Spring Reading Wrap Up | Part One | April 2021

hi and welcome to my channel i'm simon and today i am back with my spring reading wrap up part one i don't actually know how many parts there's going to be to my spring reading wrap up but i think they're going to be until sort of beginning to mid-may we'll see they might go on a little bit after that but the reason for that is one um i haven't done any wrap up since january and weirdly i've had a bit of a wobble with wrap-ups over the last few months it happened between august and december last year i didn't do them i normally do two months i had one big bump one and i thought i got back in the swing hadn't and um also the second reason is that i'm not going to be talking in these videos about the women's prize long list and which ones i've read etc because me and my mom will be uh doing our own sort of like what we'd like to see on the shortlist video and she watches this channel so i don't want to spoil that because we we're being really secretive about what we think about the long list basically in all the titles and and also i'm judging the desmond elliott prize so i can't talk about those books um so yeah there we go that's me setting out my store of what the reasons are behind these spring wrap-ups they are going to be a bit of a hodgepodge and from all over the place because my goodreads uh has gone too far and i'm not sure if i'm going to keep goodreads when i'm thinking about the moment anyway let's get cracking and talk about 15 books that i read in the spring um well these are kind of a mixture of february and some of march actually and but i wanted to start off with a book that i absolutely loved and is one of my absolute favorite books of the year um and i haven't had about doing a whole video on this book but i might wait until i've read the author's next book which is out now and this is in the end it was all about love by musa akwanga and i just love this it's a relatively short book but it's certainly a short sharp pocket book of power and it's stunningly done with poetry inside in different color pages and this is sort of a book that um is on the verges of fiction and non-fiction um in the fact that it tells of moosa well no it tells of a man who has moved to berlin in the lead up to his 40th birthday his father died when he was 40. so he's got quite a lot of um superstitions and nostalgia and worries around his 40th year but also what it's like to start a life in a new um city and just as a newcomer but also as a bisexual black man and and so what we have as well as some poetry around all of this is the story of how this man settles the the highs and the lows of moving there the relationship with his father and and looking at age and yeah it's a beautifully beautifully beautifully written book it has moments of heartbreak in it it has moments of hope but it's so real and raw i just can't recommend it enough and i'm so excited although i think it's gonna be a really hard read for um moose's um memoir which has come out about his time at eaton which i'll be reading very very soon but yeah this is incredible if you go on to rough trade books website that's where you should be able to get a copy um yeah i can't recommend it enough i found a new favorite author so yes very much recommended and then three books that i reread for um a good read on bbc radio 4 which is a show that like i've always had delusions of grandeur or sort of dreams that i could end up on that show and everything it would really really happen and it did and i will link the episode down below and so my choice and reread was an american marriage by tara jones and i loved this as much the second time this won the women's prize a couple years ago when me and mum read the longest together for the first time and this was i predicted this is my winner i think mum chose um my sister the serial killer which is a great book as well anyway and this is about celestial and roy who are newlyweds um and we follow them as they go away one weekend to see um his parents i think it's yeah it is his parents and the hotel they're staying at um he helps a woman with a faulty door and then the police arrive and arrest him at rape now we know that um he has not raped this woman and celestial knows that he has not raped this woman but as a black man there's not much investigation on whether he has or hasn't it and so he ends up in prison um as a huge um misjustice and that's one of the things that makes this book so powerful apart from the fact that tara jones is writing is just wonderful and but it's the fact that we know the truth and so just leicester and yet we watch what happens to their marriage from this point and some of the letters that roy writes to celestial i just every time i read them i just cry because he's trying to like he's saying that he can't put into words how much he loves her but in these letters he totally does but also we know what's going on with celestial in the real world outside of prison um as it were so yeah just i love this um it didn't necessarily get a unanimous review but i'll let you listen for thoughts on that one and then citizen was one of the other choices by claudia rankine i've talked about this it's one of my favorite non-fiction books of last year this is um a poetry