my favorite books of all time 📚

well hello I'm Lexi welcome to my first ever video on this channel I have a tick tock under the name newlynova if that's news to you now you know and over there I normally do vlogs and nonsense kind of talking content and I just want a place where I can Ramble On for a little bit longer and still have it be cute so here I am thanks for being here I found a pretty good place to start on booktube would be to talk about some of my current all-time favorite books these are my feral Five Star reads okay all of these in their own ways shot me directly into the stratosphere never to be seen again they're my favorites they're important to me okay some disclaimers something that you will learn immediately in this list is that I am still kind of a toddler when it comes to getting back into reading like I am a little baby in a big world and there are just so many colors around me all the time and I don't know what to do with them I was a classic case of like Percy Jackson and joyer turns burnt out gifted kid never to read another book or turn another page ever again following A Tale of Two Cities my freshman year of high school if you're here you probably know how it is anyways I've since reformed but I've only been reading for fun again for about the past two years and there's really only so much that you can get through in that time especially if like me you love drama because with a handful of exceptions normally all of the books that I read are books that people are talking about in some capacity so I don't claim to be some kind of like wizard when it comes to recommending these little nuggets of gold that you've never heard of before you're probably not going to get that from me what I can provide you is good takes on which popular books are hits and which are skips with that I am a big mood reader like I feel like people say that sometimes when what they mean is that they're bouncing between different romance tropes and throwing in a little fancy novel in there sometimes or like a thriller I read like every genre except for middle grade and children's books and not a ton of like really dense informational non-fiction and also not a ton of Classics so even for all of those like sometimes I don't know it like depends on the Vibes you know basically I have the attention span of like a little baby cricket and the only way for me to remember any of the books that I read is to like Embrace chaos and make sure I'm sandwiching them between books that are as different as you can possibly imagine from what I've just read so that way they all occupy like distinctive spaces in my memory and that just means I read broadly much more often than I read deeply like I don't consider myself to be even close to an expert on any genre this is very much for like the Jack of all trades girlies out there and it's going to be a little bit all over the place as a result but that's okay that's okay anyways I say all of that so I don't get like moms by people who think I have bad taste but also let's be honest I have like full faith in myself especially for people who have similar lore to me so if you want to be audible here are some books that'll get you there these are not in order except for the last one which is the best one so let's go my dark Vanessa the one thing about me is that I just love to suffer crying if you can make my cold dead hard feelings then I probably love the book everything basically that I'm talking about today is going to have trigger warnings so I'm just warning you once right here on mass that if you are worried about anything you should look it up I'm not responsible for the emotional pain that you'll be put through if you don't okay so this book told me now I love love stories that explore healing and Trauma and the non-linear process that is reconnecting to yourself after your life has changed forever and that's what this is so this is a book that's told in two parts past and present both parts follow Vanessa at different points in her life heart a tells the story of her High School experience as she is groomed into a relationship with her much older high school English teacher and Part B tells the story of her recovery in therapy as an adult woman many many years later who is grappling with her abuser's death and the overall impact that he had on the trajectory of her life Vanessa realizes as an adult that she's framed her abuse her entire life as some kind of like fairy tale romance in an effort to preserve some of the agency that was taken away from her by her abuser to do anything other than that would have been an act of self-destruction for her but ultimately doing that has Shackled her so much to her trauma that she's completely unable to move faster this is a book that definitely could have come across as exploitative or if it's not exploitative maybe preachy or overwritten in the name of presenting kind of the opposite message but somehow it's like not either of those things I just cannot be highly enough of the feeling that is captured in this book of how difficult it is to walk through this world when you're forced to distort the truth of your own history in order to like survive day to day I don't know what else I need to tell you it is just such a moving story we're starting out strong seven days in June so I'm something of a gremlin when it comes to romance books even with stories that are like absurdly hyped and cute there is always a 50 chance that I'm just not going to get it like I'll read them and it'll be kind of fun and then they're over and I never think about them ever again I'm not out here like frothing at the mouth like