My Favourite Books of 2020

hey pals i'm here today to talk about my favorite reads of 2020. i'm a bit behind with this video it should have come out a few weeks ago but i've just been a bit unorganized this month with getting videos together so i hope you are okay with the delay and hopefully i'll get you know back into gear and upload a couple of times every week that is the plan so i think i have 16 books to talk about for the first time in eight years where i've been doing the channel i've actually ranked these books i've done a favorite books video every year and i've never attempted to rank them and i've seen more and more people do it and every time i saw someone do it i was like there's no way i can ever do that absolutely no way i mean yesterday i sat down and wrote down these books and i thought i probably could you know for some of these and i will admit there's a there's an area where i've like ranked them where it's pretty grey like how i would feel differently on another day would probably switch some of those books around but the top three are definitely right and i feel like good about where they are placed and you know i just wanted to talk about these books anyway and hope that you pick them up you know regardless of where they are in the list now i'm super stingy with my five star ratings so i read 114 books last year i think i dnf'd around 35 and i only gave seven five stars to me a five star read is you know a book that's made it to my look new favorites a four and a half star read is super super super strong there might be one tiny thing that niggled me or it just didn't feel as powerful or impactful as the books i got five stars but i still would 100 reread them and i'm keeping all these books some of them i audio booked or borrowed from the library so i want to get my own copies so i can reread them in the future just beside no i'm in a really chatty mood today by the way my ultimate goal is to be able to regularly reread my favorite books when i was a child and a teenager i reread so much i didn't have a single book that was a favorite that i hadn't read more than 10 times like i was a massive rereader and i loved it and having so many books i find means that you have this guilt about rereading and so you don't reread and i've started rereading more in the last couple of years and really loved it and so as part of me wanting to reduce my physical tbr the ultimate aim is to be able to like in 2022 to reread my favorite books from 2020 so always reread my favorite books from two years previous so i can revisit them and you know and just re-enjoy those experiences that is the ultimate aim so the first book i want to mention number 16. it's the only book on this list that i gave four stars and not four and a half or five but i decided to include it because i read it in january it stuck with me all year it felt really important to me and i referenced it a lot throughout the year and recommended it to a lot of people and that is what my mother and i don't talk about 15 writers break the silence edited by michelle phil gate so this is an essay collection that has 15 different writers in it and they're all talking about their relationship with their mother all of those relationships are complicated a couple of them are good relationships but the vast majority are not good and are very fraught with things that happened in the past that haven't been dealt with or things that are happening in the present that mean that you know the child and parent no longer speak and are estranged from one another i'm super nosey i love hearing people's stories i'm one of those people who absolutely loves when i meet somebody new being like what time do you get up in the morning what sort of things you have for breakfast when you go home in the evening what do you do like you know you've got five hours what do you spend those five hours doing what time do you go to bed i find it fascinating and i find people's family dynamics even more fascinating you know i moved in with my partner's family for a year after university until we managed to get money together to to move out together and living with a different family to your own is so interesting because it makes you realize the things your family do that aren't what everyone else does like quiche awesome bread in the fridge which johnny hates but i love because i was very used to do that i just loads of weird and wonderful things so i'm super nosy and i find people's relationships with the parents in particular fascinating because i have a very complicated let's say relationship with my dad i don't see him very much at all and don't speak to him very much at all and there's a lot of complicated feelings around that which i'll probably never never be able to work through and so i loved this essay collection i gave it four stars because ultimately 15 different writers you know you're not going to love all the writing styles they're all going to speak to you but i felt that at least 10 of these were really profound beautifully written exploring really interesting themes and i found so many writers in the collection who i then wanted to go and read more work by them so i highly recommend it i think i would love to read more you know essay collections anthologies with different writers that are as strong as this one so please give me recommendations i would love to read more books like this one and then number 15 on the list is when the lights go out by cara spray i have read all of cara sprays books i just love her writing style and i just really enjoyed this and i'm well aware that a lot of people will read this book and think yeah that's good but it's not going to be one i really remember but she's one of those writers who i just find so much comfort in the way she deals with family dynamics so this is about a family who are