collection but also it's multimedia so you have um pictures in here you have um well pictures of multimedia but also it's been yeti which i absolutely love and this looks at both big moments of horrific racism um also times where people haven't realized how racist they're being again on a big platform um but also about the little insidious sort of flipping off the cuff racist comments that happen every day in conversations that are overheard or you are part of and i thought what was really clever about this was that um a lot of the time it's you and you are and so you're put into the headspace of somebody who is enduring um racism on small moments and big moments um and how yeah just how insidious it all is and but also there's moments that you're left to create some of the imagery in your head which is very very difficult um to read but it's so powerful and so brilliant and i read and don't let me be lonely um claudia's follow-up and i have i think it's just us um to read as well which i will do of course but i love this the second read i think this is just such a powerful book and so many of you recommended it to me um over a year ago now and uh yeah i thought it was great and then another reread but actually i say that i dnf'd it the first time and because i wasn't enjoying it but i did finish it this time and i got much more out of it was anne m wright's actress um which is the story of a mother and daughter the mother is has been a famous actress across broadway i didn't quite make it into cinema for long but um it's how now she is older and how her and her daughter's relationship has changed and it was a book that i i mean you'll hear me talk about this if you go and listen to a good read like i thought the writing on a sentence level sentence by sentence was incredible but i felt like this book wanted to do lots of things and therefore was sort of not able to do them all there was anna and i've read before and um it was the green road and the section that's told by the son of the family in america in the 1980s is some of the most incredible writing but the rest of the book felt in parts over melodramatic didn't quite make sense and i found that with this a bit because there was a scene around a bomb that happens in dublin that was so powerful that whole segment of the book was so powerful and actually dublin i guess is a character in this book um but i felt like the rest of it just didn't have that energy and actually sometimes i wanted to learn more about things that were shied away from a little bit like and there's a marriage of convenience in this book and i thought that was brilliant but we didn't get very much about it so yeah it just it left me wanting really i think is how i put it and that's happened twice now with annan right so maybe that's just me and his relationship onto another irish writer and the first of two of um the books that melania and i have read for our book club i'll link both of the videos so that you can watch them if you would like below to see more um and we read marianne keys grown-ups as our first book of uh 2021 and this is a chunkster i have not read marian keys before but i will definitely be reading her again and possibly trying to match my uh jumpers with her books forevermore i don't think i even did that in the video with melanie anyway um this is all about um one family well actually no it's about the brothers in the family so you but well no it's not even really about the brothers of the family it's more about the brothers in a family and no start again simon this book is about the casey family and within that family are three brothers but we really follow those three men's partners so we have jessie we have uh cara and we have nell um and jessie is very kind of business-minded and business orientated and cara works in hospitality and that actually is very much her personality she really wants to care if people like people and nell is very artistic and i did wonder if actually marian keys was trying to in hindsight sort of write about business um nurture uh hospitality and those are sort of themes throughout the book because they do come up and what you do there's lots more on this book in the video that i'll link down below but what you do is you um the book starts after cara has hit her head and she starts to just tell the truth at dinner and lots of secrets that have been brewing under come to the fore but very cleverly which i thought was gonna irritate me and it didn't um because it's so brilliantly done mary yankees then takes us back i think about nine or ten months and we start to see how these secrets come to be and and the sort of i guess germination of all these different things that are going on secretly within this family and she does it at different family gatherings and i just loved it i got kept getting so excited for what the next gathering might be and although there are quite a lot of characters in it and like i said like well like you saw i got a bit tripped over my words at the beginning i was trying to explain it once you're in it it's so readable and i got through this so quickly and yeah i would definitely like to read more meringues so if you've got any recommendations for which ones i should head to let me know in the comments down below but do go