July Reading Wrap Up | 2021

hello everyone how is everyone's day how are you doing how was your reading month let me know welcome back to my channel my name is jalen and today i have my july wrap-up in which i read nine books really good reading month had many heavy hitters this month only one book that i was kind of like met on as always before we get into it i will share what i'm drinking today i'll go grab a drink oh i meant to open a different drink but open this one so i have a crispy what the beer is called crispy let me get into frame here see this beer is called crispy it's a blonde lager from the shop beer company i believe they're based in tempe arizona but they make really really good beer one of my favorite beers ever is called church music it's an ipa which i'm sure i've had on here light five percent i believe 5.5 blonde lager we love it not too heavy oh so good so so good let's get into what i read what did i read so starting from the start course of the month i read i read the hatred of poetry by ben lerner so this is a book that i wanted to read because i did a recent video about how i wanted to get more engaged in my book reviewing really think about how i absorb fiction what i like what i don't like and try to get more um critical a little bit more critical in terms of like my reviewing instead of just saying like yeah the writing was good and like i enjoyed it i want to you know give you some really analyze what i'm thinking in terms of while i'm reading like what do i want to say about a book what is there to mine what is there to take away from it and give to you all and i want to have it also be like a really good record of my reading throughout the years i don't foresee myself stopping booktubing and you know five years from now i'd like to go back and look at these videos and be like wow to kind of have an archive of the books that i read and really be able to remember it through good reviews and so um a lot of you guys are super nice in the comments and saying you like my reviews already which i totally appreciate so much um but yeah it's just kind of like a fun experiment so this is one book that i wanted to read just because it's a really short essay in which ben lerner looks at the general hatred of poetry that he's seen it's like in the general discourse of people saying they don't like poetry or they think it's pretentious or doesn't really do what it should be doing in terms of being the most kind of abstract format in terms of trying to give you a format that's really looking at humanity and as a vehicle to really do whatever you want to with it you can splice it you can do anything you really want in poetry there are traditional rules and ways of looking at poetry i don't really know them too much myself but he looks at poetry as considered very bad and also poetry that's considered very good and considers what the potential feelings of it are within the framework of poetry being this kind of ultimate form of dissecting these themes that he's analyzing in terms of the levels at which people expect poetry to be at at all times and looking at all these different kind of poems and his own analysis of his own work and really considering what the hatred of poetry stems from and how a poet or a reader of poetry can really think about poetry in a more critical way i found and i just really liked it i really liked that he took the basis of considering the hatred of poetry as the start of his thesis basically saving poetry from this kind of critical analysis and the ways that he defends it very well in this essay um while also taking a stab at some poems that he does not think are great which is really intriguing to read so yeah i really liked it slim little essay it gets a little bit dense at times um i don't really read that much poetry so it was something that i was like i wanted to read it because i found myself being like i don't understand this poem or like poetry seems a little bit like fluffy or pretentious or just like i don't get it sometimes and this book was a really interesting way of kind of shifting my perspective on poetry and making me kind of more open to poetry going forward and really taking my time with it more than i have in the past so yeah that was a good first book to read the next book i read is a short story collection called objects of desire by claire sistanovich this book came out i believe in june and i was so excited for this book i had seen some early praise from some writers that i love i will say that i do think these stories are very well written and the writing is so clear there's so many lines in here that i was just like yes like getting at the essence of certain themes mostly rooted in desire and longing what claire stanovich is really good at doing is she's able to examine the mundane in such a beautiful way trying to think of a concrete example from a story but like for example she could talk about the way leaves are falling from a tree and just make it seem so beautiful however i do think that something that's interesting about the story collection is all of them kind of blend together in my mind for the most part there are a couple stories that i remember like the specific details in particular one story is called by design which stands out in my mind for some reason i think because the plot has a little bit more of like a surprise in it but i will say that a lot of these stories kind of feel like they're put in a blender and like all these ideas about desire logging putting them in a blender and just kind of like throwing things on the wall and seeing what sticks in terms of a lot of these beautiful sentences or paragraphs kind of feel like they're not rooted to anything they just feel like they're there and i don't know if it's because the stories have a lack of stakes they're really just mundane stories looking at a character going through some kind of sort of relationship to desire in some certain way typically