living in a world that's pretty much ours but climate change is a bit worse there's lots of flooding and the the husband in the family becomes obsessed with it and the idea of surviving climate change and he starts to sort of prepare for the end of the world whilst the wife is trying to keep the family together and prepare for christmas it's a very small focused family drama there's lots of you know really beautiful scenes as the the sons talk to their mother and their mother-in-law gets involved i just really love the way cara spray writes families i ca i could see everything about their house and their garden and the way they moved through rooms and this one is just filled with beautiful commentary i don't think it's her best novel in fact i think both her other novels are better than this but i still really enjoyed it and i think if you enjoy kara spray joanna cannon kit noel you should read this and you will probably love it as well and number 14 on the list is another one i read right at the end of the year and that's frying planting by salika reed benter this is a glorious short story collection this is a short story collection that's sort of a novel as well we're following the life of a young girl she's growing up in little jamaica in toronto's eglinton west neighborhood yes and she's being raised by her single mother and every summer she goes home to jamaica to see her family and she doesn't feel jamaican enough when she's in canada because a lot of the jamaican children she knows grew up in jamaica and so they have a stronger accent than her so she gets picked on for that then she has a group of friends when she's around 11 who bully her quite viciously that's so perfectly pitched it made me feel like i was 11 years old again and not knowing what to do and how to escape so-called friends who bullied you it was perfectly written and really emotive i felt and then we follow her as she becomes a woman basically and the fraught relationship she has with her with her nationality um but also with the conflict with her mother thinking she should be raised in quite a strict way that reflects her jamaican upbringing whilst not living in jamaica and having to deal with the fact that you know the canadians around her don't live with such strict rules i thought this was beautiful the exploration of the relationship between these women you know her daughter the mother and a grandmother is wonderful and i loved it i'd highly recommend this one this next one i obviously bought thinking i would enjoy it but then i was a bit unsure when i started it whether i would and i ended up loving this i think it is so intelligent and brilliantly crafted i can't help but feel like she must be so super smart to have been able to put the book together like this and that is the atlas of reds and blues by debbie s leskar this follows an american-born daughter to bengali immigrant parents and the novel opens with her lying bleeding to death on her driveway after she's been shot by the police we don't know why she's been shot we don't know what's happening and the rest of the novel is told in vignettes completely non-chronologically following this woman's life she's never named none of her family are ever named and she references herself based on what she represents in that vignette so she's talking about her parents she is daughter if she's talking about her children she's mother and if she's talking about her husband she's white there is excellent commentary here on racism in suburban america what it's like for a person of color to be married to a white person and the privileges that white person may not realize they have when they do and the everyday instances of racism which are impossible to navigate this is beautiful the writing style is really crisp every word feels perfectly placed and yeah i'd highly recommend this and i've hardly sent anyone to talk about it so i would really love to see more people pick this one up then when i listen to an audio right at the start of the year is eloquent rage a black woman discovers her superpower by brittany cooper this is excellent my audio and i definitely want to get this in a physical copy so i can read it and tab because there's so much brilliant information this is a collection of essays about rage in black women and how the idea of rage has been used against black women how she thinks that black women should embrace eloquent rage they should be allowed to feel rage because there's things to be angry about and not be told well you know you're just an angry black woman and we don't want to listen to you the essays are brilliant filled with discussions about what it's like to be a working-class black woman and whether black men choose to date white women and have this idea of being inferior if they're in a relationship with a black woman and there's essays about beyonce and her lyrics and what they mean essays about the idea of embracing how beautiful you are as a black woman and embracing girlfriends and finding a group of women you can speak to about these things it's excellent and it's really hard because i want to recommend on audio because she narrates it so brilliantly you know there's moments when she does sound really angry there's moments when she describes things really warmly or with excellent humor this is really funny whilst being really informative and awful but i also want to recommend it in print because she what she does that i love i love essay collections and non-fiction books like this that also include hard facts and statistics i like when these things are backed up and i have references and you can go and look into those specific things and learn more and this book is filled with that she's obviously done her research she's obviously incredibly intelligent and articulate and i'd highly recommend this however you decide to read