Hello everyone and welcome back I hope you are doing well A year ago i uploaded this BLOG where i spoke about all of the books that i had read in 2019 and i had so much hope and excitement and innocence about 2020 because little did i know it would suck "and i'm just so excited about it being a new year, a new decade, like i just feel really, really pumped for what this year is going to bring" "what this year is going to bring" "what this year is going to bring ... what this year is going to bring" Boy, you got a storm coming However, the one teeny tiny good thing to come out of 2020 was the fact that I not only met my target of reading 115 books in a year, I actually exceeded it and read 124 ... and i would say "how did that happen?" but we all know- we all know why that happened So, with 2021 now here -- Happy New Year, by the way -- I will not be jinxing this year don't you worry Today i basically thought i would go through all of the books that i read in 2020 with the rating that i gave them on Goodreads as i read them on the screen As well as reviewing every single one (more or less) in just one sentence each, so basically you can get a bit of an insight into what i thought but also what the plot is like and then you can go away with some reading recommendations! How does that sound? Great I hope! *intro music* On tonight's program ladies and gentlemen we have something that's going to make you sick So before we get started, this video is very, very kindly in partnership with Skillshare who are so supportive of this channel and wonderful and I love them. Skillshare is basically an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes designed by experts for curious and creative people. The class that i'm currently taking is called Storytelling 101 and it focuses on crafting narratives and what makes books so captivating to read, from characters to conflict It's a great way to learn new skills and get some structure to your day at the moment given this crazy old situation that we have found ourselves in. But, the most exciting thing of all is that Skillshare have very generously offered that the first thousand of you to click the link in my description will get a free premium subscription trial just by clicking away! So, on with the video. The very first book that i read in 2020 was called The Memorial - this is a book about post-war trauma and repression of grief and also repression of sexuality. The next book was Trainspotting which is shocking, it's gritty -- i've never read the C-word so many times in my life in one sitting. It just left me completely desensitized to that word, by the end it had no shock value at all. Then i read A Journal of the Plague Year ... um not me reading a book about a pandemic in January not knowing that it would soon be my life. Anyway, this book is really, really boring and even less worth reading now that we have literally lived a plague year. I then read A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Wonder: a Woman Keeps a Secret. These are both 18th century satires which are so witty and can still be enjoyed by a modern audience today. I then read The Gatekeeper's Wife and Draupadi. I read these for my South Asian Literature module at university -- really fascinating stuff. Then, So You've Been Publicly Shamed which is a very interesting book all about cancel culture and the impacts that having your mistakes kind of amplified on social media can have on your life (and spoiler alert: it kind of ruins your life) Then i read Is Shame Necessary, Tendencies, Shame and its Sisters, Blush: Faces of Shame ... Can you tell i was writing my dissertation on the subject of shame? Beloved is a completely stunning story about motherhood, about sacrifice, about racism... just a must read. Then Say Something Back is a poetry collection which is alright but it uses so much specialist medical jargon that it's almost impossible to actually enjoy without Googling every single word. Kari is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel, I've never really given graphic novels a chance and this was the first one that i properly read and really, really enjoyed - it is just exquisite. It's all about mental health and it is a lesbian love story. Then we have the Crying of Lot 49 - I hated this book. It's not often i get to the end of the book and understand the plot less than I did before I opened it but in this case that was true. I just found it impossible to read and not in a cool way. On the other hand we have Polly Honeycomb which is a hilarious and frankly ridiculous play. It's about how Romances and novels were seen as something only women would enjoy at the time. I found that it was best enjoyed reading the script with a Youtube performance on my laptop screen at the same time because there's a brilliant one online and it's - it's just great. I then read Outline which I think is just the best title for any of the books on this list because I feel like the central protagonist only ever allows you to understand an outline of her character. All you're able to get is a complete outline of this woman's existence and it also completely refuses to sexualize the female body which I think is really refreshing and so ... awesome book. All the Conspirators is about English middle-class heteronormativity and propriety. Lions and shadows is kind of the same. And then i read a bunch of books for my dissertation research about Christopher Isherwood so we have Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, the Epistemology of the Closet which is just essential reading if you want to understand queer theory, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years, I think I actually stole that book from the university library... like my university experience just ended on a random Tuesday in March and i think i still have that. Well, they stole £9,250 rom me each year so i think it's not my problem. I then read Prater Violet which is kind of a semi-autobiographical account of Isherwood's time as a screenwriter, followed by rereading A Single Man which was the reason i chose to study Isherwood for my dissertation. It is his Ulysses, his Mrs Dalloway, and it follows him in a 