These five books are (mostly) fabulous.

[00:00:01][music] >> Hello, let's talk about the five books that I have most recently read. I'm here in Thailand. I'm on vacation. I have a swimming pool, which is wonderful and a little bit perilously close to where I'm sitting right now. Hey, look. See all of these here? Simba, everything the light touches. I I read that fairly recently and I thought I'd do a wrap-up video where I talk about some of these reads.

[00:00:23]Four of them were awesome. One of them was not. We'll get to that one in a minute. So, I'm just going to give you the synopsis of these books and generally how I found them. Why don't we start with Ursula K. Le Guin because I read The Left Hand of Darkness, one of the books in her Hainish sci-fi cycle.

[00:00:40]This is my eighth or ninth Le Guin novel. I've read all of Earthsea. I've read Rocannon's World.

[00:00:44]I read Rocannon's World. Remember virtually nothing about Rocannon's World. And now this one. This one was a plane book. I read it on the plane on my phone.

[00:00:52]Kindled my way through the skies and really enjoyed it. It definitely was a a book of two halves though. So, let me explain the premise. What you have here is a character called Genly Ai. And Genly Ai is a member of the Ekumen, a bunch of planets including Earth. And and all these planets link up and share knowledge and and basically make lives better for everyone across all of the planets. And Genly has arrived on this planet called Gethen to convince them to maybe possibly sign up and come join. But Gethen is a weird place. First of all, it's very cold.

[00:01:23]It's very wintry, you know, basically our poles would be their equator. Gethen is also home to two kind of superpower nations, one of which has a king, very monarchic, and it has almost a feudal system thing to it. It seems a wee bit more mystical as well at the same time.

[00:01:37]And then you also have this other superpower, which is a little bit more secret police. It's a little bit more totalitarian, you know, they'll smile at you and then they'll send you to the gulag. So, both of these places maybe aren't ideal, but the key thing about Gethen is also that every single citizen is ambisexual, I think is how it's described. Ambisexual, they kind of embody both genders at the same time. or rather they don't have any gender most of the time except when they come into heat, you know, a certain period of the month. Members of Gethen get really Randy, and but the rest of the month they're totally fine. So, the population of Gethen is human or humanoid but very different in a lot of ways from the way that we see ourselves as human. It's a fascinating book, but this is why I'm saying it's a book of two halves because the first half for me felt very cerebral, quite cold. It was like Le Guin was introducing us to all these interesting little ideas and and parts of world building. But the book had no heart for me in the first half. We're following Genly as he visits various parts of this world and interacts with various different people and has kind of moments of cultural miscommunication and realizing more and more about this planet and about himself.

[00:02:42]But it all felt very standoffish, I guess is how I'd describe it.

[00:02:46]Masterpiece, but standoffish. But the second half of the novel is where the thing really finds its heart, I believe.

[00:02:52]It's where things stop being so academic and head-scratchy and come back down to Earth or Gethen as the case may be. The second half of this novel really, without spoiling anything, strips a lot of these layers back and make it much more of a personal story, a much more of a relationship story. And so, all these themes that were bandied about in the first half, intercultural communication being a big one and one that I personally love as a theme, and loyalty and the the line between kinship and lover, all of that really comes together in a much more impactful way in the back half of the novel for me. And so, I read the first half going, "Yes, very interesting." But the second half I was truly wowed. And I really like Le Guin's description. It's very visual. I'm just thinking about it now. There's not a whole lot of auditory or tactile description that that comes to mind, at least for me. What Le Guin does so well is painting emotion visually, and that very much happens, again without spoiling anything, in the back half of this novel. So, it was a really great read. Not what I was expecting at all, and I think I still do prefer Le Guin's Earthsea stuff over her sci-fi, but certainly I'm very interested in continuing with more of her sci-fi further on down the line. You know, it's interesting because the series that was coming up for me a lot is a series I recently completed, which is the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. But, I think the key difference here is Banks really enjoys answering the big questions of of purpose and eternity and existence. And Le Guin does that, too, but I think Le Guin is far more focused on the social aspects of things. Not necessarily who are we, but who are we together. So, I'm sure that Banks was inspired by Le Guin.