it and then i have a memoir i also listen to an audio and i definitely recommend this one on audio it was fantastic and narrated by the author and that is psy gone a misfits memoir of great books punk rock and the fight to fit in by tran this is a memoir about trans family moving to america when he's around five years old they flee saigon as it's falling and it's about his coming of age in america and everything that brings this is beautiful each chapter opens with a book and he tries to read um the canon the american classics written by white people in order to like fully americanize the book opens with a description of american diners and burgers and like the jackets that jockeys wear and it feels all american and throughout the memoir you realize that fucktran is desperately trying to fit in he asks to take on a american name because he doesn't like his name he has lots of conflicts with himself about how he comes across and the fact that he's one of only two vietnamese students in his school he has a really complicated relationship with his parents his parents really struggle to speak english and he starts to lose the ability to speak them in vietnamese and so they have a real language barrier there's a brilliant and beautiful section of this book where he talks about the fact that he can't really have a relationship of any depth with his parents because of the inability to talk about complicated feelings because they're speaking different languages and it's beautiful he becomes a punk rock because he decides rather than being an other for his race he'll be another for something that he chose and it's about him embracing punk rock while embracing all the american classics and his his movement through that and what he comes to realize about himself the fact that he has you know internalized racism and and has awful feelings about his parents because of that and it is a beautiful exploration of the immigrant experience what it's like for a child who you know ends up feeling pretty distant from their parents because of it and the decisions they make they may later regret this is absolutely beautiful i highly recommend on audio so now we're up to the top 10 and you may be surprised to see this one at number 10. some of you who watch my channel may expect to see this higher on the list but i feel like this one didn't stick with me as much as the books that i have rated higher i still really love this one but i don't think it deserves to be any higher than number 10 and that is the bass rock by evie wilde this is a beautiful book and i think the only reason i i'm not putting this higher on the list is just because i think with some distance the ending isn't particularly strong and so it just meant that it just didn't make it to like the top five which at the start of the year i definitely thought it would so this does two things that i adore or possibly three it is multi-pov so there's three characters telling their story and they're telling their story across three different timelines i love both those things and all three of those characters are women and the book is filled with commentary on the patriarchy and violence against women and how whilst the way that is performed has changed through the ages it is still happening now so one of the stories i think is set in like the 1600s and it's about a woman who is accused of being a witch i think which is a storyline that i just feel is a bit weak and confused me at points and the middle storyline is i think post world war ii my favorite storyline it felt very much like sarah waters it's about a woman who is raising her her two step children and her husband is awfully violent and controlling and you're following her story she's realizing lots of things and there's a story in present day where the granddaughter of the lady in the um post-war period is going to clean out the house and she has suffered ptsd and she is trying to overcome that and she she meets a woman when she goes to the house who makes her think a lot more about the way women are treated in society so this is thematically excellent beautifully written i highly recommend it so at number nine we have another short story collection this proves i need to read more short story collections i hardly read any in 2020 but two of them have made it to my best books of the year the next one is heads of the coloured people by nafissa thompson spies i absolutely love this so i am actually going to read a little bit from the blurb because i don't think i can do this justice by describing it myself in this crackling debut collection melissa thompson spies interrogates our supposedly post-racial era to wicked and devastating effect she exposes the violence both external and self-inflicted that threatens black americans no matter their apparent success so this follows a group of middle class black americans who are very successful like a lot of them are working in research their academics or teachers and all the stories except from the first and the last are pretty satirical they're dark and twisted but they're not too dark and then the first and the last go further and they're not really funny at all they're just very sad and the book being sandwiched by by those two and then being filled with more funny stories that are still incredibly insightful and sharp makes you realize when you finish the book that you know all of the stories were devastating even if they came across as humorous as an example one of the stories is a group of letters written between two mothers their daughters go to this private school and they're not getting on there's some sort of accusation about one of them killing a hamster and the mothers are writing letters to one another that are getting more and more ridiculous and they're starting to include like basically their resume to prove how professional