relationships also personal desire and growth as an individual but i feel like these stories needed a little bit more stakes or they needed a little bit more something but i do think that that's asking these stories to be something that they're really not i don't think that was the the goal of the story collection it was more so looking at humanity and desire and just looking at the simplicity of that in terms of how it can affect a character and just looking at the mundane aspects of their lives and kind of leaving them where they are taking a you know brief glimpse at their lives and then just departing but i will say that caused the story collection and not really stick out in my mind i don't really remember any of the stories like i said and so yeah while the writing was beautiful i do think there is some growth to be had in terms of narrative here that i think was definitely missing but i don't regret my time with the story collection but i will say there's a lot of promise here i do think it is worth your time still it's really interesting i want people to read this book to discuss it with because i want to see if people can kind of help me and parse through what i'm trying to say about these stories lacking something um some sort of urgency some something to make it land in the reader's mind but i don't know if that's like something that i shouldn't be asking of a story if a story writer does not want to have like a surprising story which is a typical thing in the short story form like that's fine as well but i've read stories that are kind of more mundane that felt more i don't know memorable these just weren't memorable and yeah i don't know that's my criticism of that one but i will say it is promising i will read whatever claire sandwich comes out with next but yeah i'm a little hesitant on that front i will say okay next up i read intimacies by katie kitamura loved this book so good this book is very similar in tone and style to a separation i love that book earlier this year i thought it was so good some of the best writing i've ever read on marriage grieving divorce isolation and loneliness and just like wandering she has so many good passages in that book about all those themes that oh i just remember reading that book and being like damn she's a writer and this book has very similar stuff going on but a different plot for sure we follow a woman who has recently she's unnamed she has recently lost her father and she has moved to the hague in the netherlands and she is an interpreter so she's escaping new york and she's working at the international court and what this novel basically entails is you look at this woman's interpersonal relationships outside of the court but then you see how that merges with a case that she gets involved with interpreting for a former president who's been accused of war crimes and so you see the intimacy that she feels with another man who is still married to a woman but they're separated and her longing for him and then something happens in that relationship that makes it a little bit more dicey and fraught and then you also see her work in the international court and the interpretation that she has to complete in which she gets very close and intimate with the former president who has been accused of horrendous war crimes in the very tense and intimate work that she has to do interpreting for the court and there are certain instances in which she has to interpret for a victim giving her statement and she has to basically put herself in the place of this person and the intense work that she has to do to do that in the way that it affects her and then ultimately the way that she reflects upon her interpersonal relationships and how she navigates all those things and so this book also has so many brilliant passages about intimacy about longing and also interestingly about the gaps and distances that are inherent in intimacy what kind of falls through the cracks and how that is devastating for a person both in you know very literal sense in terms of interpretation but also in the midst of relationships and how fraud those can become due to miscommunication and distance really beautiful stuff here about all these topics and this book is so tense at times there are certain descriptions in which the narrator she's working and you see the ways in which for example the former president watches her as she is interpreting and you see you have a sense of evil in terms of him kind of mining into her while she's doing it and this very like isolated relationship that she has with him and how interpretation puts her in this very at times like icky feeling spot but also necessary work that she has to do and how she doesn't really have anyone to well she has people that work there that she's able to explain that to as well but but you see the ways that this tension and closeness prise away at her mind and i thought it was so well done i don't usually do this in my reviews but i have to read two passages from this book so feel free to skip if you're not interested in me reading there's this one passage in which she describes the way that the former president finds her presence soothing to him and why their intimacy feels so tense and so the passage is this is why he found my presence soothing not because he required my interpretation not even because i was an amusing distraction but because he wished for someone to be present during those long hours someone who would not insist on examining the actions of his past from which there could be no longer any escape and i realized that for him i was pure instrument someone without will or judgment a consciousness for his own into which he could escape the only company he could now bear that was the reason why he had requested my presence that was the reason i was there i wanted to get up and leave the room to explain that there had been some mistake i saw myself doing it but that was only in my head that was not what