and watch the video that me and melanie have done on that as you can go and watch the video that me and melanie have done on my dart vanessa by kate elizabeth russell which funnily enough has a quote on it from marion keys she said it was brilliant and it is indeed brilliant it's a really hard book to read though this is about um a young woman called vanessa who we meet her at two different time periods the first is when she's 15 and she starts what she at the time believes as a consensual relationship with her teacher and we obviously reading it know that this is not the case and the way though that kate elizabeth russell writes about how she's groomed it's both deeply unsettling but also horrifically plausible and but then we head into the future when um vanessa is older and it's come to light that there have been more complaints and allegations made against um her teacher and it's how she then is dealing with that especially when people want her to come forward and say that she um was assaulted by him but she doesn't feel that way i mean it's just it's a really really hard topic to read about but i think elizabeth russell does such an amazing job and the way she depicts the relationship with um vanessa and strain and her teacher as it goes on both back in the past and in the present day up to a certain point no spoilers um is really really yeah it's so hard to read and so yeah but you kind of can't start it does read like a thriller i found it very difficult to put it down even though sometimes i really really needed to so um yeah i don't want to say it's an incredible read but it is an incredible read it's a hard and difficult read but i'm really glad i've read it and i think if you are able to um i would highly recommend that you read it and also actually i went to the lovely candid book club and got to be part of a book club with the author the candle book club with the first book club on sky arts book club live last autumn um and uh yeah that was incredible to hear the author talking about it and i mean there's some of the books in some books there's some moments in this book that again a bit like what i was saying about um claudia rankine's book it's sometimes those small moments and that can be the most effective like the big moments are horrific but actually those smaller moments all also can be as difficult to read anyway yeah i thought it was great as i did the cost of living by deborah levy which is the second in her living biography trilogy the third is a ride i'm very upset that it is the third because i don't want it to be over it's a chunkster it's called real estate um and i wanted to read it by now i haven't shame on me but i'm going to read it soon um this is i just love debra levy's writing full stop it doesn't matter whether she's writing fiction or non-fiction it's just so good and um this follows on from what was the first one called the i'm just gonna say the cost of living and that isn't right i should know this and it follows on from things i don't want to know um but this looks at her when she when her marriage ended and how she had to cope when she had to move out with her daughters and how that was for their relationship but also how she was dealing with um the marriage breakup but also about some of her writing which i really really loved and i think that's something that i have enjoyed particularly with these two in the the first judges i've read the books that she talks about writing if that makes sense but it's also about um her mother becoming very very ill and so there's actually quite a lot about muslims there's some brilliant pieces about one wonderful neighbor and one absolutely awful neighbor and she celebrates the extraordinary sorry she she celebrates when the ordinary is extraordinary and i don't know if there's just something so wonderful about her writing i just yeah i think once i've read real estate i want to go through and read them all almost like binging them in in a trio um as it is a trilogy i feel like i said trio and trilogy too many times now but suffice to say i thought this was amazing can't recommend it enough um now i enjoyed this book very very much but i i've got a few issues around it if i'm being 100 honest and that is sally rooney's conversations with friends now i absolutely loved normal people i was very lucky to get proof of it i read it before it came out and i loved it so much i ended up on the train station posters because i've wanged on about how great i thought it was that isn't the quote they chose to use um i just thought it was incredible i loved the way um sally rooney looks at the unsaid and what isn't communicated and yeah miscommunication all those things so picking up this i was very very excited now i'd heard that you apparently love one or don't like the other that seems to be the general consensus but i did really really enjoy this i think this the sadness for me is that i felt like it was the same story just slightly tweaked and i wonder if i'd read this first and then normal people i might have felt that way too but here we have unfortunate characters names of shortville francis and bobby who are friends who kind of have this relationship sexual relationship um on occasion but they meet a couple called nick and melissa and um bobby becomes