Shelf Indulgence - what I'm reading, watching and getting up to this week

but it's just always a bit funny when someone else beats her or something and they look on her face but she's trying to be like oh yeah you can tell she's raging it just makes me laugh so much and welcome to my channel my name is sarah and i love to talk about books and it's time for me to give you a little update on what i'm reading what i'm watching and what i'm getting up to so if you watch my video on saturday where i was wrapping up may i think i said at the end um a little bit about what's going on with my job situation and there have been developments so if you don't know i'm currently on a temporary contract within the nhs working on a project and that's due to end at the end of august and so i was lucky enough to land not one but two job interviews in the same week one was for a promoted post in the team i'm in at the moment but it was a very temporary post it was only six months but it was starting during my current contract so really it was only an extra four months of employment um and then the other was outside of that team it was outside of the nhs which i have been working in since 2013. um so that was a big step to consider and also it wasn't as much money as the other role although you know it's on par with what i'm on at the moment so i found myself in the position where i either chased the money or i chase something that i'm hoping will turn out to be something that i really want to do um for the first time in my life i'm in a position where i could actually follow what i want to do um which is amazing i'm so glad to have got to this place finally in my am i am i still mid 30s i've just turned 37 can i can i can i clean mid-30s for another year please um because i feel up until this point um because even when i was still with my husband i was the um higher earner so i was always having to chase the promotions chase the money and it kind of wore me out but now i'm in a position where i don't have to follow the money so much and so i have decided to leave the nhs which is something i never thought i would do but i'm going into the third sector or the the charity sector whatever you want to call it very similar to what i'm currently doing but working actually directly with people patients clients whatever term you want to apply to people but also um with management responsibilities so in some ways it's given me everything i want in other ways it's given me the thing that terrifies me most but um yeah that's exciting so in the next couple of months that will change it will probably have a huge knock-on effect on the time i've got to film and things like that but i've got to a point where my mental health is really suffering working from home i've worked solely from home since march last year and i think i'm losing it a bit um so i'm looking forward um as things are opening up again anyway and this role will hopefully give me more opportunities to work outside the home with people with actual human beings and not faces on a screen so that's really exciting obviously i'm scared as i always am whenever um i change jobs or like any big change in my life but i'm trying to um feel the fear and do it anyway which again if you watch my saturday video will make a bit more sense anyway enough about me what have i um been reading so i seem to have found i don't want to jinx it don't say anything too much too soon but i seem to have found my reading mojo again and i so grateful i hope it lasts even through these changes that are going on so i finished two books since i spoke to you last week um apologies for the tipsy shelf indulgence video last week i don't know if that was a good idea but i'm not saying it'll be the last one anyway so i finished two books since that last video so the first book i finished was the one that was my current read this time last week and that was cast by isabelle wilkins wilkerson wilkerson um i can't say a lot about this because it's one of the books the six books that i'm judging for the booktube prize non-fiction semi-finals so i can't tell you what i thought about that book but i finished it the other book i finished i can tell you about and that was rebecca schiller's earth this was a memoir so rebecca and her family moved to a small holding in kent i think it was and moved out of london moved to the smallholding ken hoping for a better life for themselves and their children a bit more freedom um you know working their plot of land raising some animals but it wasn't the idyllic adventure that they had hoped it would be um rebecca ends up taking on a lot of the work herself and really works herself to the bone works herself into quite the frenzy of anxiety always thinking of about a million things that she should be doing or has to do um and it really starts to um play on her mental health and whether it's just that or there's other things that contribute to her she does really struggle with her mental health but in a strange kind of paradox she uses that um contact with plants and the earth and nature to also help herself heal and part of that is that she looks into the history of their land of their their home and you know imagines the lives of the women that used to live there as well and i had not expected this book to take the turn it did is it a spoiler can you spoil a memoir she ends up going down the route of um an adhd diagnosis in adulthood and that is something for women and girls it is not as i was gonna say easily diagnosed i don't think it's the ease that's the issue i think it's very much seen as um presenting in the way that's typically presented with males who have um the diagnosis and girls and women tend to get overlooked because they will often present in a different way or they will they will act as if they don't have it they're very much better at covering it putting on that front and for me it was really really interesting um i i've said well i say quite often that i'm having struggles with my mental health and particularly since having to do all the adulting and looking after the house and the kids and things like that by myself since splitting up my husband and then working in isolation under lockdown conditions i definitely felt um certain things i've thought about myself have really come to the fore i've really struggled with certain things and i was reading this section where she starts to link some things together in the adhd diagnosis and a lot of things were clicking into place with me i'm not self-diagnosing myself and i know