The 19 Books I Read in January (including classics)

hello it's ruby and today i'm going to be telling you and reviewing all of the books that i read in january so this month i read 19 books which is more than i would have expected to read if i'm honest i don't usually read as many books as that anyway i'm going to separate this video into classics children's books non-fiction and contemporary so we're going to start with non-fiction both of the non-fiction books i read were books related to the holocaust because i am doing a holocaust remembrance module at the moment the first book i read was eichmann in jerusalem by hannah arant you might be familiar with aran's work already she's a philosopher political commentator and she also documented the 1961 eichmann trial in the new yorker through a series of articles this trial was so so seminal for raising public awareness about the holocaust at the time that this trial came about there weren't really public discussions about holocaust memorial and holocaust memory just to give you um a background the 1961 eichmann trial convicted adolf eichmann who was a nazi who worked on the final solution this trial was treated as kind of the main trial for nazi persecution this trial wasn't just for eichmann it was this moral trial of the holocaust and bringing to light the evil which had occurred during that time the really significant thing which came out of hannah arendt's documentation of this trial was this idea of the banality of evil which you might have heard about um it's this idea that normal people in the modern world can do truly horrendous things the idea that evil has become banal because we can be very separate from the things that we do like eichmann never directly killed anybody but he signed papers and he gave commands which allowed that to happen but the really shocking thing which people found in the trial is they wanted they wanted this monster they wanted someone who was very clearly evil but instead they had this person who was he was a normal person and so the trial raised these really key questions philosophically about the nature of human beings it's really interesting to read a lot of it as i said because it was it was a trial not directly just for eichmann but of the holocaust in general um it kind of reads like a history book for a lot of it perhaps the first and last sections of the book are the most philosophically poignant but the whole thing is really really worth reading it's one of those books that i would truly recommend to everyone i give it five stars so the second book i read was the holocaust in american life by peter novik which i would only give two stars i mean i don't regret reading it but there are definitely better books that you could read if you want to learn more about the holocaust this book specifically focused on the relationship between jewish communities in america and europe at the time of the holocaust and like the disjunct which existed between them and it also looked at journalism of the holocaust in uh newspapers in america like the new york times and like how they were documenting it it's quite long and you don't get like so much from it i think there are better books you can read so i'm actually going to segue into the one contemporary book which i read this year because this is a memoir it's on earth we are briefly gorgeous by ocean fuang this is one of the books that we read for the ruby reads book club and this is in the top definitely the top 10 books i've ever read of all time which is like a massive massive thing to have found a book that high up on my list in the first month of the year is amazing so wong is writing a letter to his mother who cannot read um so the whole of this the whole of this book is him relaying his life and relaying his most core experiences memories feelings in this letter which he knows his mother will never be able to read which is just it's so it's such a poignant way to write the book like the very form of the book is uh kind of infused with this melancholy his mother was an immigrant from vietnam and so the book also chronicles this experience of being an immigrant in america it also looks at like him coming to terms with his sexuality in our book club discussion actually we had a zoom called to discuss the book and someone said i absolutely love this this book is about normal people these these people are real like they have faults and um they're not perfect but they become perfect and they gain meaning because it's through the eyes of somebody who knows them it's this wonderful perspective on relationship this is a book that i'm definitely going to come back to it's poetry it takes feelings and then it explains them or articulates them captures them in the most unique way like through these really domestic images like things that you see every day but they they hold like such incredible significance and meaning and isn't that what it's actually like our core emotions and feelings aren't held in massive monuments they're held in tiny things which gain meaning because of the experiences which we have with them yeah it's just it's wonderful i i like underlined so many so many crates in there okay so now going into classics i read the wonderful adventures of mrs seacole in many lands by mary seacole and uh this is again a memoir mary seacole was a nurse in the crimean war so like florence nightingale it's interesting that she's not known about in the same way on my gcc history curriculum we learned about florence nightingale um she was someone that i like i knew about the whole way through childhood we all know florence nightingale and yet i hadn't known about mary seacole which is actually really like half embarrassing half just really sad florence nightingale deals with logistics and she did hands on nursing but not so much as mary