actually happened what actually took place was that i remained in my seat that i interpreted for the former president that i remained there in that room with those men until they no longer wanted me like you can expect that on every single page of this book but also there's this other very it's kind of long but it's so good just bear with me and just listen to it it's so good it's talking about another instance of intimacy through looking at painting versus photography so i think if you're interested in art as well it's not really too much in this book but there's this one chapter it's chapter 10 from my notes that just blew me away kitty kitamura like her prose is just some of my favorite honestly i cannot wait to read more of her work she's a master but here it is so unlike the paintings in jana's exhibition the canvases in this room primarily featured figures men and women and children the artifice of their poses was evident but that did not detract from the intimacy of the paintings in fact it was the very act of posing the relationship that act implied that created the sense of uncanny familiarity in some cases they were clearly posing for the painter they gazed into what i thought of as the lens or camera eye although of course the concept was an anachronism they would have been gazing not into an apparatus but directly at the painter himself the idea was almost impossibly personal and i realized the notion of such a sustained human gaze was far outside the realm of contemporary experience for that reason the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing i thought that was why as i stood before a painting of a young girl in half light there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze it was not the contradiction of a single instant but rather it was as if the painter caught her in two separate states of emotion two different moods and managed to contain them within the single image it would have been a multitude of such instance captured in the canvas between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose neck and upper body stiff from the final sitting that layering in effect a kind of temporal blurring or simultaneity was perhaps finally with distinguished painting from photography i wonder if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter to lack the mysterious depth of these works because so many painters now worked from photographs so just these like really incisive critical self-reflective analytical passages just like knocks me off my feet yeah you can expect more of that in this book it is so good i adored it i am officially a member of the katie kamara hive for sure okay next up i finally finished uzumaki by junji ito this is a horror manga so like something i've never read before my first manga ever like this is totally outside of my normal uh reading but i actually really liked it it was really fun i don't have too much to say about it it was kind of just like mindless fun but it follows this town that becomes obsessed with spirals so there's like this entity that is using spirals to cause this town to fall into chaos and you see in every single chapter there's basically a different use of spirals in the human body or in nature and the ways that that plays out and so it's very creative it's basically jude ito saying let me think of spirals where are they in life and let me make it horrific and disgusting and just horrifying and so this is a lot of body horror it's full of images of course it's manga but yeah it felt just more like a short story collection to me it kind of all grows into the final climax which is wild but yeah it's just fun if you want some like kind of light spooky horror gross body horror stuff check it out um again not my normal thing but it was really fun i really liked it i want to check out more of his stuff um i think it'd be good kind of for a break between books or something like just picking up some manga that's kind of what i did with this one i just picked it up when i wasn't in the mood to read uh fiction so yeah i really liked it i kind of wish there was more meat to it but that's not really what it was doing i always looking for more meat on things and i don't know if it necessarily needs to be there but i don't know so yeah that was good and then next i read crossroads by jonathan franzen i will keep it brief because i did a separate video review of that book which i rarely ever do so i can tell you something i absolutely loved this book to death i already want to reread it it was so good um i had to give my copy back to my friend who let me borrow it but the publisher is sending me a copy so i'm very excited to have one for my shelves to keep it brief we follow this family that is truly at a crossroads so we have the father figure he is a pastor at a local church and he's married to this woman named marian and their marriage is close to ending i would say um he is thinking about cheating on her and she is also checked out in a way and then you see their kids and they're all involved in this social program that is at their local church called crossroads so you get to look at all of these characters and the ways that their interpersonal intentions play out on one day so it's december 23rd 1971 so mostly this book takes place on christmas eve eve but we also get a ton of flashbacks and learn more about these characters and their desires their self-reflections what they want out of life and how trying to appease family can often cause self-destruction and harm to oneself despite wanting to please others within a family and the ways that we have to choose ourselves over others in order to be better for a family so much is going on here i can't even like get into it too much because i'll just talk forever go watch my video review if you really want to read it but i will say this is one of my favorite books of the year so far i adored it i cannot always read more friends in i know he's a controversial