[00:04:30]I haven't checked that, so that could be totally wrong. But, certainly if one wasn't a fan of the other, then they're coming from very similar places. Anyway, Left Hand of Darkness, not what I was expecting, but really, really rewarding, and I would recommend it to pretty much anyone.

[00:04:45]That being said, I think I'm probably the last person to have read it.

[00:04:47]Speaking of being the last person to read something, segue, so I also read The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien, or rather I audiobooked it. I did the Andy Serkis narration, and I'm going to speak about that a little bit at the end, but it was a great time to pick this novel up, or this part of a bigger novel, up.

[00:05:04]And yeah, it was awesome. I should probably say something a bit better than it was awesome, right? I'm a BookTuber.

[00:05:10]I've got to be got to be at least somewhat intelligent, but the truth is I feel like everything's already been said about The Two Towers, and also everyone knows it's it's fabulous.

[00:05:19]So, do I do in the meantime? Let me give you a couple of things that struck me about The Two Towers, um and certainly my reading of it and maybe compared to the movie, cuz a lot of my interpretation of the text and a lot of my reading of the text was overshadowed maybe a little bit by the movie. I really wish I'd read the books before watching those movies, and I can't do anything about that now, but I'm already thinking with my children, um make sure that they have a chance to read those books before I I shove Fellowship of the Ring in their faces. So, there we go.

[00:05:48]We're going to pass it down the generation. Let me just tell you a couple of things about The Two Towers that surprised me and that I wasn't expecting. And the first one is the character of Saruman, right? We all know The Lord of the Rings movies are masterpieces.

[00:06:01]I didn't know they did Saruman so dirty in those movies, man. And I am not besmirching Christopher Lee, who is a fabulous actor and just all round amazing dude. Like he had like a heavy metal band in his 90s. I think he's the only cast member of Lord of the Rings to have met Tolkien as well. So, no shade to Christopher Lee.

[00:06:18]But Saruman is so captivating in The Two Towers. He's barely in it, but when he's there, he is I mean, he's literally hypnotic. The character of Saruman in The Two Towers the novel is crafty and honeyed and genuinely quite intimidating. And you know, I know how the story ends, but nevertheless, when the characters are interacting with Saruman, I was going, "Guys, guys, flipping flipping watch yourself here."

[00:06:42]And in the movie, I feel like Saruman is reduced to staring old man on a rooftop.

[00:06:46]And he's also very much, you know, a parallel to Gandalf and an opportunity for talking to show that Gandalf has leveled up and become Saruman the White and in some ways replaces Saruman in that regard, but for me, the movie does a big misstep by not leaning into just how creepy and and what's the word?

[00:07:06]Manipulative Saruman is. And and we see that really at the forefront of The Two Towers. And for me, that was one of the highlights of the work. Another character I thought was a little bit different in the book was Gollum/Smeagol. And I'd be curious if people agree with me or just think I've been miswatching the movies the whole time. But for me, Smeagol and Gollum in The Two Towers felt a little bit more hostile than he does in the movies. I feel like with the movie, Smeagol/Gollum is really at this kind of tipping point, right? Where he's deciding which way to go. And is he going to let his addiction to the ring consume him or will he actually get a sense of brotherhood and family that he he almost gets. And I he is one of the most tragic characters in in both stories.

[00:07:45]I feel like Gollum in the books is a little bit more hostile. He's a little bit more aggressive. So, I kind of have the interpretation when I'm reading The Two Towers that he's never actually on their side. He's always just waiting for a chance to betray them. If he's on this knife edge in the movies, it feels like in the books he's much more of this kind of dark portent of what Frodo might become if he doesn't watch himself. And as I'm saying that, I've just realized that didn't they actually have a scene that they cut from the Lord of the Rings movies where Frodo almost is dressed up to look like Gollum. So, maybe that was something that was consciously reduced a little bit in the movies. I don't know.