you can have traits of adhd without actually having um the condition itself it is kind of a spectrum but it was really it's the first time i've read someone's experience of that and i just found it really interesting i really enjoyed that book it's a little bit i was gonna say hi brow and that's not what i mean but i often find um i can feel a little bit distant from people whose reference points are a little bit more cultured than mine you know she talks a lot about flowers and their names and she's talking about certain reference points in history and a like classical culture that i just don't have a foothold on um but at the same time i found it was interesting i thought it was really refreshing and direct and honest as well and i review memoirs not on the um the content of the life story but how it's put across and it's put across really well in this book so i'm now reading uh fat and queer an anthology of fat and queer bodies and lives i think that's the full subtitle if it's not um you'll see it on the screen in its correct form um so this was a book that i started earlier in the year because it was to be read um it was released in may it's one of my net galleys so i'd wanted to dip in and out of it up until the release date and then review on the release date it hasn't happened because i'm crap and in fact at the time when i started it i only read the introduction and kind of part of the first so it's essays poems and um short stories as well so the first one was a short story and i've read maybe half of that and then hadn't picked it up again so i went back i didn't really read the introduction but i went back and started the the first piece from the beginning it's a really great collection of queer people who live in fat bodies talking about their experience and through those different mediums of essay poem short story um or response to someone else's work as well there was a couple one or two in there that were that as well and it was just really interesting because i have lived in many sized bodies but my default is a larger body i'm currently in a larger body and have been for the past few years and for the most part i've struggled with it and i've always seen queer identity as one thing living in a fat body as another thing and i didn't really you know i don't think i appreciated the intersectionality of those two particular aspects of a person but this really made me understand it that when you are living in a fat body you deal with these things um but also if you're queer and living in a fat body you are dealing with other things that as a as a cis-hep woman i am not um yes so queer and trans sorry the whole way through that conversation when i said queer i mean queer and trans um because there's there's a lot of trans rep in this um as well as queer rep um lots of different gender identities other than um just male female trans as well um yeah it's a really all-encompassing collection of um representations and ideas and there's some people that are really comfortable with their body and they see it as a strength or as not a defining feature of anything they are and then there's stories from other people who do struggle with it um and it was really interesting to read it from all those different perspectives and um and as always i'm trying to gain more understanding of people that live different lives from me i do a lot of reading around race but i really want to expand my reading around all aspects of lgbtq plus everything so yeah any sort of sexual um identity and gender identity i want to suck it all up like a sponge and this was a fab um collection to do that with i'm hoping to get that finished today if i do i'll move on to another netgalley before i can get to the library but i'm hoping to get to the library tonight and pick up my next book for the booktube prize which will be our bodies their battlefield women's views of war and that is by christina lam and she was the co-author of i am malala which i haven't read but obviously that book and malala's story blew up as it very well should have done in this book christina is looking at well like the subtitle says um war from women's point of view particularly the use of rape as a weapon and i gather she looks at a lot of historical issues right from was alexander the great i think i read all the way through right up to modern day so she looks at um conflict in bosnia she looks at uh the boko haram kidnapping of girls um there's lots of different things that seem to be covered in this book but it's all um women's perspective and i think that's really important i saw was it read a book gem this week had been talking about that in the context of something she just read that the stories about war we get are very typically masculine i think she was talking in the context of world war ii um and she'd read a book that had a uh was about the female perspective of war and yeah we really don't get that and i think in particular we need the diverse voices of women who have experienced war i think it's good to highlight the things that women did in the the world wars but when we're looking at contemporary current conflicts they don't include a lot of western white privileged people so we really need to look at the impact on people of color people of muslim religion or middle eastern all these sorts of cultures that are currently being so decimated by conflict and the people that feel that most tend to be women and children um and they are often not participants in that conflict they are their collateral damage but it's a lot of damage um and so i'm really interested to get to that book but as with all the booktube prize books i cannot really talk about how i feel about the book until um after the scores are in i will be doing a video that will wrap up my thoughts on all six of the books that i read for the semi-finals um and i'll do a separate video on that probably in august i think we've got until the end of july to read for this round um and then the the rankings will be announced and then i can i can let you know what my thoughts are on those books so yeah quite busy with the books and this week which is a lovely feeling it's been a bit too long for that um so as a result i haven't really watched an awful lot of telly um but i did manage to finish line of duty so season six or the finale and because season seven hasn't been confirmed yet i'm really hoping there is a season seven because so obviously the whole world that was watching line of duty had seen the finale when it aired live a couple of months