seacole like in this narrative you see this intense connection with the men and she kind of takes on the role of mother sicole that's what they call her so you have this really intimate relationship between her and the man the moments where men die or are injured on their death beds they are so moving the tone of the book is also really chatty like there are lots of oh yes it was like this um and oh i should tell you and it kind of it kind of sounds like a story that your mum would tell you you know if you're when you're a kid and you ask your mum to re-tell you that story from her past that you love so much it kind of reads like that and so i think it fits really nicely in with that whole idea of her as a mother i only gave it three stars though and that's because however much i appreciated certain moments of the text and um appreciated the fact that i learnt more about mary seacole i didn't actually really enjoy the book i think that's because there's no real plot or recognized characters like because she is working on she is working like treating these men they come and go so you don't have set characters who are there the whole way through like she's the only person who is there the whole way through the narrative and obviously like in real life we don't have a natural progression of plot like things just come up and about and there isn't like a natural progression but but it does it doesn't mean that reading as a book it's just not as enjoyable um still i would recommend it because i think it's an important seminal text let's go on to mary barton by elizabeth gaskell next like the genre of this text is really hard to place because it's domestic but it's also political it's also sensationalist it's a romance novel like there are so many different genres blurring in with each other and it kind of changes like between the two volumes like halfway through the genre just changes this is set in a working class household in manchester during the industrial revolution and you have mary barton who is a young woman she's like in her early 20s and she lives with her father john barton who works in a textiles mill and he becomes really actively involved in protesting for workers rights i think my favorite thing about this narrative is that you have this divide between working class and middle class upperclass um households so you have scenes which are set in working class homes and then right next to that you have these scenes in middle class drawing rooms and the distinction is just so so striking but i think the really poignant thing is that the working-class families are so much more tight-knit like they're so much closer and the communities within their villages and streets is just so much like it's so much more beautiful than within the middle class homes where you're literally like within the drawing room and you don't speak to anyone outside of your house it's like it's a really cutting examination of middle class life by a middle class woman so this book is critical of capitalism and how the industrial revolution has really negatively impacted the working class and like how it's led to so much poverty she does also draw attention to how it's not just the working class who are suffering at the hands of modern capitalism but it's also the middle class the this is something i just picked out when reading and i found quite interesting marx picks out this idea in his writings that people become defined by their jobs but interestingly it you don't you don't have the working-class people being defined by their jobs like john barton is never actually shown in the factory he's always shown at home in the context of like other people and hobbies and things whereas the middle class are defined in terms of their jobs like if you see a doctor they won't be given a name they'll be called the doctor they'll be called the fireman like they're defined in terms of their profession so you kind of see that them not benefiting from capitalism too yeah um sorry to go on a ramble there but it is a good book i would recommend it uh next jane eyre by charlotte bronte this was a long time in the reading like i started rereading this book last year and then i just read it slowly over the first lockdown put it down and then picked it back up at the beginning of this year and finished it and oh my goodness i loved it so much more this time than last time i read it when i was 12 and retrospectively like i enjoyed reading it but i just didn't really kind of appreciate it in the same way i just read it for plot whereas this time i felt like i could kind of appreciate the context of it a lot more and appreciate jane eyre as a character too you will know the story of jaina but if you didn't know it's a classic bulldogs roman novel which basically means that it follows the progress of a character like through their life you have you start with jane as a child she's living with her aunt in this like upperclass house but she's mistreated in this house and so she's sent away to boarding school she becomes a governess at the house of mr rochester where she falls in love with him wonderful use of language and imagery i really like jane eyre as a character um she's really fiery she's strong and her strength is very much her ability to restrain herself and like refrain from things and self-sacrifice and i do think that's really powerful so i give this book like 4.75 the thing i didn't like was the ending it feels kind of forced it doesn't really fit i don't think it really fits with jane's character and it's done for the sake of this resolve and teaching a moral lesson providing a moral lesson i wonder if it's literally simply because charlotte bronte she might not have been able to publish her book if it didn't end with this moral ending but it just it doesn't sit quite right and it also comes out of nowhere