Weekly Reading Wrap-Up: Family Trauma, Vengeance and The Beauty of Nature

[00:00:00]Hello, I'm Bob the Booker and welcome to my channel. And today I wanted to talk about the books that I've been reading this week, these lovely little ones.

[00:00:07]And I'd love to hear your thoughts as well as we go. It is still boiling here in the UK, so I am still slightly electrified constantly in the head department, but otherwise good. So let's get talking a bit about these books.

[00:00:20]First up, I read Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu. And this is I mean it's a great title for a book, but it's also a really unhinged and slightly bizarre book. And so the core idea behind this is we have a young woman who is applying for university and feels a significant amount of pressure sort of to achieve in a certain way. So she is from the US.

[00:00:44]She is an Asian woman and she is basically applying to all the top law schools and she has this sort of thing about getting into particularly Harvard Law School, I think it is.

[00:00:57]And what starts as just a real sort of heavy intention to go to that university and feeling a real sense of this is the kind of pinnacle of achievement. This is how I know I'll have arrived. The book just keeps on getting more and more unhinged because essentially we we learn very quickly that she will do anything and everything to get to this position and to get into this school. And so what starts really I guess more from the the side of her sort of being envious that other people are you know who she sees as being similar to herself are getting in and she's not. What she comes to I sort of understand about herself as it were or at least something that's told to her by someone who has worked around admissions is that she falls too neatly into the bucket of boring Asian female by which it's meant that she has um an application that's almost too perfect. That the personal statement sounds like you know I did these four clubs, I did the debate, I did this, I did this, I did this, all in order to get into a top university rather than from a love of it. And as a result that there are millions of applications from all across the US and internationally every year that just seem to say the same thing. They're all kind of, you know, I was top in my class, I was valedictorian, I volunteered at a shelter, I did this thing, I did debate club. And it starts to become almost a thing in and of itself. Um and so this one conversation with an admissions tutor or kind of someone who knows admissions spirals into something significantly more unhinged. She starts thinking about how she can ruin other people's lives to make them less likely to get into the school so that she has a higher chance.

[00:02:41]She thinks about what she can do to improve her life story. So, how can she go through suffering or through something unique to give her a different flavor for her application versus everything else. So, you know, um without going into the specifics or spoiling anything, there are lots of things that come up in this book that are truly unhinged that actually if she stepped away at any point and said, "That is nuts. What am I doing here?"

[00:03:06]I think she would change her behavior.

[00:03:09]But yeah, so the book keeps on moving on this. And I found it really funny and really interesting in a lot of ways. I did also think in some ways the the kind of unhinged element of it became a bit less believable at certain points. Um but I also can kind of I I think that's part of the fantasy of this novel almost that is kind of understanding somebody who will stop at absolutely nothing and this sort of sociopathic behavior almost to achieve her ends. Um so yeah, this is a bit of a wild romp. Um it it reminds me of quite a lot of the the other kind of of um of sort of unhinged women um in novels that we've had recently. And I think this is a kind of fun companion piece to a lot of them as well. Next up, um an author who I love dearly and will read pretty much anything he writes. Um, Édouard Louis um, with uh, well, he's had two books that have just been published in the UK in English um, and they've sort of been out separately in sort of different time periods in France and sort of other places. Uh, but we have uh, Collapse as it is in English and Monique Escapes and both of them I think translated by Tash Awl are just brilliant in so so many ways. Um, I He He basically he writes quite a lot about his experiences growing up in a working-class household in France that was that had its sort of share of abuse and difficulty and um, him sort of dealing with his own sexuality and bullying and many other things going around. And so there's just a lot in these books anyway where he's really deeply mined his his family life and his personal life. And um, I found in these two books uh, that they were just really really interestingly done.

[00:04:43]So, um, in uh, Collapse he talks a lot about his um, his brother and particularly his brother's uh, very difficult kind of life. He's a man who is quite difficult for Eddie or Édouard to to really feel certain things about because he both loves him as a brother but also recognizes that he is a deeply troubled man who is dealing with a lot of addictions and other things and is violent and is horrible in many ways and is particularly homophobic at times to Édouard.