24-hour period. But it's all about how a gay man who is kind of ostracised in his neighborhood and it's a very interesting conversation about minorities. The Hungry Tide is so beautiful, it's all about language, sacrifice, protest, resistance, communication, symbiosis. Basically a lady called Priya goes to this labyrinth of islands in the Bay of Bengal to research dolphins but ends up coming away just learning a fascinating amount of stuff about the local community in the Tide Region. Antony and Cleopatra, because we do love a bit of shakespeare in this household ... My English Lit student is showing. Home Fire is one of the best books that i encountered on my degree. It is political and social fiction at its absolute best. It's about national identity, radicalisation, diaspora, and there's actually a Home Secretary character who is scarily similar to Priti Patel and that lady is scary! Um, anyway, please read this book. The Year of the Runaways is just aggressively average I think. Disgrace is about racial relations in South Africa, post-apartheid It uses the symbol of the sexualized female body as a landscape for discussing colonialism in such a fascinating way. The Inheritance of Loss is another good postcolonial book, this time about two parallel lives, one in America and one in the area where India meets Nepal. Then i read some absolute classics we have the Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar and then a book called Sylvia Plath: in Context.The Third and Final Continent - I loved Lahiri's writing and i'm definitely going to be trying to read more of her work in 2021. Manhattan Transfer is a very cinematic book about New York City and the stories of all of these individuals who inhabit the city and their lives just interweave to create this really rich tapestry. Um it's kind of like a montage, it's brilliant. Book number 40 is The Provoked Wife. This is another 18th century satire. Really witty, really funny. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, possibly the last thing I read for my degree and incidentally also one of the worst. Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality and the English Stage (1660 to 1720) -- I was definitely doing some last-minute revision there. And then we get into things that i read after my degree finished so i did a big Ernest Hemingway binge. I read the Old man and the Sea and The Sun also Rises and then the Snows of Kilimanjaro. I'd never read any Hemingway before, but i think in this time where we couldn't travel but we were all lusting for travel so much (I was about to embark on a gap year which I thought was going to include a lot of travelling -- spoiler alert: it hasn't) I just became completely enchanted with Hemingway's writing and his stories of life all around the globe - they're so vivid. Just as closing borders started to make those areas unreachable. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Clearly lockdown was starting to get to me a little bit since i was reading a lot of books about murder. I. think this is also where i had a breakdown and dyed my hair but we don't talk about that. And then I read Normal People and I think reading Sally Rooney and Agatha Christie just reminded me why I love literature so much. Sally Rooney especially captures young people and university and imposter syndrome so well and i think it's important to remind yourself why you actually did the degree in the first place, especially once it gets to exam season which literally sucks every bit of passion out of you. I then read Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. I actually wouldn't recommend reading Jane Austen books back-to-back because pretty much the plot of all of her books is just people going to each other's houses and, firstly, when you can't do that it's really annoying and, secondly, because they're so similar you do get a bit muddled with the names and the characters and the plots and quite quickly you start to lose the plot. But I think that sense and sensibility might have actually been my favourite Austen novel aside from Emma which is just... elite. The Eyes of Darkness, what a throwback! This is a book which accidentally sort of predicted the COVID-19 pandemic and when i say that i mean that it literally just predicted that a virus might come from China but it is just classic Cold War, anti-communism propaganda and not worth reading in the slightest. It's actually terrible. And then because i was making a Youtube video about books which had predicted the pandemic I read a book called Lockdown which was initially rejected by publishers until an actual lockdown came along but honestly it should have just stayed rejected. That book is bad. A Streetcar Named Desire broke my heart into tiny pieces and i enjoyed every second. The Golden Notebook was long and that's the only way i can think of describing it. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was charming and brilliant. I think that Mark Twain actually claimed he was the first person to ever type write a whole book, um so there you go - a bit of fun trivia for you, use that in your next Zoom quiz. Candide is a fun little satire that i read because a fictional character from Normal People recommended it. It was actually for a youtube video that i did about all of the books that Connell reads in Normal People (the tv series and the book) so if you want to go check that out be my guest. I also read Frank O'Hara's poetry for the same video and that was just exquisite, i loved it. Also i actually read The Fire Next Time for that video which became particularly poignant because at this exact moment the Black Lives Matter protests were happening and, yeah, just a really important piece of history that we have lived through, i think, that is still so important to continue talking about. Then we have a rogue bit of Shakespeare ... um i randomly read Coriolanus. I'm not entirely sure why. I might have been having withdrawal symptoms from my degree, stockholm syndrome or something like that. I don't know. Followed by Temples of Delight which is all about childhood friends who become suddenly separated and then find each other again in later