like you get to the last like three pages and you're like surely something's gonna happen spoiler that um you're getting to the last few pages and you're like surely jane and mr rochester are gonna get back together and then yeah it happens but it's like in the last few pages and it just kind of it reads like an afterthought it also upholds this idea of the angel in the house which is women were encouraged to be the angel of the house they were like this pure and moral force in the home which led moral teaching like the mother was responsible for morally teaching her children and also ensuring that her husband remained moral and so with jane returning to mr rochester at the end and she's almost returning as this like force for teaching him to be moral and maybe especially in the context of the fact that she was like meant to go out and be a missionary the fact that she declines that and then goes to mitch with mr rochester she's kind of in the context of this colonial missionary narrative at that point i didn't like the ending but the rest of the book i loved and if it had a different ending it would have definitely been five stars next aurorally by elizabeth barrett browning uh this was mentioned in one of our lectures and we like read an extract of this for our victoria module and i loved it so much that i went away and read the full thing this is a novel which documents the growth of aurorally as an artist i mean like as a poet as a writer and it's kind of semi-autobiographical because elizabeth barrett browning was also a middle-class woman who um became a poet um like there are massive similarities between the two between their two stories so it starts with her as a young girl and she her father died she moves to cornwall where she's educated on how to be a prophet young lady by her aunt those first two books where she's being taught how to be a lady were for me the most interesting in the book because you get this great insight into female education and what it meant to be a perfect ideal woman the most striking thing when i was reading like you've got this uh the aunt teaches her that art is supposed to be done in a frivolous way for the sake of your husband so you should sew cushions which are going to be thrown on the floor accidentally basically just do embroidery for the sake of doing embroidery so because it's a respectable thing to be seen doing embroidery like the point is you're not supposed to create anything meaningful you're just supposed to do it because that's what women are supposed to do and it's just this like really awful understanding of art and i love the way that she uh totally turns on her head and royally goes away and it's like book five she changed her whole whole disposition she's like no that's not how i'm gonna make art i'm going to write to create something wonderful and meaningful and i think it's just it's great um i think especially like one of the best bits about this book is it is written as an epic poem it's a domestic book it's about a woman but it's written as a as an epic poem like the odyssey you have this great like recognition that female experience is also worthy and it's not just male experience which is kind of like worth having an epic poem written for and also the form is like a constant reminder that she is a talented artist because she's written this so um aurorally wonderful really liked it four stars maybe uh then this is actually a poem and i added up my goodreads literally because i'd put it on my tbr and so when i read it i put it on red but it's a poem it's also by elizabeth browning it's called the cry of the children and it was a really influential seminal poem which was a criticism of the conditions of the working class in industrial cities so it's used to invoke sympathy for the working class through children so children are used as the point of empathy i think she's appealing to maternal instinct and children were evocative symbols in the victorian period because in middle class homes victoria like children were more important than they'd ever been before like they had like a lot of emotional like and significant social value put on them it's a really sad poem really moving it made me cry actually next the talented world hall hall by anne bronte oh my goodness this book was just wonderful it's my favorite bronte book like i love jaina but this is like six stars it's amazing i again have read it once before i read it when i was 13. i brought it to the beach with me and i literally read the whole thing in one sitting um i sat there on this like on the sand for hours and just read this book i adored it and i loved it so much more the second time reading it and we studied this in the victorian module so like being given the chance to talk about it too i loved this book is narrated by gilbert who falls in love with the mysterious mrs graham who comes to live at this old house called wildfell hall she's a widow who appears with only her child and her ladies made and there is so much like scandal in the village because nobody knows who she is everyone and there are these rumors surrounding her and she doesn't uphold like normal escape and what women are supposed to do women go round and leave their calling cards and she doesn't return them which is a very scandalous thing to do if you're a victorian lady mrs graham ends up giving gilbert her diary which reveals that she isn't actually a widow and she is still married to mr huntington she was in very abusive relationship with mr huntington and she ended up running away from him with her child to escape this like really awful marriage it's worth keeping in mind the context here because this is a grating criticism of marriage laws the marital rights that women had at this point and actually if you look at like looking at the timeline you can see that um