I'm promised okay and I feel like part of that is a lot of authors will skin bag on character in the name of fleshing out like the dynamic between characters and that just never works for me like I need to like both people as individuals in order to like their relationship and to like the fact that they've fallen in love if I don't I'll be bored and I'm not gonna believe that they should be together and that's the cool tattoos even with that said I read like a whole heap of romance novels and I like a lot of them and I love some of them and 90 of the time I go on to never think a single thought about any of them ever again that is not true with this book I don't know what Tia put in between these pages but dude it's good stuff so this book follows Shane and Eva they are both authors Shane writes sad boy prize-winning literary fiction and Eva writes is kind of called classic fantasy erotica series and when they were in high school they had this one tumultuous life-changing week together where they fell in love and did a bunch of things and then for reasons that are obviously explored in the book they end up never talking again but give this this ever since that week they have been writing to each other through the characters in their books and in the modern day Tia is a single mom with this like really cool very sleigh daughter and she ends up running into Shane unexpectedly and it dredges up all of these emotions from the time that they were together when they were much younger and everything changes for both of them and it's so much better than you could possibly imagine this is a second chance romance which is not my usual Trope but when I say that she is cooked to Perfection I am so serious okay I found this book to be like legitimately laugh out loud funny like that never happens normally for me rom-com humor is either like cringe or it has me kind of blowing air out of my nose in appreciation for whatever joke that the author was trying to make I fully laughed like more than a few times reading this book but more than that I thought that the drama here is like immaculate it is heavier than your average romance novel for sure like there is a lot that both of these characters have been through in their past and are still going through and dealing with the consequences of to this day and I know it's just it's so well done if you have someone in your life that is a romance doubter this is the one that you should have them read to make them develop an appreciation of what this genre can do the office of historical corrections I always recommend the short story collection completely on a whim by a random clerk at a bookstore in Savannah when I was there visiting and to date is the best recommendation I've ever received from a stranger in the wild so this is me trying to be the stranger that gives you that same gift if you're a fan of short stories already this is definitely for you but even if you're not this was one of my first ever short story Collections and I loved it so much that I ended up buying tabs for the first time and like annotating this which really is not something I do very often for books but there were just like so many quotes that I loved in here I genuinely could not help myself this collection has six short stories and one Novella and it follows mostly black and multiracial characters as they experience like a lot of different emotions like grief love trauma a bunch of stuff I mean it's hard to describe a collection of like completely disparate stories in a way that captures all of them so I'm just gonna give you like a few examples okay one of the stories follows a white girl who wears a Confederate flag bikini in a photo that ends up going super viral on the wrong side of the internet and she ends up getting centered by her campus but the way that the story is written also completely humanizes her even and especially when she's being like absurdly awful and ignorant it's just it's really good there's another one where a woman who is trying to reinvent herself and move across the country ends up being the sole caretaker of this like abandoned little boy who's left on a bus with just her basically as a potential guardian and she builds this like really strong bond with him but is also still involved in some crime from her past and the story forces her to reckon with her identity her future and also whether or not to return this kid to a family who she believes clearly is not looking out for his best interests even if it might be the right thing to do I cried I was not well reading that one and then the titular Novella follows a woman who works at the office of historical Corrections which is kind of like a government fact-checking agency she's like the only black woman on staff and she's always sent out as a result by her agency to anything that might be like racially sensitive and she ends up being sent to investigate the mystery and the truth behind this sign in this tiny place in Wisconsin in a town where this black man who was thought to have been killed by this mob many many years ago might not have actually died and the novella is like such an interesting investigation of Truth and like race politics and white supremacy and also a nose dive into really complicated female friendships and it's wonderful and those are probably my favorites in this collection but like they're all good there are no doubts in my opinion Danielle the author just has such like a beautiful command of language but also writes in a way that's very approachable and never alienates your readers which to me is a balance of skills that I have like the utmost respect for and I don't