they are in order to to like make sure their daughter is the most popular there's another one where a woman is contemplating suicide because she's not getting enough likes on her social media and she's thinking about the fact that you know if i did this how many likes would i get how much interaction would i get but then i wouldn't be alive to see it it's like hilarious but also awful so i love this and i feel like i can safely say i've never read another book like it i can't compare her voice to anyone else's because it feels entirely her own i'll read whatever she writes and if you have read this and you feel like you've read other books you know like this with a similar tone please recommend them to me because i really love this then at number eight we have silver sparrow by tiara jones i have the physical copy of this but i actually listened to this one on audio i highly recommend the audio it's absolutely phenomenal i think there was two narrators i'm gonna put their names along here because they definitely deserve a shout out they're excellent i really love that american marriage i love this one even more i think what i've realized after reading two of the harry jones books is she does something which is one of my favorite things in fiction and that is she gives you these characters characters who are complex and are not perfect people and have flaws and through that character's eyes you see somebody else and these characters are somehow entangled in one another's lives and when you see it through one of the characters eyes you feel like they're not really at fault and the other person is and then she flips the perspective and you realize that situation you were sure you you knew who was in the right or who's in the wrong you suddenly don't know and actually there's all these different things to consider and it feels true to life you know when a friend asks you for advice and says oh this happened and i said this and they said this you know inevitably there's no one who's who's innocent here right there's no one who's totally guilty both people have been involved in a situation both people have wronged and both people have done have done good things and she exposes that in all its um beauty so this is a novel about two sisters who don't well there's a man who's a bigamist he has a wife who everybody knows about and a daughter with that wife who everybody knows about but after marrying that woman he very quickly married another woman and had a daughter with her and they're his secret family they know about the public family but the public family do not know about them and we start when the girls are growing up they're becoming teenagers they live in the same small town and the secret daughter is being denied certain things because the father doesn't want her to meet her public daughter public sister so for example she wants a summer job at a theme park she can't because her sister wants to have a job she wants to go to a certain private school she can't because her sister's going there and she needs new clothes she can't because he spent all his money on buying the sister new clothes and the novel opens from the secret daughter's perspective and then it switches to the public daughter's perspective and it is absolutely brilliant not only the commentary on the daughters but the commentary on the father and his sort of foster brother and the two the two mothers is beautiful you feel like you know the relationship the father has with the the public wife and you don't and you you find out so much more and you're left at the end with these people who feel so alive and yet you still wouldn't be able to to decide like what should happen next and who and who wronged and how this could be resolved it's phenomenal none of her other books have been published in the uk but i'm gonna just have to get hold of them from the us because i think she's one of my favorite authors i'd highly recommend this and also she just writes beautifully about smells and textures and everything like you can completely see their hair and the clothes they're wearing and smell the food they're cooking and picture the rooms they're in and she's an incredibly i think tactile writer so yeah absolutely adore her definitely pick this one up and it's just a really joyous read as well like even though it's about a difficult subject i got so much joy out of reading it the next one is homie by daniel smith i'm not going to talk about this one for very long because i don't read much poetry and i don't really know how to talk about poetry i borrowed this collection from the library and i absolutely adored it because i don't read much poetry what i actually did was i found a uh a reading that was on youtube where denise smith had read out from their book read i think probably like a third of the poems it's a fairly long reading so i watched that first and then i read the poems i found that really helpful because i'll link that video below because i found that in the poems that the nurse had read i knew the way they intended them to be read i knew the rhythm i knew the intonations the emphasis and then the poems i hadn't read i i knew the way dynasty would have read them the rhythm to them this is beautiful this is such a powerful and wonderful collection it's one of those books where i read it in all that anybody could possibly write like that and i kept rereading sections and reading bits out loud to johnny it is glorious and if you don't read poetry and you're scared of it like i am then i highly recommend starting with how you're reading smith because i found it i'm really approachable and um filled with beautiful commentary um that was that was understandable like i knew what was being said and i just loved it then completely different and this is why i struggle with ranking these books because how do you