author but his fiction slaps um in my opinion so far so yeah i loved it i can't wait to read the corrections now because i guess that's like his magnum opus and some early reviews i've seen i've said that that's still better than crossroads so i'm very eager to see just how good it is but so next i read a poetry collection called stereotype by jonah mixon webster and this is another book that i loved it was so good so experimental again i don't really read poetry too much but this one is like if this isn't experimental i don't know what it is he uses the page to his benefit the floppy paperback copy of it is quite big because he's playing with space on the page which i really like these poems are so so powerful looking at black and queer identity a big portion of this book is also dedicated to the water crisis in flint michigan and that actually gets more essayistic but he also blends some poetry into that as well basically looking at black identity in every single poem and he does it in such an interesting and unique way that i've never seen done before in any format and it just blew my head off i think it's so good it's so so powerful i will say i'm saying it's also powerful because i saw him perform some of these poems because he had an event with ben lerner who i previously mentioned and he performed these and the pure raw emotion with which he performs these poems it's just like it's just out of this world i had read a few poems and then i watched the interview and he read some of the poems that i had already read on in print and just seeing it performed was a completely different experience so my friend matthew sharapova he said definitely check out the audiobook if you can i haven't listened to the audiobook yet but now i really want to just to hear more of his performances of this book it's so good if you're a poetry fan or not definitely check it out it's so worth your time so good beautiful beautiful heartbreaking just powerful poetry that i will never forget it's so good next up i read virtue by hermione hobie this is a really really good book kind of a weird one very unique book that's touching on a lot of topics that i've read a lot about this year and did it in a different way that i thought was really interesting and i actually wrote a a book review of this book i don't know why i was like in the mood to write a review after i finish this one but so that's another good sign i really liked it i actually took some time to write two big paragraphs about it but this book is definitely an exploration of performative activism and morality and finding oneself in your early 20s in the trump years basically to put it very concisely so in this book we follow this young man named luca he is just turning 23 at the start of the novel he gets an internship at this very like prestigious literary magazine in new york and you see him basically leaving his colorado upbringing he then went to college at oxford and then comes back to the states and you see him trying to discover himself in the midst of the inauguration of donald trump and starting at this internship and he meets this older couple that i believe are in their 40s early 50s and they are both artists and so you see him kind of fall in lust for them and they invite him to stay at their summer house with their kids and you see him spend the summer with this couple and he leaves his friends that are co-interns at the magazine and he spends the summer there and so i will say some of this felt very tonally similar to me kind of like call me by your name in terms of a younger guy lusting for someone older or to a couple that is older than him and you know summer vibes at the summer house and just longing for them having the unrequited love feel similar to that but it also is very rooted in art and so i also got like kind of second place vibes in which we have a couple that invite someone to stay with them and looking at art and its meaning and morality very similar there too but then it also was very preoccupied with the trump years and thinking about social media and facades and so it also felt very similar to me to fake accounts by lauren euler in certain instances but this book is interestingly told because it's told from the perspective of luca and he's in his 30s and he's now married he has kids and he's thinking back to the trump years in his early 20s and so you learn more about so it's set in the future basically is what i'm saying and you get his narrative in terms of it being in hindsight thinking back on the choices that he made and the nostalgia that he feels for that time and him thinking about whether he's done the right thing in his life there is some definite tension that comes in in this book that i'll try to not spoil it all but something occurs while he's at the summer house that really really messes him up and until he thinks about the choices that he's made whether and how to be a virtuous person and how to balance virtuosity with happiness in an era that feels so fraught with tension in so many different ways and so this book is really really cool i really liked it it's definitely something different in this kind of field of contemporary novels looking at the trumpeters basically it's very explicitly addressing trump and our current political times which was really um interesting to read but it's done in this really controlled and nuanced way that i really like so this is a really good book definitely give it a shot that sounds good to you i really love the pros here as well it's just she has a really good almost poetic lyrical sense of writing often but since she also mixes it in with like some very cutting analytical prose as well it's kind of a nice balance there that i really like so yeah this is a good one as well and then finally i have another story collection called how to pronounce knife damn i meant to look up how to pronounce her name i'm not sure but i'll include it here um i don't want to watch it this