picture that was like this is the oldest book shop in the world and i was like pardon and i googled it and i looked it up later that night and it is it is the the oldest like still working functional bookshop in the world and i love that i accidentally went there and i bought four books in their english language section one thing that this shop did that reminded me of my beloved shakespearean company um is that they stamp your books and it says uh you know purchased at the oldest bookshop in the world i think that's so cute i love that um so i got like i said four books i got two poetry collections that i just thought were really cool one of them is of mutability by joe joe shapcot and the other is serious concerns by wendy cope i like wendy cope already as a poet and so when i saw her collection i was like oh this is really pretty edition sure and then i saw this one and i started flipping through it and i saw two poems that i really liked and i thought hey i'll give her a shot i don't know who that is but i'll give them a shot and then um i also picked up requiem a hallucination by antonio tabuchi this is a book set in lisbon i don't believe that the author is portuguese uh i i don't remember where he was from i think he was italian and but the character is the same like is a person visiting lisbon and i thought incredible that's me so excited to get a book that was set in portugal and then i got ken fallon's a random book a short history of the meaning of cathedrals so this is the same author that wrote pillars of the earth and i was like how fitting i bought part one i bought the fiction version in the uk and now i've bought the non-fiction book in portugal i love it this tiny little slim volume on the history of cathedrals specifically notre dame sign me up i love notre dame god i wish i was in paris i should never have returned from europe okay and then the last book i got i this was such a silly purchase but i got emotionally attached to it i don't know does this happen to anybody else where you like see a book in a shop and you're like that seems cool but then you keep walking but then there's something in the back of your minds like you're you're supposed to get that book like your your you and that book are emotionally attached now you need that copy of that book that's what happened here so i picked up this was in a used book shop kind of a cross from that other bookshop but like i said we were staying really close to there so i kept walking past the shop and and it's the sound of waves by yukio mishima so this is another translated japanese book um but this one's quite old i feel like this is from the 50s yeah wow 1956 and it sounds really lovely it's i was looking up reviews of it and somebody reviewed it and they were like imagine my surprise to read a book by yukio mishima and it has a happy ending and is basically a rom-com and i was like pardon that sounds fantastic um but it is set a very long time ago and it's about a young fisherman and how he falls in love with kind of the rich fancy girl of in town and they fall in love so they get married but they have to deal with prejudice and i thought that sounds great i'll get it wow okay i'm sorry that was a long video i got so many books but i'm so excited about all of them you know the comment that i get on my book calls a lot of the time probably from people who don't really know me but they all comment like she's not even gonna read these books i do read these books i do read them i just don't really review books on my youtube channel anymore so if you want to hear me reviewing these books once i've actually read them check out my podcast books unbound it's a great name it's a great pod i really hope that you enjoyed this video and enjoyed spending some time with me and all of these books what a tower what a tower i've collected um oh my gosh i have to do a little shout out you guys i have to do a little shout out to my merch or else i'm not being kind to myself or to you because you deserve to know so i have this sweater that i made that i absolutely am obsessed with and also people keep complimenting it two people in bookshops complimented it my vet the vet's assistant complimented it so people like this okay i love the color of it i got it in an extra large and i definitely should have gotten a large if i wanted it to be baggy or a medium if i wanted it to fit perfectly because they are true to size and i just didn't know because i was ordering a sample size so i have an extra large but it's definitely pretty giant on me um on the front it says i'm thinking about books i'm amazing and then on the sleeve you guys it has a little book it has a little embroidered book okay okay but also for my podcast we made these beanies and i drew these little books that are embroidered onto the beanie which is possibly the cutest beanie for winter that's ever existed um for my podcast we also have these mugs i'm just shouting all the merch i'm being shameless right now i'm doing a shameless plug for my beautiful merch that i love and i'm proud of also i have been wearing this non-stop and washing it excessively because i wanted to see how many watts like if it up if it stays good if it shrinks once you wash it a lot she has stayed so strong the color has stayed it hasn't shrunk it's still soft it's amazing quality and made um ethically so i'm really proud of it anyways this hat is also great i'm proud of all my merch so i'm gonna shout it out this mug says all books are winners on it and then it has a bunch of the logos and some confetti from uh our favorite book prizes so i thought that was really cute but then the final thing i have to shout out and i i awkwardly pinned them to the back of this hat but that's life um my pins you guys these enamel pins are possibly the cutest thing that's ever existed these are based on the drawings from my logo for my house renovation videos so if you want to support my house renovation or just the channel please check out my merch it's linked down below there it is i did it and finally again thank you to book of the month for sponsoring this video they are linked down below if you want to check them out i will see you guys all in my next video bye

Channel: Ariel Bissett

Views: 71,789

Keywords: arielbissett, ariel, bissett, books, book, book review, booktube, ariel bissett

Id: wplhHH87bm0

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021