marriage reform does come after this book like this book is influential this book i think does have it like sits in the context of wider marriage reform and these debates i think my favorite bit about this book is the form because as i said you have her diary gilbert's narrative is told through a letter to his friend and within the letter he puts mrs graham's diary so you're reading this letter and then suddenly you're reading her diary and the diary lasts a long long time this book was published in three volumes the diary starts in the first volume is the whole of the second volume and is like a lot of the third volume so you've got this long long diary and usually just in i was doing some research into the context of diaries and like maybe sharing them in letters it was it was quite a common thing for women in their letters to each other to share extracts of their diaries and like include those little snippets but to include a whole diary like this was very unusual and so reading it as like kind of if you can imagine actually reading as a victorian reader you'd expect for that diary to end any second um but instead it just keeps on going and so you get this like very tangible like the visuality of the book in the form of the book gives you this insight into like how long mrs um mrs graham was trapped inside of this abusive relationship i think that adds like how cruel it was and like how important marriage reform is yeah i'm not going to go into too much more depth apart from to say i love mrs graham as a character it's a change from the traditional female character which you'd have at the center of these narratives she is an objective scandal she's a woman who is scandalous um she's a as i said she's a widow she's a single mother and she'll say shrouded in history and she also has a chain like changing of names like her identity isn't fixed she's the tenant worldview hall which we see on the title of the book but she's also mrs huntington mrs graham helen like she's got so many identities yeah wonderful book oh my gosh you have to read this book six stars as i said okay so then the final victorian novel i read was sense and sensibility by jane austen which was again for the ruby reads book club and i actually enjoyed this book you might know that i am not the biggest fan of jane austen and i've always been quite vocal about the fact that i do not like her books i've read pride and prejudice many many times mansfield park and persuasion didn't like any of them but i really enjoyed sense and sensibility sense and sensibility follows two sisters eleanor and marianne and after their father died their mother and their little sister margaret moved to barton cottage which is um a much smaller place of residence it's about complicated relationships your eleanor hoof was in love with edward marianne who's fallen in love with willoughby but also colonel brandon is in love with her and so you have like these complicated relationships and the plot itself is not very exciting like i don't know how it was so griffing because so little happens and it's all like so complicated and there's so much description for the sake of nothing happening but i think with this book i really appreciated how jane austen was being so like how it's all sardonic it's all sarcastic and she's doing it for a fact like she's making a point that this is ridiculous and i think you see that especially with like how complicated all of the family relationships are and how inheritance is going to work and how much money people are going to be given and everything's so convoluted that you just see how confusing it is and how little sense it makes um so it gives like a very good insight into that um yeah i realize i'm speaking for way too long on all of these books so i'm gonna kind of cut down my reviews a little bit now four stars maybe three and a half i i'm looking forward to reading some more of her books after reading this okay i'm actually gonna go take a break and have lunch because i've been reviewing books for like 40 minutes now and i will check back in with you possibly in the same outfit possibly tomorrow as per warned i think the lighting is probably quite different but hopefully it's not too bad the next two things are actually short stories both by ed grampo the first is the mask of the red death it's got just the right amount of frightening so in this short story there is a plague called the red death and it's just outside of the walls of this king's castle and he's invited lots of people around for a party and all of the doors have been closed the gates have been locked to keep out the red death and to keep out the um disease and it's so so relevant to today like when we think about it in terms of covid and how wealthier people have been able to lock themselves away from the virus in a way that some people just can't do if you're working in a if you're working in the primary sector and you're still having to go out to work um you can't protect yourself from the virus in the same way that the king in this um short story can like i think this i think this short story is really worth reading at the moment and the other one is hop frog i only give this two stars because it's so problematic to read now so this is about a jester in court who is disabled in a jacobean court there were two types of fools so you had um the one who acted and then you had the natural fool which is basically where people would laugh at somebody for being disabled hopfrog falls more into the natural full category which makes this whole story problematic basically in the short story hot frog plays a trick on the king who is described as a tyrant like you're supposed to think of the king as the villain in the story and poe has like polaroids that say that hot frog is meant to be better than than the king but i still think