compare a memoir to a non-fiction that's dealing with a certain topic to a middle grade fantasy to a poetry collection it's impossible right so on another day you know some of these books will be in a different order but today the next book is hollow pox the hunt for morrigan crow by jessica townsend i read this towards the end of the year and i absolutely loved it i got so much joy out of it i'm not gonna say much it's the third book in a fantasy middle grade trilogy it's my favorite of the three i love the fact that this was focused on sort of magical animals like as soon as animals are involved i'm game this is filled with so much joy and wonder the descriptions of buildings and food and clothes and smells are glorious i love the fact that in this one morrigan starts to go to lessons i always love like lessons in middle grade books and yeah i just thought this was absolutely wonderful and i immediately started doing so much research into middle grade fantasy i have a massive list that i want to try and get through this year but do please let me know down below if you've read any middle grade fantasy that you would recommend you know it may be on the list but it'll bump out the list or it may not be on the list and i can add it i adored this and got so much joy of it and i highly recommend it number five is another book i listened to on audio and that is natives race and class in the ruins of empire by akala this is phenomenal this does something i adore in non-fiction and that is when a writer has elements of memoirs they take you through their life but they use the structure of their life to explore a subject and this subject is the british empire and how the british empire has affected the way we view race and class in britain today it is phenomenal i listened to this one on audiobook because it was when i just wasn't feeling well enough to to read physical books and i loved hearing a carla narrator because he is phenomenal like oh my god just go and watch any talks he's done he's one of those people who's so incredibly intelligent that he can be asked any question and immediately come up with a really articulate thoughtful and informative response that doesn't sound like just to give an answer like he knows the answer he's so intelligent and you can really tell that when he he tells this story the elements of memoir were beautiful i loved hearing about his life and growing up and how he was treated at school because of his race how he was expected to to not perform well academically and how he completely proved them wrong he's incredibly intelligent and what i learned about the british empire in this was devastating and also fascinating and this is the book that really inspired me to want to learn more about the british empire which is something i mentioned in my um 2021 goals video which i'll link up here i love this i did love it on audio but i 100 want to reread this book perhaps this year because there's so much if i was reading it physically i would have tabbed and like gone and done more research and so on already i just kept like rewinding and re-listening to certain bits because i was like i just want to make sure i like took that fact in so i would recommend this on audio because he narrates it brilliantly but i also think this would be an excellent book to read physically because you could you know pause and tab things so yeah i adored this one at number four you're probably all thinking if you watch my channel where's this one we have hamlet by maggie o'farrell i love this book this is a historical fiction book that focuses on shakespeare's family shakespeare is unnamed and we open with his son hamnet and it follows their story as you know that hamnet will die you know that's how this book will end and and you watch as the events of several days unfold as the plague comes into their village and and hamnet contracts it and and how that affects the family this is one of those historical fiction books that does something i love in that whilst it follows this period of time before and after hamlet's death it also sort of reminisces so it doesn't have sections saying you know a different date so you know you're earlier in time it just reminisces about how shakespeare and his wife met and what they were like as teenagers and how they built their life together so you get the full story and then following hamlet's death you see how that affects them both really differently and how that leads to shakespeare writing hamlet and how his wife just doesn't realize the man she's married to and how they're such different people and i heard maggie farrell um talk about this one and she said something she really wanted to to bring to the forefront is that a lot of scholars have said about shakespeare you know he married a farmer's daughter obviously he's incredibly intelligent and can write beautifully so why did he marry a woman who probably couldn't even read um you know what's that about and maggie farrell wanted to talk about the fact that actually shakespeare came from quite a poor family himself and yes he became somebody um who achieved status and success and riches but at the time when they got married he wasn't and actually she was the daughter of a very wealthy very well respected farmer and landowner and she was the catch and maggie fowler decided to make agnes the wife somebody who knew a lot about herbal remedies and almost bordered on being a witch and she decided she wanted agnes to sort of play the role of being shakespeare's inspiration for the more magical elements to his plays so i just love this it's beautifully written just as a historical fiction book in and of itself it's wonderful and but i just also love the commentary this has on on women and marriage and families and grief this is like incredibly sad um you know if you have children i i think this