ago and we were behind but i knew i didn't know what the outcome was but i knew that a lot of people were quite disappointed with the outcome and i now have watched the finale of season six i can kind of understand that it was not the outcome that i suspected and if i'm honest it's not the outcome that i think is the truth so there better be a season seven um reviews i'll be absolutely raging if that's where they leave it but i don't always get like my knickers in a twist about a finale um because like i watched the man in the high castle i thought that whole thing was great the finale was absolute dog um but and you know i was mad about it in the moment but overall it hasn't spoiled how i feel about that whole show because the rest of it's great and um so i i i can take a bad ending on the chin uh which is funny because with books which i think actually have i had any books event well um the reluctant fundamentalist the ending kind of frustrated me a bit but i wouldn't have said it was a bad ending i can't think of any books off the top of my head they've got terrible endings um but i think i would probably take a terrible ending of a book far more to heart than a terrible ending of a tv show so yeah finish that currently watching um just today actually i've had it on while i've been working i've been watching uh untucked the kind of companion season or series uh for rupal's drag race because here in the uk we don't get on netflix at the same time as the actual show we don't even get it the week after the show we get it like has that been like a month since the finale of season 13 or whatever season we're on so it kind of takes the joy out of it because the whole point of untucked is it's what's happening backstage on a particular episode so ideally you watch the episode and you'll watch untucked right after it and get the whole story as it says itself if you're not watching untucked you're only getting half of the story um but for some reason that's like two seasons now the netflix have got untucked but for whatever reason they have not been allowed to air it at the same time as drag races on which is completely stupid and so i just had it on the background because a lot of the time now when i watch it i can't remember what they're arguing about or discussing because it's been that long since i watched the episode anyway that's happening the great british sewing bees finale is next week so i've been keeping on top of that really good it's really made me want to take my sewing more seriously i really want an overlocker i wish i could win the lottery i think i know who the win is going to be i'm not sure if i want her to be the winner um but i mean she is really good and she's scottish um i've totally forgotten her name serena i think sienna serena serena and she's really great and everything but she's a little bit too competitive for me i'm not really competitive person and i don't really like it in other people um because i quite like raph who is a french guy and he's got a really quite cool style she is really precise with her sewing and her designs are pretty good as well but i think ralph has this like kind of cooler edge but um i think it will be someone who wins and she's scottish so you know it's all good but it's just always a bit funny when someone else beats her or something and they look on her face and she's trying to be like oh yeah you can tell she's raging it just makes me laugh so much i also started watching um i may destroy you and by starting watching i mean i watched one episode um which is the michaela cole series um about a girl she's a writer and she is um well we think she's been sexually assaulted um in a maybe a nightclub or something but she can't remember and it's all about you know does she how does she feel about the people around her now who were there with her that night what happened and i think it goes on to how she deals with that situation um it's really good even just in the first episode so i'm really looking forward to that i know it's not gonna be an easy watch but i do think it's gonna be um a really hard hitting and important thing to watch and i also need to finish off um a whole bunch of other things like for some reason i've taken a huge pause on pose even though i love it um i've still got quite a few episodes of whatever the current or final whatever is um season to do i haven't picked up a pursuit of love again since i talked about it on here same with shrill so i need to um find time to get them back into some sort of routine as well and obviously because we finished line of duty me and my son need to pick a new season to watch so if you've got any recommendations put them in the description box below so things we have watched and loved so far we watched the whole of all from black who watched the whole of um the man in the high castle what else have we watched we've watched quite a few things obviously line of duty or we watch devs so we've watched um a few things along that way like it's funny i won't read sci-fi but i don't mind watching some sci-fi um so yeah anything kind of along those lines anything kind of policy or kind of apocalyptic or you know kind of parallel universe but not spaceships seems to be our kind of jam so anything that you can think of in terms of that or anything that you just think we might like um let me know but i feel i'm waffling now and my son is now making a lot of noise in the kitchen making his it could be his breakfast and we are at five o'clock at night and we're about to get our dinner so i don't know what he's up to so i'll go and investigate that and look out for my video on saturday where i've got a book haul to share with you i got lots of books for my birthday and i'm finally getting around to talking about that so until then bye so if you saw my video on saturday what was that video even about i can't even remember what did i film them

Channel: Sadie Reads Again

Views: 42

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: books, reading, booktube, booktuber, scottish booktuber, booktube uk, what i read, book recommendations, fiction, memoir, literature, literary fiction, book covers, library books, new books, second hand books, short stories, non-fiction, historical fiction, books I loved, netgalley, tv recommendations, earthed, rebecca schiller, rebecca schiller earthed, caste isabelle wilkerson, isabelle wilkerson, booktube prize 2021, fat and queer an anthology, our bodies their battlefield

Id: QvWTHupJyoE

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021