Weekly Reading Wrap-Up: Apocalypse, Language and Strangers

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Hello, I'm Bob the Bookworm and welcome to my channel. And today, I'm going to be talking a bit about the books that I've been reading this week. Um, I hope you are keeping really well. We have some sunshine in the UK, uh, which is good against what's otherwise been a slightly depressing week. Um, but let's get on with talking a little bit about these books. Um, and yeah, I hope you are all keeping well. So, first up, I'm I'm going to be talking about two books that were joint winners of a prize. That prize being the Republic of what what was formerly known as the Republic of Consciousness prize. Um, it was then uh, renamed to the Queen Mary Small Press uh, prize. And that is a prize, as the name suggests, that looks at books from small presses, um, and particularly small indie presses and books that are taking some kind of risk or kind of gamble in their own way. So, these are books that, for example, would be risky to publish and therefore a small press, um, which itself won't make a massive amount of return on them, would also kind of be taking some kind of gamble and with them. And so, these two books, as you can imagine from that, are quite odd.

[00:01:04]And I think that's what I really enjoyed about them. So, let's go kind of as as we've got them here. Um, [snorts] so, uh, the first one here, Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Grandston. Um, and this is quite a short book, um, although obviously physically, sort of the pages are slightly bigger than you'd normally have. Um, and this book is a really odd one in quite a few ways. It's an a sort of some way sort of post-apocalyptic or kind of dystopian thing that there is sort of this red sort of haze or fog that seems to be creeping in, that seems to be affecting the world. And there's a general feeling that things are either ending or the world is becoming a bit spookier and lots of things are happening. Just what you need in this these cheery times. Um, but uh, the book does some quite interesting things stylistically as well. So, for the first well, for most of the book, apart from when a character is speaking or when we're reading a report by someone else. The idea is that also language is starting to break down. And so for the at least for most of the beginning part of the book, lots of things are told in one syllable words only. And if you've ever played the game Poetry for Neanderthals, it feels a little bit like that at times. Um but this is also um done in a I think a really interesting way. And there's something about that that one syllable sound kind of thing going on throughout the book that feels quite haunting at times. I'll give you an example. I'm not going to do it massive amounts of justice. Um but this is just from the first uh the first couple of pages. Um these are from the first page rather.

[00:02:36]Um The Way of Salt and Sin and the old red sun on the land, a slow wind stalks the brush when the tide out at sea waits to run in green. On a high coast, a lone girl sits and thinks of a boy and the push that sent him down to the rocks.

[00:02:50]And at first you don't necessarily realize that it's one syllable at a time, but then something starts to creep again. Occasionally you get words like neath instead of beneath um and things like that that kind of signal to you that something else is going on. But there's something about that that actually makes it so that when about uh five or 10 pages in, you have a character who speaks dialogue and you hear multiple syllable words, suddenly it feels quite jarring because there's something in there where it feels like that character is either incredibly verbose or in some ways is also kind of um uh like official. And there's something very strange about having a word like information or what have you when actually everything else had been this staccato rhythm of these one syllable um words. So yeah, it's this really odd sort of book. And then when it opens up towards the end, particularly this idea of um this impending doom, words start breaking even more where a word like wild that is one syllable that kind of has to your ear doesn't land as one simple syllable, you know, that isle sound, that word also starts getting broken up and you get words so you will have w i space l d for example and you start getting that happening where it feels like the book is playing around with language and the world of words is breaking. Um it's really quite bizarre.

[00:04:11]Um it's a book that is quite haunting in that sense.

[00:04:14]Cuz not only linguistically on the page but also sort of the actual fabric of the world feels like it's falling apart in this novel and I thought it was a really interesting book for that reason.

[00:04:23]So we come to the other joint winner which is ghost driver by Nell Osborne.

[00:04:28]Also a book that feels quite mind-bending in its own way. Also a book that in many ways is quite dark um and feels like it deals with the world again in this slightly dystopian way. Um there is this idea of a kind of nameless well not nameless but sort of faceless organization which seems to be what's holding up the world and our main character Mallory seems to be falling foul of it. She um is meant to do these these tests that feel a bit like going to a drama lesson and doing one of those sort of warm-up activities um where she has to um pretend to say hi but in a way that an alien might understand. It becomes this whole weird thing and but because of that she's docked points and that means that she is seen as being antisocial and so but there are a lot of things that follow on from this where not only is she failing to exist within this very almost corporate clinical kind of world of things that are expected of her. Also just in the in the broader sense the world is weird and not something she can easily understand.