very interested in melissa and francis becomes very interesting nick and it's how these sort of it's all about trysts um which which isn't isn't what normal people's about but i don't know what it is i just felt like it ran through the same course we had a relationship that was sort of friendship but then sexual but yet at the same time kind of distance then that spread out a little bit further and then we ended up on a lovely trip to europe and that actually did my life because that happened in mary anki's book as well and there is something about when suddenly characters living in the uk so they just pop off for a very middle-class holiday and um you're around be like oh even though i myself pop off for very middle-class holidays in europe i don't know maybe i feel seen um but um i just and and this you know one of the characters is a writer and it just felt a bit samey and i have to say i did a reveal for um beautiful world where are you which i'm excited about but having read the blurb i feel like it might be the same thing again and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that because i think sally rooney is exploring different things with each book in many ways but i also think you know variety is the spice of life um so we'll see but i'm really intrigued to read beautiful world where are you and i will be reading it but um i just yeah this this didn't satisfy me as much as i wanted it to because i kind of felt it was i don't know a diluted normal people but then i wonder if like i said if i'd read them the other way around i would have feel the other way i would feel vice versa if that makes sense so yeah there we go and then as i am judging the desmond elliott prize i thought it'd be quite nice to read some books that have previously won the desmond earlier prize and one such book is saraswati park by anjali joseph now i have wanted to read more indian fiction for ages and um this is set in saraswati park in india and it's about a couple whose nephew moves in with them and it's how he is dealing with his sexuality it's how his uncle and aunt are dealing with their relationship and what's going on but also what's going on politically within india at that time now i enjoyed this but i have to say for me a lot of this was a lot of sort of showing showing showing um and i felt like the place was done really vividly but the story wasn't i couldn't quite work out what the story was because also some of it became quite repetitive and i didn't see what the i couldn't quite work out what and charlie joseph was trying to say once i'd read it and so yeah i i think as well i was a little bit disappointed that she was the the gay nephew gets into some very negative situations with other gay men and i just feel like that's been done so much and i'm a bit bored of queer characters ending up in miserable cycles or miserable story lines um especially when not especially when yes i think if it had been around how although it would have been difficult to read if it had been around cultural um well the negative bias on queer people within that culture but this was just some horrible people not being particularly nice um and i couldn't see the cultural issues being a reason for it it just was horrible people being horrible so yeah tricky um my thoughts on that one but um yeah but that said i would like to read more of her books but i do feel like it was definitely like endless paragraphs of beautiful prose about the place which the title is kind of the place that the book is set and so maybe therefore that is why the book is so much about it um but yeah anyway there we go and a beautiful cover uh here with uh black narcissus by rumor goddard which is a book that one of the books that chris picked off my shells for me when i did a vlog of um him doing that where i let him choose my uh reading habits i'll link i let him choose my reading habits so i let him choose my reading i'll link it down below um and actually some of those books are from a book i can't speak some of these some of these videos some of these books are also from a video that i did where i only read yellow covers i'll link that down below and the reason i've not included all the books from all those videos because i just wanted to mix it up with it basically anyway um right now says this chris picked it off michelle's because it looked beautiful he'd also seen there was an adaptation on the telly this is about a monastery which has gone to no it's not a monastery that's not true it's actually about a nunnery but it's about this sort of huge palace that's gone to rock and ruin that was kind of the salacious um build for this grandiose man um and now it's been left to some nuns and once they're in there it's how it's how their relationships twist and spiral but also how things change both for them and the people around this place some of the history of that place i didn't love it i wanted the book to be as beautiful as that cover or just as brilliant as that cover and i just felt a bit disappointed by it i have to say the ending is brilliantly dramatic but and i've said this on my channel a lot of times or on here a lot of times the book's got gotta be more than it's ending i don't i i just don't think you can say oh i read 250 pages for the final 50 pages