life. Never Let Me Go! Oh, this shattered my soul. Ishiguro is an incredible incredible writer and this is basically a book about people who are being raised specifically to one day donate their organs and, I have to say, much better than it sounds like it will be. Then, and i still cannot believe i'm saying this, I actually read The Uni-Verse by ... me. WHAT? And i'd like to think that it's one of the best books that I read this year, I mean i read it a lot of times because i had to read it a lot of times during the editing and proofreading process so i will confess to being a little bit biased because i did write the book. Anyway, I then read In Watermelon Sugar which is surrealist, post-modern, post-apocalyptic, it's just bonkers. It's a story about a utopia with no consumerism or materialism which basically turns out to be less great than they originally thought it might be - and yes it did inspire a Harry Styles song. The Subtle art of not giving a fuuuuu-, How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less ... I think actually the length of this video might make you hate me in 30 minutes or less so i apologise but this is the halfway mark! The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a stunning book with beautiful illustrations my mum actually gave this to me while i was processing grief, um, at this particular moment in time and it just had all the right words that i needed to hear and, yeah, i really recommend this book. I then read three women which is all about womanhood and femininity and for me personally I think that it improved my feminism a lot. It's really important if you're a male feminist to read actual experiences of being a woman, I think. And then I made two videos reviewing Youtuber books which i'll speed through. The first one is Girl Online which actually I was pleasantly surprised by. I enjoyed reading this a lot. Wilde Like Me, again it was actually pretty decent but not really aimed at me i think, um, it was more aimed at, like, mothers. And then it kind of just goes downhill from there. So we have How to be a Bawse - stupid title for a book, hated this. This Modern Love, Hello Life is genuinely not worth the paper that it's printed on. Selp Helf - I think I genuinely lost brain cells reading this one and i cannot afford to lose any more. Then we have You Gotta Want It and a Work in Progress which are two books which just prove that just because you can hire someone to write an autobiography doesn't mean that you should. Especially not in your early 20s when you haven't really done very much yet - terrible waste of money. 147 Things, Love Tanya, I Hate Myselfie, The Amazing Book is not on Fire and Sidemen: the Book. And then the final boss of terrible Youtuber books: Adultolescence. I'm not saying anything about this... I hated it. Intimations is a book of Zadie Smith's observations during the beginning of the pandemic which captures the experience, i think so perfectly. Not a single word is wasted and i think it's such a cool sort of time capsule of that time. Homegoing! Wow, this covers so much ground. It's such an ambitious and powerful novel that traces about 300 years of a family tree descending from two sisters born into different villages in Ghana. Night is a heart-wrenching book about the Holocaust and it's so important to read these narratives as the people who wrote them are starting to not be around anymore. Cinnamon Gardens. I will never, ever, ever stop raving about how talented Shyam Selvadurai is and how well he weaves Sri Lanka's social and political history into his narratives about personal dilemmas. Especially impressive, i think, is his use of space in his novels - they're just awe-inspiring. Girl, Woman, Other: one of the biggest books of 2020. If you haven't heard of it you've definitely seen it because basically all of the posters and advertisements for this book were put up the week before lockdown and so every tube, every bus stop, every notice board that had advertisements on it had this on for the whole lockdown because no one else was advertising anything, so they really got some bang for their buck you know. They really got their money's worth. It tells the tales of a plethora of women, so intersectional and so important. The only thing i would say is that it portrays young people quite badly just because when you're reading it and you're reading the perspectives of the young people in the novel it's very obvious that they have not been written by young people. One of the bits that particularly kind of irked me was when the uni student tells off her mum for using the word friends because she's like "mum we use the word squad now" which is so stupid. That just felt a bit out of touch to me and as someone who is the exact age of this character it was just not very accurate I don't think, but still this book is a must read! Drive is one of those self-help books that has a point to make which could be made in 50 pages but instead takes 250 pages to say it. It's very very repetitive but it's basically about how motivation needs to come from within. The Railway Accident is just surrealist nonsense, it's so pretentious and just a bit frustrating to read. Natives is a book on race and class in modern post-empire Britain. I found it particularly poignant for me because Akala was born in the exact same hospital that i was born in and then moved to Camden where i had recently moved to and i think it just was a real reminder to me of my own privilege and how different my life has been because of my race so i think because of that parallel it was particularly interesting to me but i would recommend this to anyone. Playland is an allegory about racial tension and race relations in post-apartheid South Africa. Siddhartha is about one man's quest to find spirituality before eventually realising that it has to come from within. The Essential Rumi. Rumi was a Persian poet and again it's all about kind of spirituality. The Metamorphosis. This is so bizarre and so excruciatingly slow but then i think that's kind of the point. Basically a man wakes up one morning as a big insect and then it's just about how he navigates and negotiates his new life and