[00:08:18]I'm waffling. I really enjoyed The Two Towers. Let me talk about Andy Serkis's narration though, because I wasn't wholly a fan. I'm a bit mixed on it. I know it's been celebrated quite a lot.

[00:08:28]And he does do a a really good job. I mean, he's flipping Andy Serkis, isn't he?

[00:08:32]Here's my issue. He He did Gollum masterfully. He did a lot of characters masterfully. I did feel a little bit like when he was narrating some characters, he wasn't doing his version of the characters. I felt like he was just doing the movies' version of the characters. So, for example, when he does Legolas, it doesn't feel like he's doing Legolas. It feels like he's doing Orlando Bloom doing Legolas. And similarly with Gandalf, I felt like when he was doing his version of Gandalf, he was just doing Sir Ian McKellen. And so, that kind of sullied my enjoyment a little bit. And this also comes back to the fact that the movies are so firmly stamped onto my brain, I did have a bit of a struggle separating the the two different franchises or the two different media types. And this this compounded the issue a little bit for me. I did really feel like when I was listening to certain scenes, it was like the movie was playing in my head, which is unfortunate, but nothing I can really do about that now. So, moving on. Ultimately, right, The Two Towers is The Two Towers. I'm going to get to Return of the King within the next few weeks. Um and then probably move on to The Silmarillion because I'm having a really good time with Tolkien.

[00:09:33]And it took me 32 years to read this series or this book all the way through, but I'm glad I'm doing so now. Okay.

[00:09:39]Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb, book one in the Rain Wild Chronicles quartet, book flipping 10, I think, in the Realm of the Elderlings. We're in the back half now. I've now got six Robin Hobb Elderlings books to go, and that's kind of sad, and it's especially sad if the next three are of similar quality to this one, because here's the thing with the Rain Wild Chronicles. If you look up the discussion of Rain Wild Chronicles online, you do have a few people saying that it's utter tripe, and you do have some people saying it's actually really amazing and that people aren't really reading it properly, but you seem to have 80 to 90% of the readership going, "Listen, it's fine. It's not Hobb at her strongest. It's certainly the weakest component of the Realm of the Elderlings as a whole." And I was really hoping to have a special Four Corners of the Page opinion and be like, "Yes, it's actually incredible and here's why you're all wrong." Or I'd love to do like a 20-minute rant. Unfortunately, I can do neither, because for me, I'm also in that mushy middle. It did feel a bit watered down for a Realm of the Elderlings book, and I went in with with reasonable expectations, and nevertheless, it failed to meet them.

[00:10:38]Just to be clear, I am not saying it's a bad book, and kind of actually, I'm saying the inverse. It's a good book, but with Robin Hobb, you you hold yourself to a high standard, and you hold her to a high standard, because she is phenomenal.

[00:10:49]Here's the premise, cuz I do think the premise, the setup, is one of the the coolest parts of this book. That kind of sounded damning, didn't it? The best part about the book is the idea, not the execution. It's not like that. So, let me talk about the setup. I'm not going to tell you anything that's not on the back cover of the book, but also, please recognize that this is book 10, so just by looking at the back cover of book 10, you are kind of spoiling books one through nine ever so slightly. Um there's also dragons in this novel, and I was worried about spoiling that, but then the book is called Dragon Keeper, so you know. Dragon Keeper out, David.

[00:11:17]Anyway, here is the setup for this book.

[00:11:20]You have dragons born in the Rain Wilds.

[00:11:23]You have a new clutch of dragons coming out from their cocoons or their caskets or whatever they're called, and blinking in the daylight under the forest canopy, but there's an issue and the issue is that the dragons didn't come out right.

[00:11:36]They've come out a little bit stunted.

[00:11:38]They've come out a little bit malformed.

[00:11:40]None of them that have survived are able to fly, for example. And while they do have that dragony craftiness, they're also extremely bestial and and aggressive and and basically the crop of dragons for the year is viewed as a bit of a failure. So, what do these dragons decide to do and the humans are a kind of guarding them? They decide to send the dragons deep er into the Rain Wild, to the city called Kelsingra, which is their ancestral home or certainly one of the ancestral homes of the dragons.