and i think i don't know i mean it was obviously enough to draw me through because i found the relationships between the nuns interesting and i just find that whole religious life fascinating we have retired nuns living opposite us and i've never kind of asked them about their careerisms anyway who knew that nuns are tired but they do um so yeah i it just was a bit of a disappointment but it was one of my um 40 classics before 40. i am glad i've read it i can't say i would read anything else but i will say it's dated some of the language i didn't really like um in terms of it being slightly problematic in today's uh world um but yeah it was it was fine that's an awful thing to say isn't it it's fine and then on the other end of the spectrum but i absolutely love but i don't blinking know why because i didn't think i really understood it and that's pond by claire louise bennett but i just love the writing so this is a it's kind of several short stories which could read as a novel because it's the same protagonist who is just thinking about random moments so the title alludes to um her thinking about why a pond has to have a sign on it at a party because it's not deep enough for anyone to fall in and drown in so just what's the point and yet that works there's a whole bit where she's thinking about different potatoes that works and there's also an incredibly sinister um story in here where she is walking on her own and she's thinking about how likely or not it is that she might get raped and that was very difficult to read but but brilliantly written um and yeah there's there's just some it's a really odd quirky collection that i still don't quite understand what went on throughout it um other than these all these different sort of random thoughts as they came about but i really really liked the writing i laughed a lot um even when i didn't quite know what the heck was going on or where we were going to go next it was a ride so yeah i'm looking forward she's got a novel coming out and i'm really looking forward to this and also i should say this is the american edition which i really really really love um then we have um and chris chose that actually off my shelves um because he liked the cover um i have the finished copy of this um it is boy queen by george lester i did have it but i um gave it to my mum's school i'm donating any why a uh queer books that i love to my own school so i've kept um i've kept this um i kept the proof sorry and also sometimes it's really nice to have the proofs so i really really enjoyed this i've just realized that i've completely forgotten the name of the okay robin robin and this is all about a young man called robin who is basically coming to terms with his both his sexuality and what he wants to do in life and he's got this kind of really rubbish relationship with a boy who's closeted at school and it's about him wanting to get into theater school and not quite going the way he hoped and so he ends up going to a um drag show and wanting to do drag and i won't say any more because i don't want to spoil it because it's just such a treat i read this in a single day i just literally devoured it i thought it was brilliant and uh yeah so i'm i'm it's really lovely because i know george um and just his personality and his joy is totally in this book along with his real passion for um drag and pop um and theater but also he writes some beautifully heartbreaking scenes if that can be such a thing um so yeah it's the kind of book that i wish that i'd had in my school library when i was a kid hence why i donated it to my mum's sorry someone was at the door right so four more books to go one hit and then three absolute misses i should have said at the beginning i'm gonna be slating a few books coming up because that would have kept people watching i'm sure probably anyway this is a treat for those of you who are dedicated to the cause and watch every single minute i'm joking it doesn't bother me if people need to go and try it off and do anything hey blah blah next book chris um chose me the red house mystery by a.a milne and he chose this because amel of course is known for writing winnie the pooh and not particularly for writing a um crime well mystery i was going to say thriller and it has got thrilling skills but it's very wat ho and uh it's very much kind of agatha christie golden era crime i really enjoyed it um it's about a murder that happens in a big old house lots of people are suspects and amateur amateur detectiveness shenanigans whatever begins and there's a few very wry uh sort of well nods uh a bit of shade towards sherlock holmes throughout this which i kind of enjoyed even though sherlock is like you can't beat sherlock in my mind uh for a detective but i did it i did enjoy those nods and also i like the fact that i didn't guess what direction was going to go i had an inkling actually at one point and i thought no i can't do that um but i never felt like i was being wrong-footed uh there are a few red herrings but enjoyable ones because sometimes i think with crime especially modern crime actually is i can sometimes feel like the author is really really trying to mislead you so you have that big twist this isn't like this is just as joyful twist as you go and secret passages and ponds