[00:05:32]And the book actually goes on in a way that becomes quite dreamlike in a slightly haunting way because things just don't really feel real. She will say something, she'll go somewhere else, something else will happen and And all feel like they're disconnected. There's something quite jarring just generally about this novel in a way that I found really engaging. I thought um it's so offbeat, it's so surreal what's happening for Mallory in her life that it becomes more and more sort of it it feels like she is hallucinating almost at times. And the language starts to mirror that. There are these sort of odd observations. There there's this really odd use of language where sometimes it feels like the both the narrator and Mallory are sort of Victorian children communicating in this very this very odd style.

[00:06:21]And yet the world around them feels quite modern. Um and so there's just this odd sort of disjunct going on constantly that I found really kind of quite fun.

[00:06:30]Um it's also really darkly funny. Um there are moments that are absolutely horrific in this book, but there's this sort of Daria-like sarcasm that cuts through it that's really funny. Um so it's just a really odd book.

[00:06:45]>> [laughter] >> Um even I mean some of the darker moments for example, um there is a reference to uh men on public transport um pleasing themselves shall we say. And obviously it's really gross and grim and it's done in this way uh where uh our main character Mallory feels really uncomfortable. But then she makes these little asides about, you know, oh how nice it is that there's a community of men who will um give each other tips on how best to do this or which buses are the best to do this. And there are these weird sort of barbed asides like that where the situation itself is absolutely not funny. Something really dark or serious or or what have you is happening, but Mallory as a character kind of cuts through with this very odd done with it kind of sarcasm.

[00:07:36]So I really loved this. It's such an odd book at times. It's really unsettling.

[00:07:41]It's incredibly jarring.

[00:07:43]Um it just it feels constantly like the world that the the the sands underneath your feet are shifting and you don't really know where you are and what's real.

[00:07:54]But at the same time, the book has this very even a sort of done with it kind of feel to it that is just really quite engaging.

[00:08:03]So yeah, this is a very odd book and I think I need to sit with it a little bit longer. Uh but I absolutely see why this one is just a really It's a book kind of like nothing else I've really read recently. Um and I just There's something about the this the utter sarcasm of the main character that is really quite compelling, I think. And last but not least, a book from the Women's Prize shortlist for nonfiction.

[00:08:26]Um and that is Nation of Strangers by A.

[00:08:30]J. Temelkuran. Um and this is a book that I I found really fascinating in many many ways. Also feels incredibly sort of pressing and urgent. Um the UK has just had some elections. They do not feel like very comfortable results for me. Um I'm not very happy with this, personally. Uh and um but I think weirdly this book was a bit of a salve to parts of that. Um was also, I think, talking about the urgency of it. So, um in this book, uh Temelkuran talks about fascism and the rise of it. But also through it a a kind of a migrant story.

[00:09:11]And the things thread together in this really interesting way. So, a couple of things are happening all at once. So, the book is split into four parts, um which are framed around questions that are often asked to uh people migrating into a country. And so, I'm now going to absolutely forget one of these questions while trying to do this, but they are, for example, um uh like where are you from? Um how long are you going to stay here? I think it was. Um uh how will you support yourself or how will you survive, I think was the phrasing, and when will you go home? I think I probably missed one or or sort of got something wrong in there. But, these the framing of that I think is really powerful because it allows Tam Mel Koran to really go into some of the um the discussions around what it means to be a migrant. Um she herself is from Turkey and um she spends a lot of time in this book, particularly in Germany, but sort of lived elsewhere.

[00:10:08]And she talks a little bit about how some of those questions and some of the other things around that um impact the ways that you survive and the ways that you make decisions of what happens for you. And she describes that through the lens of being Turkish and therefore seeing uh sort of recent sort of political developments there and what that means for what she how she can almost warn other people about that um in our countries. And she does that through this idea of letters to people um addressing us as strangers. We are the strangers that she is talking to.