know okay read it do just trust me it's so good it's wonderful I loved it Legend's born I love how much y a has changed since when I was reading as a teenager I feel like there's so much more trust now that authors have in their audiences to be able to handle like legitimately mature themes that ultimately make the entire genre much more true to the real world and also valuable for what I think should be a primary goal of reading fiction which is just to develop a greater sense of empathy with the world around you anyways with that said a lot of way also makes me feel old sometimes like there are just absolutely things I read where I'm just like okay that's cringe that's too far I am no longer at all in the target audience for this and I guess that's just the price you pay when you read why a as a 22 year old woman but there are a couple of series that I really believe are just standout pieces of media regardless of their target audience and for me my favorite among those is the Legend born series I don't know what to say that has not already been said like a million times but I'm going to try to convince you if you're still somehow a hold up on this one okay so this series follows Brie who is a 16 year old currently going to UNC on kind of like an early college high school program and she's still very much in the throes of grief over the recent passing of her mom who died pretty close to when she moved into UNC and her first weekend campus she's kind of in like the wrong place at the wrong time when she finds herself in the middle of a monster attack and it turns out that there is like this whole Warrior society that is composed of the direct descendants of King Arthur Merlin and the round table which is already really cool but Bree also realizes when she meets them that one of these Merlin wizard people was directly involved in the death of her mom and she ends up kind of like undercover investigating them while also dealing with her grief and building these really strong authentic bonds with the people who are around her this is such a testament to the potential that Y.A has as a genre like the momentum that the plot has in this book and say it is interesting it's serious it's often dark and it's like legitimately shocking and all of the ways that the plot kind of twists and turns around here also the representation in the series is like insane on all levels but somehow none of the characters feel tokenized at all which is not common and I'm still looking for a series that's going to make me feel like this again like my apologies to you I guess that this is not completed yet but you know that means you get to be a part of the moment okay dude it is so good know my name this is as close as I think I will ever get to saying that a book should be required reading for all human citizens of this planet it's a memoir by Chanel Miller who was the Survivor in the big Stanford assault case a few years ago now she wrote this incredibly poignant viral Victim Impact statement for that trial and ultimately she ended up kind of expanding that and telling a much more complete story in a full book about not only how the assault changed the trajectory of her life but more than that how she was constantly re-traumatized by a justice system that was operating in a way that really did not care about whether or not she would actually be okay and seemingly much more empathy for the defendant who ended up getting charged with like the most pathetic sentence in the history of the world and I know I really just wish I could download this book into the minds of every man and also the complicit women around me all the time even after me too and a lot of conversations about how we talk about violence against women I am still constantly disgusted about the ways that gender violence is discussed around me and by the media no it's a cool take perhaps the coldest ever take I can't imagine that anybody watching this video actually disagrees with me but I am so dismayed all the time by how little consequences there are for perpetrators of these crimes it's something that's personal to me and that I look for in fiction and non-fiction and I just think that this Memoir is the best on the market when it comes to capturing that feeling of complete shattering followed by the terrifying reality that now you have to pick up the pieces you have to find a way to still have hope in a world that broke like glass around you when you needed it to work the most you'll probably cry reading this I know I did but you should read this the people that you love should read this the people that you hate should read this even though they probably won't like it's just one of those kinds of books for me Betty this is the newest addition to this list I read this this summer and I was kind of a historical fiction skeptic before I picked this up I really enjoy the only other family Saga that I've read in my life homegoing which I picked up last year other than that I don't often reach for books that take place in the past it's just not normally something that like piques my interest but I am so so glad that I decided to give this one a go because oh my God it is so good I've said it before but this is my little life like this is a book that is heavy so this follows a girl named Betty who is one of eight siblings growing up in a biracial Cherokee home the era is like the 1950s and 60s and most of this book is just all of the sad things that happen inside of this family they face a ton of violence both from outside like directed towards them but also between members of the family towards each other like the call comes from inside the house