that have mystery at the bottom of them and yeah it's just it's really really really good fun so i'd recommend it very very much indeed now onto the duds sexuality a graphic novel by mega john barker and jules shiel i was really excited for this one i think the covet is absolutely stunning it's a shame that therefore it's black and white throughout and reads like a flipping children's textbook that you would have got at school in the uh well when was i school the 90s um so yeah i found this quite dry um i found it quite patronizing i also found some of it quite i don't want to use the word problematic often because i think it's overused a bit like counseling people but i just found some of it uh not inappropriate what's the term that i want to use just just just just i don't know what to say i just yeah some of it i just didn't agree with there we go i very much disagreed with i didn't quite like how it looked at certain things within the queer community and i was just yeah really really disappointed by it and it was supposed to but it just it did feel like i was being really taught something rather than enjoyably learning something and for me that's an absolute killer but also it felt very much like this was two people's version of what sexuality should be even though they were quoting lots of people with lots of different thoughts so yeah just not for me didn't like it um i didn't really and this is going because in fact now i'm going to go the other way around um so i was sent by vintage um two of the um uh fairy tale revolution book cinderella liberator by rebecca sullivan it was one and mario black men it's blue blood it was the other there was one by jeanette winston there's one by camilla shamsie i was going to buy them to have the whole set but i really didn't like them i particularly didn't like this one um so i have meant to read rebecca sonic phrases everyone's raved about her writing i can't see why from this book and she retold cinderella as sorry a slight spoiler but cinderella being liberated by ending up running a cake shop i mean what's that all about um and i just if i was reading it to a kid it was dry also i know that they were like trying to modernize it but why are they using the sort of illustrations from years ago like these are sort of illustrations that i had when i was a kid and i felt like it should have just been a bit more funky full stop um and it wasn't and i was really good as well because blue blood was better but it's still for me i don't know i i've not read my ruby blah blah before and i've always wanted to this probably wasn't the best in because i was in a grump because i just read that one because i decided to read them both together because i think it was when i was having a dear conspiracy i was just being a bit rough and i thought well these will be the same could be that as well but you know it just again i just found whilst you know the imagery just wasn't good enough as far as i was concerned with either of these and i didn't really like the stories that they were i mean to be fair to blue blood i like the real twist on the uh fairy tale of bluebeard i did really like how it was twisted but i just left feeling like okay that was all right um so yeah i i'm not gonna get the other two and i won't have these for long and now that i've done this video actually i can pass them on and maybe some children in the library will enjoy them but like i said i found them dry so i'm not quite sure how i also couldn't work out what age range these were aimed at because that one was really dry and this one felt a little bit grown up for picture book age but i don't have children so i don't know so there we are those are some of the books that i read in february and march i'll be back probably next week with more books that i read in february and march and i'll be back on sunday with a book haul and monday with the next of mine and melanie's book club where i haven't got it oh no i have got it and i'm chipping uh we'll be discussing uh exciting times by noise dollar now just to make this clear this has recently been put onto the desmond prize long list the three judges myself chitra and lisa don't choose the long list that's done by a group of readers who read the whole long list and they're from all around the country and they choose the ten books for us to then wilt down to a short list and a winner and so i didn't know this was going to be on the long list when me and melanie chose to read it so the prize of that i know that you know that there we are anyway i will speak to you all very very soon let me know in the comments down below any of your thoughts on any of these books that i've talked about and yeah i hope you're doing as well as can be i'll speak to you soon bye

Channel: SavidgeReads

Views: 6,172

Rating: 4.9870129 out of 5

Keywords: Booktube, Wrap Up, Savidge Reads, Spring Wrap Up, February Wrap Up, March Wrap Up, Musa Okwonga, Tayari Jones, Claudia Rankine, Anne Enright, Marian Keyes, Kate Elizabeth Russell, Sykes and Savidge Book Club, Deborah Levy, Sally Rooney, Anjali Joseph, Rumer Godden, Claire-Louise Bennett, George Lester, A.A. Milne, Malorie Blackman, Rebecca Solnit

Id: WihsKxtoRPM

Length: 31min 58sec (1918 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021