would be really hard to read so like be warned but it is excellent and well worth a read if you can bear it and at number three we have a book that i think brought me the most joy throughout the year this is just a wonderful wonderful book and i do feel like whilst a lot of the books i have on this list do deal with darker topics a lot of them do that in a really warm and generous and joyous way and this one really exemplifies that and that is mr lover man by bernardine evaristo i list this on audio so i'll put the audiobook narrator's name here because it's absolutely excellent so in this we follow 74 year old um barrington barry to his friends he was antiquing born and he came over to london during the wintrust generation and he has lived in hackney for many many many years um he is unhappily married and has been having a secret relationship with his childhood best friend since they were like 14 years old so they've been having a secret love affair for 60 years and this is excellent because right you love barry he is a phenomenal character he's kind and generous and and funny and thoughtful in so many ways he's also stubborn and arrogant and uninformed and homophobic like as a queer man he's homophobic there's the points in the book where he goes into queer spaces and he doesn't want to be near these gay men he doesn't feel that he is the same as them and there's also lots of commentary about the way he treats his wife carmel so there's sections of the book that from her perspective which are told in a different style i love those sections from his perspective carmel is awful and then from her perspective you see how he is really um even as a as a gay man he has really oppressed his wife he um really holds this patriarchal role in the family he doesn't know how to do anything for himself um and she feels that she feels really trapped by him and there's lots of commentary on their relationship with their two daughters and what their two daughters represent about them i love this book like every single character even like a tiny side character was brilliantly described and there's moments of such grief and tenderness and also moments of such um happiness so i adored this and i'd highly recommend it and then at number two we have small island by andrea levy i also listen to this one on audio and i need to get myself a copy of it andrea levy's books have been re-released in beautiful editions and i'm scared to order any of her books online in case they send me the old ones so i'm waiting until we can actually go back in book shops to pick up small island and her other books because i need to read all of her work now so i actually read this book when i was 17. i'm now 30. and when i was 17 i had been reading adult fiction for about a year two years and i was still at a stage where i sort of struggled to to pick them myself and i was studying in english literature and i noticed that my teacher had a book on her desk i sort of spied on the book as i was handing in an essay or something and noticed that it was small island and it must have been the year that it had won the women's prize because it was in paperback and it had just been released and i read it and i remember absolutely loving it at the time but on a reread i realized how much more i i got out of it as a person i am today you know i'm i was completely you know unaware i think of anything to do with um the legacy of empire um and racism and classism in the uk anything to do with the windrush generation i just didn't know any of that i didn't learn any of it at school and you know i've picked up bits and pieces here and there over the 13 years since i read the book and i really read this book just sang like this book is glorious so this is a historical fiction book but it's told from the perspective of four different characters andrea levy narrates them all and she is phenomenal i kept checking being like there must be more than one narrator because how is she doing these jamaican accents so brilliantly and then this yorkshire accent and then this sort of um posh um you know sussex accent you know just couldn't couldn't understand that somebody could do those voices so perfectly but she does so in this story we follow a married couple who are coming over from jamaica and during the wind rush movement and the husband has previously been in the uk because he joined the army and fought during the war and he is bringing his wife over to join him and she assumes when they get there it's all going to be wonderful and beautiful and of course it isn't um london had survived the blitz it was in pieces it was covered in rubble and dust and people were poor and rations were limited and life was hard especially for people of color um and she's not expecting it and it's about um their life and their relationship and it's about them trying to pull a life together and also about um their landlady who they live with who rents out her whole house to to black tenants and is hated on her street for doing so and so we follow the landlady story and we also get a section about the landlady's husband who is over in india and fighting over there as part of the armed forces and this book is just filled with excellent commentary on on race on class on on sexism but it's also such a warm funny story filled with joy and again like tayari jones andrea levy is excellent at giving you characters with all their flaws and saying to you you know who is wrong or right who could possibly be wrong or right in this situation um it's impossible to to place the blame these people are in a an awful situation and they're making the very best of it with the limited knowledge they have and you get to watch that unfold this is one of those books i look at and think this is the perfect example of a novel and what it can achieve and it's one of those books that sort