story collection is a new favorite of mine it is pure excellence it is a near perfect collection of my mind reading every story i would finish the story and i'd be like yeah that's how you write a story like this is short story telling this is perfection like it's so good every story is actually short and so basically these stories are looking at laotian immigrants and refugees in their experiences in being othered often and trying to fit in in a new culture and you see the ways that this is very intense in basically all these stories we find characters that are just trying to discover themselves in a society that is often trying to push against them just being and so often these stories are very heartbreaking and searing and just so moving and in their specificity in looking at the minutia of these characters lies but there's so much at stake in these stories that just really impressed me in terms of how much she was able to pack into every single story here with such brevity the pros it's such an easy story collection to read not only is it brief but it's every single sentence is very like visceral and cutting and sharp and usually quite short and so these stories are so easy to digest on a prose level that by the end of it you're just kind of left breathless by how like much you just consumed so quickly how she's able to do this in such an effortless way it just was beyond impressive going forward if anyone asked me for a short story collection to check out whether they're new to the forum if they don't like it really or they just want a new collection i will be recommending this one it is so perfect every single story was just like chef's kiss incredible please read it if you haven't already it is so good i'm a little late to the party on this one but i read it for our book hottie book club that we're doing and we're going to talk about it at some point i think we haven't yet but it was so good can't wait to talk about it with them i almost forgot so finally i'm finishing up right now rachel kushner's the hard crowd this is an essay collection that i've been working on for a while i think i have like 30 pages left i'm going to finish tonight so i'll just give my review here but i think these essays are really good i had a weird time with this book just because of like my mental state i think while reading it i was very eager to read this collection because i knew it had some literary criticism going on but also some personal essays that are more like memoiristic and i do think i wasn't really in the right like frame of mind to read this essay collection it's very as dense with people artists film just individuals that i'm completely unfamiliar with and so it's a lot of rachel kushner explaining her appreciation for various art or people or stories that she knows about and just the ways that that impacts her and kind of formed her identity over her life and so i loved getting into her mind and she's such a brilliant writer that's very clear i think her writing is so sharp and she's such you can tell she's big brained as hell she has so much to say and she has so much that she thinks about that's very clear through this collection but i will say at times it felt a little bit hard to get into it's a little bit dense in many parts where you have to really be in the mood to read about certain things in this collection for example like she dives completely into dennis johnson who's a writer that i don't know about i think if you're unfamiliar with the topic there's a little bit of distance that's created here it's kind of inaccessible at times in my opinion it's hard to critique for me to give though because it is accessible because i still got something out of these essays but there's some kind of like there's something with these essays that just didn't completely land for me sometimes some of these essays are just like amazing i loved a lot of them but some of them were just a little bit they failed to keep me engaged throughout i would often find myself putting them down or just kind of being like i'll come back to this or like so it wasn't a completely compelling undoubtable experience for me which it's hard to do when you're collecting essays throughout the last 20 years reflecting on a ton of different subjects but so i think she had a tough feat ahead of her in doing that and maybe just like kind of my mind state i wanted some more fiction at the time and i was you know forcing myself to read an essay collection which i probably shouldn't have done but yeah overall i think it's a good essay collection i think it will be up to the individual person to determine whether they're going to fully connect with these essays at times but i was introduced to some new authors that i really want to check out such as margaritas mccarthy dennis johnson i want to read clarissa specter now and yeah so these are really good essays i just wasn't in the right place or time for them i think i think this would be a good collection to come back to in like 10 years and see if i get more out of them this is a book that's really reflective of her personal life over a long period of time and so me as a 25 year old i wonder if i would get more out of it when i've had more experiences myself and kind of have a more reflective nature about me in terms of like my past i guess i don't really have much history to me at this point in my life but yeah it was good i would recommend it so far but but i wasn't completely floored by it so so that about does it for my july wrap-up it was a really good month i'm really excited for the books i'm going to read in august i have some that i'm like pretty sure i'm gonna read you know me i'm a mood reader so i don't really know but yeah yeah until next time cheers

Channel: The Bar and the Bookcase

Views: 1,066

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: books, booktube, literary fiction

Id: h-4TJm9sSNM

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021