[00:05:16]But then he also wants to love him as a brother. And so so much of this book is about this moment, this collapse of when his brother suddenly um, becomes really unwell and where a lot of things change. And equally in um, Monique Escapes um, his mother Monique is trying to leave his uh, his father, her partner um, who is abusive and horrible in many other ways. And so as a sort of duo the books really I suppose paint this picture of Édouard's [snorts] life and how he is watching the violence that is around him that shapes how his mother looks at her potential future life after her husband and his brother being kind of carrying on some of that violence itself and kind of perpetuating it which then also makes makes Edouard Louis feel that you know both he and his mom are almost this duo against the violence that they've seen from the the men in the family.

[00:06:14]But then Edouard Louis has to also reckon with his mom then being imperfect and you know there are things that she will say or do or moments where she's thinking about going back to the husband that kind of color the relationship that he has with her as the sort of gay son of a mother and just lots of things that go into it.

[00:06:31]So yeah, I found these really really beautifully done and they just come out in English which is wonderful cuz I I just really love his writing. I think he has such a beautiful way of threading together a story of something so harrowing from his personal life and putting it into something like this. Um it's gorgeous.

[00:06:47]And last but very much not least, Q is for Garden by Jenny Chamarette and I really really adored this. I think this is such a unique way of doing non-fiction. It is a book that is kind of a bit of everything but ostensibly the main focus of this book is about nature and ecology and particularly how the sort of privacy and privacy of a garden and the kind of flourishing of nature in many ways also reflect part of the queer experience. Um and there's a lot that goes into this. I'm doing it no justice by by sort of talking about it now cuz I think it's just such a stunning book in so so many ways. But it takes this idea that nature is um by its very nature something that could be deemed very queer. It is something that doesn't rigidly abide by uh boundaries. It's sort of flourishing and overflowing. It is genderless for the most part. Um, and so kind of plants and ecology and all these other things have this vibrancy uh that is itself a challenge to our very rigid ideas as humans about what humans can and can't be. But then this book also threads together an interesting line about um, other forms of uh how sort of violence that often happens against marginalized groups is also a violence towards land and there are so many other things that go into that. Um, also how there are many people throughout history for whom having a garden um, was their kind of escape from the wider world that sort of sought to uh, pigeonhole them. And so this book writes really beautifully about um, uh, like for example people who would have been now we would deem queer or we'd put sort of various sort of LGBTQIA+ labels on them. Um, but actually in their worlds their way of escaping was also to grow and to have these gardens and do whatever that kind of allowed them this critical lens of everything else that's going on.

[00:08:54]I'm again doing this book no justice at all. Um, it is stunning. It's really gorgeously written. It has this really freewheeling approach where across one or two pages you can cover so many different things within history. It almost feels like um, the author um, is drawing really interesting lines between so many things and kind of connecting them. But in this way that also has a kind of chaotic natural way of being. Um, and I don't mean chaotic as in it's hard to read in that sense, but there's a kind of um, it feels almost like a bee going between various flowers and creating the little connections between them. Um, and that's what I really loved about this book that it it kind of defines easy definition in the same way that kind of queerness and nature and define easy definitions as well. So, I just thought this was so, so beautiful. Um really, really gorgeous book and I really urge you to go and check it out.

[00:09:47]I think it's just a really stunningly focused book in its kind of unfocused and its kind of way of threading together so many disparate things. Um but really above all else feels like a call to respect nature's kind of unique ways that it's not an easy categorization. Um that nature is this multifarious beautiful thing. Um and that's what I really, really love about this book, too. The way that it allows that to, pun unintended, flourish and bloom um throughout the writing. I just thought this was absolutely stunning.

[00:10:18]So, those are the books that I have been reading this week. I hope you are having a really lovely week and not melting as I am. Uh take care and speak to you all soon. Bye-bye.