[00:10:43]And so, every sort of mini section begins with dear stranger and is written directly to us with the idea of also bridging a gap of you might not know me, you might not understand my life currently, but I want to tell you a little bit bit about who I am. And so, there's something really powerful that comes through because she starts talking about fascism and particularly it's sort of how it shows up for people. She looks at, for example, um shameful moments from even the UK's recent political history of um something that we had here, unfortunately, what at least floated by a former a former Prime Minister um of the idea of a hostile environment of how you create uh an environment that is meant to push back and make it far less welcoming for incoming migrant or refugees or or or whoever. And in doing this uh it Timur Kuran also looks at um situations where that's been done really effectively. Uh sorry, where where a welcoming environment has been created really effectively. Um so uh an area of Berlin um and sort of organized by this company called Refugio. And all of these things are happening.

[00:11:57]And so this book I just think is so I'm doing a really terrible job of threading together all the parts of it. But there's something so beautiful about the way this book is done, I think, because it's incredibly startling. She does say here that we often frame it incorrectly, that we say things like um you know, the rise of fascism, for example, as if it's this external force that kind of comes in um or this this sort of the idea that it's external to us. And actually what she says um is the thing that we should be looking at is where the seeds of that are sown elsewhere, that it's not just one day a group of fascists arrive, it's the idea that over time this has been engineered or it's been kind of growing or or what have you, and the effects that can have. And again, that feels incredibly timely in the UK where a party that is has been explicitly sort of really anti-immigrant and as well as many anti many other things um has just swept a lot of the kind of council seats. And so there's something about this that actually, yeah, in if we were looking at this from the outside, we could say, "Wow, you know, look, there's been this real um invasion of far-right politics coming in." But actually that has just been slowly growing and been engineered. And so this there's something she's arguing here that often governments and peoples in general only look at these things before it's quite late that they say, you know, we should have seen this coming. We should have stopped this years ago.

[00:13:33]But actually once it started to take root, it involves it's a lot more challenging.

[00:13:39]And she I think just speaks so beautifully in this book about how we can experience each other as strangers as well. So she talks about some of the really harsh aspects of what she sees when, you know, for example, Ukrainian families are there in the immigration office in Berlin and she's watching them and they some of them don't quite know how to jump through the various hoops that's required by the bureaucracy there. And so there's this this fabulous and beautiful thing of lots of other people helping them and trying to help them navigate that. But equally at the same time, it's a system that can feel so um cold and alienating and it dehumanizes people in its way. So yeah, there's a lot that goes into this book. But I think the framing of it, particularly as a a direct letter to us, is or set of letters to us, is so um powerful cuz I think it's quite easy to read books like this and have this as a an academic exercise that is just something being spoken about. And I think actually what's really powerful here is there is a direct call to action. There is a sense that this needs to be taken seriously and treated with the urgency that it requires. Um and also at the same time that um accepting it in one place allows us to accept it elsewhere. And she talks about quite a few global moments of this and how, for example, turning away turning our eyes away to wars or genocides or other things happening in the world makes it far easier to engineer content for something else elsewhere. So anyway, I've gone a lot into all of this, but I think this is a deeply fascinating book and an incredibly important one for where we are um sort of politically and culturally at the moment. Um in a time where the world feels incredibly hostile and can feel incredibly um alienating and intentionally cruel.

[00:15:35]This book feels like some kind of tonic.

[00:15:37]Um it's not not, you know, shying away from the darkness of this.

[00:15:43]It's sort of delving into the lion's mouth and trying to see what we can do next. So, I think this is an incredibly beautiful book um and really powerful in the ways that she also shares her own experiences of being someone caught up in in various systems and endless bits of bureaucracy.

[00:16:00]Apparently, I was rambling too much in that part of the video that my phone so much so much so that my my phone decided that it had enough and just sort of cut me out there. But anyway, yeah, all of that is to say, I think this is a really powerful book and I think um it's an incredibly vital one and I'm really glad to see it on a list like this. Um as well. Uh but yes, I I think a really powerful one that I do recommend you have a look at. So, those are the books that I've been reading this week. I hope you are having a wonderful week. I hope things are good where you are and take care and speak to you all soon. Bye-bye.