[00:12:08]Joining them are the Dragon Keepers, [music] title of the book, The Dragon Keepers. And the Dragon Keepers are volunteers, but they're also very much the social outcasts of the Rain Wilds themselves. People who've been born in some way wrong, whether that's being too scaly or having claws or just coming from the wrong kind of social status.

[00:12:24][music] Um there's a bunch of young people, very young people, who decide to join the dragons and I'm basically escort them all the way up the Rain Wild River to get to where they need to go. There are other characters, too, who I've not mentioned, but I'll just I'll leave that there for now. Again, I'm a wee bit spoilers hesitant. Um but I really like the idea of this this story. I love a story, first of all, that goes off the map. See, when you give me a map, a big fantasy story map, the first thing I usually think is, "Okay, but what's what's further up? Or what's further this way?" I get really annoyed at George R.R. Martin for the lands of always winter cuz I want want to go over there. And apparently, apparently book six of A Song of Ice and Fire is going there whenever it flipping comes out. Um similarly, my favorite Narnia book is Voyage of the Dawn Treader cuz they basically just keep heading that way for for miles and miles and miles. Or basically any fantasy book, my first inclination is to go, "This map is great. What's over there?" And this novel tries to give that to me to some extent. It's really carving out an an uncharted territory that we've not seen as much of as I would like. I also really enjoy some of the themes that this novel was bringing up, this idea of maybe found family that we're beginning to get with the dragons and the dragon keepers. The question of community is here certainly, the question of identity is here in spades, the question of purpose, you know, that a lot of these young people are trying to give themselves purpose in this story and to to various extents it's working or not working.

[00:13:41]That being said, I can't say that I had the most tremendous time with it and there's a few different reasons for that. Um one of which is simply the characters. I didn't find any of the characters hugely enjoyable. There was no character who I turned to in the book and went, "Oh yes, we're back with this person." It was more just kind of turning to the next chapter and going, "Okay, we're back with them. Okay." But here's the thing, Liveship Traders I think had broadly unlikeable characters as well, but they were fascinating enough that I was willing to ride that out and also Liveship Traders characters were not annoying.

[00:14:15]>> [laughter] >> I feel like quite a few characters in this novel were just straight-up annoying. It's It's not the unlikability of love-to-hate them. They're just a bit grumpy, a lot of these characters, and they just sort of snipe at each other and and get snippy with each other and it's not hugely enjoyable to read 400-500 pages of, let's be honest, bickering. And the dragons too, I said they're a bit aggressive, they love a bicker as well. And so you're just reading scene after scene of everyone just having a go at each other. It feels a bit claustrophobic. I was trying to think of a good way to sort of sum this up, but I think the best way I can is imagine going on a road trip with four Malta Vestrits from the first Liveship Traders book and that's what this feels like a little bit. The pacing is is a bit slow and that's fine. I don't want to like criticize a slow pace, some of the best books are are slow-paced, but because we're stuck with these characters who aren't very enjoyable, you kind of want to just just just push them a little bit, push them up that river a little bit faster. But another issue I have with this novel is this idea of place. I don't think there's a strong sense of setting or place, which was a bit disappointing to me because as I said, I was looking forward to getting off this map and exploring things a bit further, but I think Hobb kind of confuses world-building with with setting a little bit. We're getting lots of world building, but ultimately, it just feels like we're stuck in the same few trees and the same canopy. Even that Realm of the Elder setting doesn't quite feel as strong to me as it did in Liveship. When we were there in Liveship, it felt a lot more evocative.

[00:15:35]The analogy that kept coming into my mind when I was thinking about this this difference between the setting in Liveship versus the setting in Realm of the Elder is video game tie-ins. So, have you ever played, for example, well, let's do The Two Towers. Have you ever played the video game adaptation of The Two Towers? It's really good, but it almost felt like with Liveship I was watching Helm's Deep. And then it felt like with Realm of the Elder I was watching someone play Helm's Deep the mission in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers the video game. Everything felt a little bit pulled back, a little less descriptive, a little less fleshed out.