it's problematic just because hop frog is dehumanized so much we only ever hear about him through this nickname that he's been given by the court yeah um so i only give it two stars because i do like pose writing but it was just kind of uncomfortable to read especially because some of the language which was used okay so then um finally for classics i read the painter of modern life by charles baudelaire this is possibly what am i saying this is the best essay i've ever read i've never read an essay which is so wonderfully lyrical um usually reading essays reading non-fiction essays i am aware of the fact that i'm reading them like i'm finding it interesting but i know that i'm reading it this felt like reading fiction i forgot i was reading it which is testament to how good it was so you should read this in this essay baudelaire basically documents what it means to be an artist so he talks about how artists see the things that other people miss and then through that art they're able to document it and he also considers the artist as a kind of child like having the sense of wonder and open-mindedness that you find in a child and i think the actual form in the way that it's written really mirrors this like child-like wonder uh just in the descriptions which because it doesn't he doesn't just make these points he like illustrates it with actual examples of wonderful things that you see so it's really really good i recommend it so then finally we're going to go into children's books which i read i read quite a few children's books so the first one i want to talk to you about is actually a picture book and this is the book it's called bat wings and petticoats and this is actually where my friend blake knew he you might know i live with her at university and i know that i'm biased because obviously she's one of my best friends but this picture book is honestly one of the best children's books i've i've ever read for one the illustrations are just beautiful painted herself with watercolor and i love the details in these paintings like the fact that there are little ornaments on the sides the details of the london skyline um there are actual posters which have little um diagrams and pieces of writing on them it's just it's like the her attention to detail is just amazing this book is set in victorian london and it's about a young girl called tia who wakes up one day to find that she has grown bat wings and a tail and so she has to hide them beneath her crinolines not let anyone see her otherwise they will think she's strange it's just it's a really clever story it's a story of friendship and trust and this idea that we never quite know what other people are dealing with it's such a special message really beautiful i'm gonna be sending a copy of this to my second cousins because i really think that they'll like they'll like it they're very young so i read that one which is very short but very good oh and also 100 of the profits go to feeding britain to help combat hunger and families on low incomes in britain so all the money goes to a really good cause as well so the next book is the fifth book in the miss peregrine series which is the conference of birds i love this series i don't usually read book series read the hunger games and divergent series but i didn't like really like them the further they went on this series though i have loved every single book in it and i can't wait for the sixth one to come out you probably already know the premise of miss peregrine's home peculiar children but it speaks of this kind of separate realm from the real world which is made up of peculiar these are people who have peculiar talents uh things about them which make them different so for example one of the children emma uh can create fire from her bare hands and then you have enoch who can bring things to life i love how varied the peculiarities are the whole book is pretty creepy but also so clever and i think one of my favorite bits is the um vintage postcards which ransom riggs has um like uses to illustrate his books it's so clever because he takes his real-life photographs and then he interweaves them into the narrative and it kind of helps him write them it's just it's such such a great book series and i would highly recommend it next i read the invention of hugo cabre by brian selznick i've wanted to read this book for the longest time i loved the scorsese film in 2011 like how magical and wonderful it was i think there's something so wonderful about clockwork in general and like the intricacies of it and how everything works together and fits together it is its own special kind of magic it's so great to see that magic transferred into this children's book so uh basically hugo cabre is a young boy who lives in a train station in paris he lives alone and he's responsible for winding back the clocks in the station and he has the secret uh he has an automaton which he is fixing uh before his father died he and his father have been working to fix it and this is the story of hugo and the automaton uh the really great thing about this book though uh is the illustrations i'd actually wanted an award for it um for how unique its illustrations were the book kind of mixes fiction and real life because it draws on real life cinema history and this is reflected in the illustrations so you've got the text but then you've also got it accompanied by these black and white illustrations which are dotted throughout the novel and they'll be like on consecutive pages so when you turn through them it's like you're watching a silent film and it's just so clever and sometimes the pictures will like substitute the written text just a pleasure to read it's like to read and i would highly recommend it no matter what age you are this next book is another picture book this is pola the titanic bear by