of makes lots of other novels pale in comparison and that's why i'm so harsh with my five stars because if books like this are possible if somebody can craft something like this how on earth can other things be put on the same pedestal because they're just not um so if you haven't read this book like what are you doing it's been out for so many years and it's absolutely phenomenal like it's flawless absolutely love it but another book did beat her i gave another book the first place so you know this book is also brilliant the book that got my number one spot and if you've guessed well done is know my name by chanel miller i don't know how anybody could read this book and not put it in their top books of the year it is just a masterclass in writing it's absolutely phenomenal i listened to this on audio again it was narrated by the author which i loved i'd highly recommend on audio but again i do also want to own it in a physical print because if i'd read this then it would be like filled with tabs as with this one if i'd if i'd read this one compared to listening on audio there's so many moments of just perfect writing so if you don't know um chanel miller is the woman who was known as emily doe during the stanford rape case trial and after the trial she decided to go public with her name and she released this memoir but that starts with the moment of her going out for the evening to have a good time with her sister and her sister's friend and then moves into her waking up in hospital and not knowing what's happened to her after being sexually assaulted and follows her through the subsequent years of dealing with that and the trial and how she has tried as much as she possibly can to recover from from that moment and how it sort of stains everything in her life and all relationships and this is just it's perfect it's absolutely flawless and again this is a master class in writing like when i read books like this and small island i just almost want to just cry at like every sentence because the fact that somebody can write like that is is phenomenal the fact that that no paragraph can feel like it just passes by like every single word counts every single word is perfectly placed and on every page you can find something that's beautiful and powerful and means something um this is excellent you know as an exploration of of how chanel herself dealt with it but also what what her case did for other survivors of sexual assault it's phenomenal you know obviously this book is filled with trigger warnings you know don't read this if you're going to be triggered by sexual assault because that is discussed but i will say that this book gives a voice to the voiceless and this book really argues with the way we treat victims of sexual assault and the way we put all the weight on the victims there's a point where she's you know in court during the trial um and she's being attacked by by one of the lawyers you know asking her all these ridiculous questions about what did you eat and what time did you eat that and then when did you sip that drink and then when did you just another one and when did you go to the toilet and and everything about her is being assessed down to you know the most minute detail um and she has this moment of clarity where she realizes that you know as the victim she is the one on trial she is the one whose character is being torn to pieces um she is the one that has to to answer to the call an answer to the public and she really makes you question you know what sort of society are we if this is the way we deal with situations like this so yeah i highly recommend it and it's it's not you know it's obviously a hard read but i found it really hopeful i found it um really inspiring and informative and she's just a beautiful voice i'd highly recommend it so it's got very dark in here and i hope this isn't like you know awful lighting and really fuzzy i'm sorry if it is i can't be bothered to film this all over again but um yeah i really um had to sort of get my enthusiasm up to film this video because whenever a video feels late i feel like oh god i just wanted to do it now but as soon as i started talking about these books i felt really enthused and i feel like i could just like been february off reading any other books and just reread all these which would be a joyous thing and i you know just on the topic of rereading i do really think that reading a book once just isn't enough because i feel like books are always better on a reread because you can pinpoint moments especially in fiction when something happens uh you know something's dropped into the narrative which feels meaningless um but that has so much weight once you get to a later part in the book and on a re-read those nuggets are phenomenal when you find them and realize that there was this hidden or there was this moment that mattered that you didn't realize mattered um so yeah you know i just want to recommend all these books but i also want to recommend rereading your favorite books from last year or the year before because um i think that rereading is absolutely wonderful and i want to become somebody who just rereads all the time so yeah that's the end of this video thanks so so much for watching let me know if you've read any of these books or if you plan to read them after watching this video i hope you feel enthused about all of these books because they're all glorious and as always please please please feel free to give me recommendations for other books like these ones because you know i would love to read more books like this thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: MercysBookishMusings

Views: 11,009

Rating: 4.9700599 out of 5

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Id: MgqaVr1BA18

Length: 42min 41sec (2561 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021