hi everyone it' Lauren, now I was going
to talk to you today about the books I
read in the first half of March but I've
actually only finished one book and I'm
in the middle of reading several others
so I thought what I would do instead is
do a kind of chatty discussion
about what I'm currently reading and you
know, my thoughts on these books so far
The first book that I have finished in the
month of March is The Argonauts by Maggie
Nelson, now this is a memoir,
autobiography of Maggie Nelson's life with
her partner who is fluifly gendered, but it's
about so much it's like nothing
I've ever read before; it's about gender
identity
it's about your sexuality and changing
sexualities, kind of what it means to be
in a self-identified queer relationship
when that your partner then goes on
testosterone and their body starts to
change and then it's also about
motherhood about her body changing when
she is pregnant with her firstchild
and it's just, it's about so much it's
very very interesting. It's written in a
much more academic style than I perhaps
thought it was going to be, she uses a
lot of quotes from philosophy and
sometimes I did feel like she was just on
this level which I I couldn't quite get
to and
yes, some of it was a little bit above my
head I think, but once I got into her
style and kind of got what she was about
I found it very interesting
it's very, like I say, philosophical
and it's a very interesting look into
what we see as a normal family life and
what the new normal might be in the
future
she's obviously very intellectual and I
enjoyed seeing the world through her eyes
through her perspective. So onto the
books that I am midway through, the first
of these is Leftover Women by Leta Hong-Fincher,
and this is about gender
inequality in modern China the reason
I'm reading this is that is the pick of
the month for the Feminist Orchestra
book club which is a book club that Jean runs
on Goodreads, I will leave a link in the
description box below if you'd like to
check it out. They are having a two-month
hiatus at the moment as it has been going
nonstop for a year but I believe she
will be back in June. I don't read very
much non fiction as a rule but it is
something I would really like to get
into in the coming months so I was
really looking forward to picking this
one up and I especially find China quite
interesting as a country
and this is about a new phrase called
'leftover women' which is used in China to
describe women who are kind of over the
age of 25, 26, 27, 28 who are unmarried and
it's a very interesting phenomenon
because there's a lot of pressure on
young women to get married as soon as
possible
there's also a lot of pressure on young
men to own a home and so even though a woman
might be very financially independent
and put a lot of money into a house
with her husband, in the majority of
cases the deed of the house is in the
husband's name alone and this is where I
am at the moment in the book. There's a
lot of other things I'm sure she's going
to explore, but it's a very interesting
look at all the different contributing
factors as to why women are in a more
financially precarious position in China
than they have been in the past, it
almost feels like they're going
backwards a little bit. It studies a lot of
the different societal norms and
expectations that there are in China
which are very different to where I live
in the west and it uses a lot of
anecdotal evidence for women that
Hong-Fincher has surveyed and she kind of uses
a variety of sources
it does feel like an extended essay or
extended article on the subject I'm not
sure I'm really getting the writer's own
voice through but like I said, because I don't
read a lot of nonfiction I don't reall know
how to compare this to in terms of writing
but the subjects and what I'm learning
I'm finding really interesting and it's
very very readable. I'm also reading some
fiction, I am in the middle of Home by
Marilynne Robinson which is on my kindle
I always like to have a kindle book
going as well as some physical books
because I have this like weird fear that
if I'm on a train and I finish my
physical book...well what if I finish it?
and I don't have another book to hand
to pick up straight away?! Because I always like
to be reading something so I always have
my kindle on me, because it's very easy
to pick a new book on your kindle
Home is part of a trilogy of
companion novels the first of these is Gilead,
add the third one is Lila and I read
those a couple of years ago when we
did the videos for the Man Booker Prize
and Lila was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize so I
thought, well I'd better read some of the
preceding novels to this story before I
read it
However the books themselves don't
actually follow a specific
order and the plots kind of
overlap so you don't need to read them
from Gilead - Home - Lila, you can kind of
read them in any order you want and you can
probably read them stand alone although you'd
get a very different experience I think
doing it that way. I really enjoyed
Gilead when I read it, it's about a vicar
in this small Midwestern American town
who knows that he's terminally ill, he's
writing a series of letters his young
son talking about his life, he's kind of
musing on life, death and faith and I
really very much enjoyed it. Home is told
from the perspective of this vicar's
best friend's family so it's about his
best friend's daughter and it's about
the return home of this guy's wayward son
who's not been in Gilead for about 20
years and it's about how they're
all reacting to that
Marilynne Robinson's writing is very slow
and it kind of unfolds, it'a very much about that
kind of American family life and I think
this is set in the sixties and seventies
so I'm enjoying it because I like
her tone and I liked Gilead when I read
it. To be honest I loved Gilead, I
thought Lila was ok and at the
moment I'm getting vibes that Home is ok
I think I liked Gilead because it was
told from the perspective of this vicar
and I likes his kind of ponderings and
musings on life and Home and Lila are just
about other characters in that world
which just kind of didn't speak to
me as much. And the last book that I'm currently
reading is a collection of short stories
by Lucia Berlin called A Manual for
Cleaning Women and these stories are set in
the 60s, 70s, 80s I think, in various
points in the US, they're set in New York
New Mexico, in Chile and I didn't really know
what to think about this going in, it's quite
a long collection of short stories and I
wasn't sure how I was going to feel, but
actually reading them, most of them are
based on Lucia Berlin's own life and
there's lots of characters that come
back and it feels like it's
fictionalized, but some of it I'm not
sure it's fiction or if some of it really
happened, so it actually becomes this
cohort of stories which all make sense
together and it feels like these are
different chapters of one big story and
I'm really loving that she looks
at some quite intense and sad subjects
but she puts a little bit of humor in
there and she's got some quite dry and
witty observations about American
life, so I am really enjoying it so far
I'm about halfway through
it's not the kind of book that you can race
through because it's just lots and lots
of little stories but yeah I'm actually
very impressed. I'm enjoying it more than
I expected to be going in. I will be
really interested to see if my opinions
on any of these change like once I
finish them compared to where I'm
feeling now at the midway point for
most of them. I would love to hear from
you as always if you've read any of these books and
I guess I'll see you in my next video
bye!
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