[00:16:06]And And that was quite disappointing to me as well. I am going to continue, just to be clear. I have Dragon Haven here, which I've heard is not nearly as good as Dragon Keeper.

[00:16:15]>> [laughter] >> But here's the thing, Dragon Keeper was still an okay book. It was still good, but I'm just holding Hawk to such a high standard because of how amazing she writes when she's firing on all cylinders. And I I unfortunately I didn't get that here. And I am in the mushy middle. I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on this book cuz I'm I'm all over the place. So, the next book I want to talk about very quickly is A Murder Most Fungal by Adrian M.

[00:16:37]Gibson. Now, I think one of the the strongest things I can say about this novel actually is that I bought a copy, which is not a damning comment. I don't mean, "Oh, the best thing I can say about it is that I bought it." No. I was sent an e-arc by Adrian M. Gibson. He's been on the channel as well a couple of times. Really really lovely, really cool guy. And I got halfway through the e-arc and I thought, "You know what? I want a copy of this." And I don't regret picking up a copy. And it's going to sit very nicely next to Mushroom Blues on my shelf. So, there we go. So, in case you can't tell, this novel is set in Adrian M. Gibson's fungalverse, this fictional world which kind of reads like a parallel Earth where some countries and some nations are made up of not by human people, but humanoid mushroom people.

[00:17:13]Which sounds daft. It sounds really daft, but it's pulled off really well.

[00:17:17]You just have to believe me if you haven't read Mushroom Blues. The setting and the descriptions and the way that mushrooms are sort of fused into the culture of Neo-Kyoto, which is the parallel to Tokyo, is just so well done.

[00:17:27]It's one of my favorite things about Adrian Tchaikovsky's work. Now, one of the main themes in both Mushroom Blues and A Murder Most Fungal is the idea of conquering and colonialism because the people of Neo-Kyoto have been conquered by another country, a country called Caprina. And people of Caprina is very Western coded and and people look like conventional people. Um, and they have come in and they have conquered Neo-Kyoto and they have basically taken up shop. And all the citizens in Neo-Kyoto are suffering because of it.

[00:17:55]But actually, one of the differences between Mushroom Blues and A Murder Most Fungal, in Mushroom Blues, the protagonist is Henrietta Hoffman, who is a a normal, mass of air quotes, normal human being from outside of Neo-Kyoto who comes into the city. But here, we're following the perspective of Protacio Jiro, who is a sushi chef. Can I say that? Sushi chef, that's a bit of a tongue twister. Thanks, Adrian. He's a chef who has been born and raised in Neo-Kyoto. So, we're getting much more of the culture of Neo-Kyoto and we're getting much more of the culture and way of thinking of its inhabitants, which is something I really enjoyed about this novel. Basically, the inciting incident of this novel is that Protacio Jiro has been invited to become the head chef for the main colonizer in Neo-Kyoto, General Duncan MacArthur, the guy in charge of the whole shebang. He is the one who is going to make that guy's food. And you can imagine that being in that position would have some challenges and potentially some people looking to take advantage of your station. And that's kind of what happens in this novel. Now, if it sounds like I'm being a bit cagey and not giving you a whole lot of information about what actually happens in this book, that's on purpose because in my estimation, actually, the blurb of this book, the back cover of this book, spoils more than it needs to.