more often than not but what I think is truly exceptional about this book is that despite how sad the entire story is like basically from page one to page 500 or whatever like it is not a happy story a lot of tragedies happen the tone of the book stays so jubilant and hopeful and kind of revelatory of especially the impacts that the dad in this family had on the lives of all of his kids it is abundantly clear that everybody in the family really looks at to him as the symbol of compassion and wisdom even despite all of the violence that's happening in their lives and it ends up just being this beautifully written heartbreaking story that tells the truth in a way that I think is difficult to do without it feeling exploitative but my favorite thing about this book is that the author wrote it about her mom like it's a semi-biographical look at her mom's actual life and it's filled with so much love for this girl who endured and came out of this and grew up into this like resplendent beautiful woman that ends up the mom of this author you know like that's so special and it gives the story a realism that underscores all of the things I've already said about it feeling true and hopeful even at its lowest points and I love this and it's my favorite book of the year so far and I want to read all of the family sagas that have ever been written now and I cried like a little baby in a public airport reading this book and honestly there's basically nothing more that I can ask for than that because that's criminal Behavior you only get that out of me when you're writing something that's really awesome tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow what is there to say about this book oh it's so good okay like however Wonder careful you think this is Cuba do it again you're almost there keep it again is that enough for you like do I have to keep explaining myself I am rabid for this so this is a story about Sam and Sadie they meet when they're kids in a hospital kind of 80s 90s Vibes Sadie's there visiting her sister who's battling cancer and Sam is getting a ton of surgeries on his foot after he was in a car crash that also killed his mom and the two of them ended up bonding over a shared love for like classic video games only to end up falling out of touch for many years fast forward and they end up meeting again in college and they recognize they make up and they end up deciding to design a video game of their own and the rest of this book follows like a massive chunk of the rest of their lives as they continue making video games together kind of experiencing success and failure and falling in and out of each other's lives the two of them are described by the book as often in love and never lovers and one of the things that I like best about the story is it is absolutely a deconstruction of whatever presupposition you have about what the relationship will be based on the description that I just gave you and it's also like so much better than I could possibly capture through just talking about it with you right now dude just trust me at its core what this book is is a meditation on the creative experience and the intimacy of like burying your soul and being creative with somebody else to make something together it's about the poignancy of friendship it's about how complicated your relationships can be with the people that you love most in the world and the reality that those relationships will evolve and change and come and go throughout the lifespan and that is all against the backdrop of like a really interesting story about some nerds making some video games together which as someone who grew up playing a lot of video games with my brother as a kid carried a seriously large amount to nostalgic value for me and okay not to like gatekeep real quick but I read this book the month that came out okay before it had gotten any of the awards or a claim that eventually would come for it I sat her down and I finish it and I cried and I knew for a fact that I was experiencing something for the first time that would matter to me for the rest of my life I have never felt that way before about a book to that extent it was like a seriously loaded experience I don't know I just I love this so much I have forced everyone in my life who cares about me to read this book this includes my dad who basically only reads like David Baldacci political Thrillers I don't know I've just never been touched like this by a book before or since I turned to her in good times and in bad like I actually get inspiration from like flipping through my little annotated copy and like finding a quote that will make me feel better about whatever I'm experiencing I have marks living in my head at all times constantly giving me feedback on my words and ideas Sam and Sadie are both kind of unlikable characters like they make bad decisions they don't communicate very well they have real substantial flaws and to me that is why they feel like such real substantial people it was so easy for me to just emotionally invest myself in this book and the payoff was just Sublime I liked everything about it even the things with the structure that some people critique I thought enhanced the story I don't know there's like nothing like it and that's that those are my favorite books they might change in the future I'm not a betrothed woman okay please engage like comment subscribe you know the drill I would like to keep doing this I don't have anything more to say bye

Channel: lexi aka newlynova

Views: 70,832

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Id: XbJy7ML5RPA

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023