it's as bizarre as it sounds. The Third Man. Now i read this not that long ago and I literally cannot for the life of me remember what this was about. Love is a Dog from Hell this is a poetry collection that i enjoyed so much that i then went on a bit of a Bukowski binge so i read You Get so Alone at Times that it just Makes Sense, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame and the People look like Flowers at Last which is the loveliest title for a poetry collection I think ever. Love is a Mixtape, this is a memoir eulogizing this man's wife who sadly died very young and it's written by the editor of Rolling Stone magazine and just captures incredibly well how music is just the soundtrack to our existences. Music lovers will adore this book. Number 100! This was My Policeman, a beautifully crafted narrative all about perspective, betrayal, acceptance (or lack thereof), telling the story of a woman whose husband has a gay love affair and how their three lives all become desperately unhappy. The Course of Love i found just not enjoyable to read at all because it's just so bleak and there's all these philosophical kind of interruptions which i just found really cringey and stupid. Yeah, i just thought it was a bit annoying really. On the other hand we have Norwegian Wood which is by Murakami and it just captures human beings so well. I loved his writing, I thought it was so vibrant although, I have to say, it is about an english student studying in Tokyo which is like kind of my dream so i was always going to love this book. Then we have Women and we are back to Bukowski. This is filthy, raw, pretty much just about Bukowski bonking any woman in sight. It gets quite repetitive after a while. It's very blunt and very authentic but i basically listened to this as an audio book and I remember going to the local supermarket and listening to a very intense and graphic, uh, sex scene and i just felt so embarrassed for like no reason. I mean to anyone else it would just look like a person standing looking at the frozen peas with some headphones in but it was so graphic and i was just horrified. So it was alright, but just pure filth. Then i read Mad Men and Specialists followed by Trout Fishing in America and the Art of War. Oh, the Theory of Everything! Physics is not my thing at all, like i was incredibly bad at physics, but Stephen Hawking has the power to make me enjoy it. The community that I was in at secondary school was actually named after Stephen Hawking so i felt like it was only right to at one point get around to reading his writing and i loved the subtle wit of the way that he writes. But, I could not give this anything other than five stars simply because i do not understand physics enough to correct anything that he said so... it's a five from me. The Alchemist is a brilliant, charming little book. It's about a man who goes in search of his destiny to find treasure and all the different people that he meets along the way. It's lovely. Brother had my heart in my throat. It's about gang crime in a neighbourhood and the loss of a brother and coming to terms with that grief and it's so sad. Changes: A Love Story is everything the Course of Love isn't because it's gripping. It's about divorce, the female body, complicated adult relationships and the role of women in independent Ghana and it's really great. I then read the House on Mango Street which is a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago kind of inventing herself for the future. Around the World in 80 days, i just lived vicariously through this charming classic travel story and read it voraciously all in one sitting Atomic Habits is the best self-help book i think I've ever read. It's all about changing the systems in your life to make positive changes to the habits that you have. Then for my Christmas video where i did 12 hours of just reading Christmas books i read the Grinch, A Christmas Memory, Little Women, The Polar Express, the Nutcracker, the Snow Queen (which inspired the film Frozen) and the wonderfully named The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. Ah, then i read 84 Charing Cross Road. This is just essential reading for any book lover. It's so enchanting and exquisite and it's just about the correspondence between a woman in New York and a bookseller in London and just very heartwarming and cozy. And you will be pleased to know that we have got to the final book that i read in 2020 and this was actually a christmas gift and it's called The Windrush Betrayal and it's all about how the Home Office started deporting people from the Windrush Generation despite the fact that they'd lived in the UK for over 50 years and they'd moved here completely legally -- they were British citizens! And it's just really heartbreaking, i think sometimes when you live through these things and you see it all in the news you don't actually appreciate the full picture of what happened as a kind of event and it's just... shocking. So, um, yeah I would definitely recommend this book. And so that is everything! Those are all of the books that i read in 2020. If you would like to join me on Goodreads then I've just started my 2021 Reading Challenge. Obviously since we're in lockdown, I've been reading quite a lot. But yeah thank you very much for watching my first video of 2021! I hope that it gave you some book recommendations for the coming 365 days (or however long we have left because this video is a little bit late i'm not gonna lie). If you'd like to continue hanging out with me this year then you absolutely can by subscribing down below and checking out my Instagram and Goodreads account which i keep constantly updated with what i'm reading as and when i read them. For now, thank you so, so much for watching and a massive shout out to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. I appreciate you guys more than I can ever explain, and make sure you do sign up using the link in my description. Have a wonderful day and i will catch you very soon! [Outro music] In case i don't see you good afternoon, good evening, and good night
ll 124 books i read in 2020, reviewed in one sentence each
0
May 16, 2021
Tags