[00:19:05]Definitely, it was clear to me that there are certain things described on the back of this book that I would have rather discovered for myself over the course of the novel. Certainly events that actually happened in the back half of this novel are put on the cover and I found that a little bit frustrating. I would have preferred to I had come across those myself. And I say all this because on the whole I really really enjoyed what Adrian M Gibson has created here. I think he has a really good talent for evoking place in the context of POV because what is becoming clear as we move from different characters is that Adrian M Gibson thinks very carefully about how to portray his setting as through the eyes of the various perspectives that he is writing in. Henrietta Hoffman's Neillcanoco feels very different from Potro Jiro's Neillcanoco and now this novel as a whole feels a little bit darker. The city seems like it's in a worse place but you can feel Potro Jiro's respect for both his city and his past and also the kitchen. I mean the atmosphere of the kitchen very much does feel like something out of a Gordon Ramsay or or Anthony Bourdain and that's a really fun thing to read especially in a kind of a fantasy FFF book. I don't think we've seen something similar before. Certainly not not that I can think of. And if I stick with fantasy, in fantasy we have so many taverns and so many you know flagons of ale but how fresh it was to be in a kitchen that feels so different was was really enjoyable. So I think setting and culture is something I really really gravitated towards in this book. The ending is also pretty flipping explosive man. I mean often there's a thing, maybe you feel this way too. When you see that book 1.5 or 2.5 or a book 0.5 is coming out um in in whatever series, sometimes you're kind of like okay but can we get the actual number of please? I'd like book two not book 1.5 and maybe that's just personal preference. Maybe that's me being a complete idiot and you should disregard what I'm saying but that's often how I feel when I see an author is coming out with kind of a a halfway sequel. I'd rather have the main event but to me this does not feel like a 1.5.

[00:20:56]This feels like a standalone novel set in the same world that moves the world on and I'm always a fan of books and series where the world moves on the further into the series you get and now I'm thinking of Malazan does this and I'm thinking Dresden Files does this, and that element is here, too, that the from book to book to book, you feel like you're in the same location, but also a location that is moving on with the times. And I really do appreciate that, too. The first half is really good.

[00:21:19]You've got this kind of slow burn, this building up of tension and and threat, and then it all comes together into the second half of this novel, which is just explosive in a lot of ways. And yeah, if anything I'd have liked this novel to be, it's a very small I'd have liked it to be like 30 or 40 pages longer, and then really spent more time digging into the ending. But, I also understand that the style that Adrian M. Gibson is going for here, it's supposed to be shorter, it's supposed to be rapid, it's supposed to be fast. Um yeah, I really had a good time with this one. I'm glad I bought a copy. I'm still losing the light, so we're going to keep this last one a little bit brief. But, I also read 1984.

[00:21:52]I did this as a buddy read with Joanna, and this is actually my third time reading this [music] novel. Again, rather than maybe giving you my my thoughts, my review on this novel, giving you the synopsis, everyone knows the plot of 1984, I feel like. Um let me tell you about my experience reading it this time compared to the previous two times, cuz I did have a different experience this time round. So, the first time I read 1984, I was 14, um and didn't even know the difference between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party or anything like that. So, a lot of the the big ideas of the novel were totally beyond me. I was asked to read it as part of like a summer reading challenge by my English teacher. She gave us like 15, 20 books and asked us to read three, I think. And 1984 was one of the ones I chose. And I didn't understand huge sections of it. I'm not saying that all 14-year-olds can access 1984, but certainly I could not access 1984 properly. Even just the idea that the central governing body is called the Party, I'd never heard that before. I'm like, "What where are the balloons?

[00:22:46]Where's the cake?" Nevertheless, at the same time, what really came through to me on that first read of 1984 was the sense of doom surrounding the whole thing, and certainly the main character, Winston Smith. This is going to be spoilers-free, but from page one of 1984, you feel like Winston Smith, our hero or protagonist does not have very long to live. He seems really, really doomed and damned and and basically a goner from the very beginning. And I remember very much reading the first time through the novel just thinking this guy is is suffering and there's a whole lot more suffering coming. The second time I read 1984 was in university. I went to the States for a year where I met my wife. I studied in Upstate New York for a year and I decided to be ironic and take a British literature class in my American university. And one of the prescribed texts was 1984 by George Orwell. So, I read that over the summer in preparation and then got to the class and the professor goes, "We're not going to read 1984. I've changed the syllabus a bit."