daisy corning stone speddon this was actually recommended to me by a viewer called roo and uh she said that this was one of her favorite books and i asked for it for that for christmas that year and then i didn't read it i have this awful habit where if there's a book i really really want to read i will put off reading it because i want to wait for the perfect moment um and i read it early this year i think i read it on like the 2nd of january and i just i thought it was i thought it was a really great story there are good illustrations and there are also pictures from the titanic so this is a children's picture book that was written by the author for her son douglas the family had been on the titanic all of them in the family survived and douglas had a soft toy bear called polo which he took on he took on the ship with him and which survived with him so the book documents um douglas and paula's adventures before going on the titanic and then on the day of the titanic and the bond between them and it's a it's a lovely touching story about the bond between a child and his favorite soft toy like you know kind of thing velveteen rabbit i really did enjoy it as a book and i think it's really touching that it's from a mother to to a son um but there is something quite uncomfortable about the fact because this the this family is extremely privileged very wealthy first class passengers for the family in the in this book the greatest tragedy is the fact that he temporarily loses his bear at the end and it seems so incongruous and it doesn't really seem to fit because of how much was lost that night so you can't read this book without being so hugely aware of its circumstances and of the class divides which were like so integral to the titanic disaster and like the debates which are raised out of it it's a children's book but like you read it in a very political way because of the way that like we understand the titanic next summer's dream by kathy cassidy which i would give three and a half stars for this book i will give an eating disorder trigger warning but i do think it's one of the most sensitive books about eating disorders which i've read it's a middle grade book and it follows summer who's age 12 and she's preparing for an audition at a really exclusive ballet school her mum is on her honeymoon and her sister is spending less time with her and um she throws everything into these auditions she feels like she's losing control and so she turns to her food and starts controlling that it's a very sensitive account of an eating disorder and it doesn't go into little detail about the actual eating disorder it's more about her mental state and the pressure which um she finds herself under um so i thought it was i thought it was a sensitive account a good book for young young readers and then finally the actually this was the first book i read this year but also i'm saying it last for some reason um the secret garden by frances hudson banette which i would give five stars and if you can believe it i have never read this book which is so funny because a little princess is literally my favorite book of all time and this is francis hodgson bernat's other most famous book for some reason i just didn't like the sound of this book i didn't think i'd enjoy it when i was younger and so i never read it um and how mistaken i was because i thought it was fantastic so like little princess this is set in the edwardian period and it's one of the first books written especially for girls it follows mary lennox whose parents die in india and so she is sent to live with her uncle in his mansion in the yorkshire moors so mary has been spoiled in india and she is a truly questionable character she is like a very unpleasant character to read and it's actually so refreshing to have a character who is so unpleasant um because like with sarah crew and a little princess she has a wonderful character you love her from the get-go she's like kind and lovely and grateful and wise sensitive and then you've got mary lennox who her nickname is mary mary quite contrary on the boat over and she's very spoiled however this book is a book of transformation of character and as she becomes obsessed with this locked garden on the other side of the garden wall we see her character changing and we see her remedying these like worst bits of her character and it's a really beautiful thing to see i think one of the greatest bits too is just the incredible wonder which is found in nature and in simple things and simple beauties like the beauty of spring the beauty of new life of flowers and these are tiny tiny things and they're imbued with such magic and power and wonder and it's just truly delightful to read so if you haven't read it then you should it's made me very excited for spring more excited for spring than i think i have been okay anyway those are the 19 books that i read in january i hope you enjoyed watching this video and let me know if you want me to do more book review videos in future if this is a kind of video you'd like to see every month i can't from a solo every month but i used to do these i used to film like a book roundup every month and then i just got out of the habit of it so let me know if you want to see that i hope that you enjoyed and i hope that you have a productive week you

Channel: Ruby Granger

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Keywords: how to be productive, morning routine, night routine, study with me, english literature, how to get motivated, university fresher, college freshman, british girl, old fashioned, vintage, cosy, wholesome, day in my life, get productive with me, uni move in, week in my life, study tips, study advice

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Length: 32min 47sec (1967 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021