[00:23:42]And then, oh well. And but what struck me with that second reading was actually beginning to understand not just the political thinking of 1984, but the ideas behind that political thinking if that's not a redundancy. The idea that for example, um history doesn't have to be permanent. If people in power can take all the books and and wash them away and then you can change everyone's thinking, then in some ways history has ceased to exist. And there's real world parallels to that, right? I'm thinking of Stalin but removing people from from photographs for his propaganda and and things like that. I mean, the scary thing about 1984 is that all of it's happened just in different pockets around the world. And you know, 1984 is is is so obviously um twinned in our minds these days with North Korea that it's hard to escape. Um But yeah, the second time I read this book, the second time I read 1984, it was the ideas, the philosophical and political thinking I found genuinely, genuinely scary and terrifying. And for me that second read was so much more affecting than the first. And I do think it's a book that that holds up on a reread. This third time reading through 1984, I don't think I had any big, massive, grand thoughts >> [music] >> in the way I did with with the first reading and the second reading. I think this third time it was like lots of little small moments that I was noticing. Question of age was coming up for me a lot as I was reading this this novel. The different ways in which people are manipulated depending upon what age they wear and and the decay of people and how people mature and grow in this really controlling, harsh society and what their bodies are saying about their own inner state. I found that really fascinating and it's not something I was really picking up on in the previous reads. Another facet of the novel that I didn't really pick up on as much the first couple of times I read it is the character of Julia, uh one of the one of the main characters of the story and I guess I didn't really think about her too much compared to Winston and the first and second pass, but I was really kind of zooming in on her this time and I think she's a very interpretable character. I think you can view her with a lot of charity and someone who becomes increasingly bold and resourceful and clever and conscious, quite frankly. Or you can view her as as someone who is kind of out of their depth a little bit and a bit and a bit romantic, but romantic to the extent that they are beginning to not realize the predicament that they're actually in and and that was a really interesting conversation uh and question that I was wrestling with while reading this novel. I will say as a critique, are we allowed to critique 1984? I'm going to. There's a lot of exposition in this novel, man, and I often feel like the scenes in 1984 aren't really scenes, but they're just dressing for Orwell to give us more thoughts about this world that he's created. You know, you'll have Winston sitting down speaking something into a microphone and then what's really happening is Orwell is using this as an opportunity to describe the room and other facets of the political system and there's one chapter in this book that is just the reading of another book that I do not think needs to be there and maybe that's heretical, but I just think that Orwell doesn't always fully trust the readers to get stuff through subtext. He doesn't really leave us a lot of blanks to fill in in my estimation. It just feels like he's doing all the coloring in himself and showing us the picture he's done. Does that make sense as an analogy? I just feel like you could cut away about 30% of the the world building doesn't seem quite right when I'm talking about 1984, but I guess it is.

[00:26:53]Um, I think the plot of 1984 does enough heavy lifting that we don't need so many pages of what's going on with the party.

[00:27:00]We can have some of that just left up to the readers' reading and interpretation of the text and the subtext in the text.

[00:27:07]So, yeah, how many times can I say text when talking about 1984? I am so impressed with what Orwell has done with 1984.

[00:27:15]>> [music] >> And I'm so glad I've read it.

[00:27:18]And I continue to be impressed with it, but he does go a little bit overboard when he's when he's talking about the world of 1984, and I wish he trusted the reader a little bit more um because it does turn the thing a little bit more into an academic essay at times than a real story. So, am I wrong? You can tell me if I'm wrong. Let me know if I'm wrong about that, but I did very much feel that with this reading. My next video though will be about 1984. So, if you're interested, what I've done is I've read a few of the authorized and unauthorized sequels to 1984, and I'm going to be compiling those and making a little discussion on those in my next video. So, if you are interested in the the 1984 chat, please do stick around for that. Anyway, I've had a a merry old hour kind of moving around trying to find the best most attractive angle that the light can hit off my forehead, and I think it's time to say goodbye. So, thank you so much for watching. If you've read any of these books, please let me know.

[00:28:08]Um and if you haven't read any of these books, which ones would you be interested in reading? Which ones are you interested in picking up? All the best, and I'll see you in the next video. Goodbye.