Hi, Kiran! That Caroline Blackwood is so on my radar. Yes!! I read Middlemarch last Summer. It is a really good Summer book, in my mind. Have a fun Summer!
Ah the subject of colorism...the legacy left by our "dearest colonizers". I agree with you when you say the author could've chosen to tackle the subject in a more positive way. As for the story of Carolyn Kennedy, it's fascinating for sure. It's interesting to note that she tried to not stand out in the styles she would choose to wear but instead it had the contrary effect. These people were indeed regular human beings.🙂What a reading journey you had! great video.
I am really looking forward to reading All Four (I've followed her work for years), and your take on it is interesting. I think i'll also have a problem with the 20K thing - because I don't think art should be considered outside of the system, especially contemporary fictions
45min!! ❤ lol i also just had my first emhen with ppl we meet on vacation and i was charmed enough to wanna read some others! My local library is having a book club for book lovers so that’s next for me. I also really wanna get to butchers crossing after stoner but also because of stoner im also saying that with much trepidation 🥲
i think maybe i started w/ the wrong emily henry book? but it is so heartwarming how much people love her stories!! i've been avoiding stoner bc i'm afraid its going to change me forever and i'm not sure i'm ready for that!!!!! lol
@@kiranreaderfor real women of all ages will fight to the death for emhen and you can’t really say the same for say, sally rooney? I think u can totally handle stoner it’s sad but we like that 😊
Ever since I saw the Irish film, “An Cailín Ciúin”-“The Quiet Girl”-for the first time in March of last year, I’ve been reading up on modern Irish history, particularly the events surrounding the 1916 Easter Uprising, the subsequent Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War which followed it. So, I was pleased when you included, “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland”, in your video wrap-up, and gave a mention to, “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland”. I hadn’t heard of either book, but will definitely want to read the second one by Fintan O’Toole, and probably Keefe’s as well. The year 2016 was the 100th anniversary of the Easter Uprising, and there are plenty of documentaries and news stories on RU-vid assessing the significance of the events of 1916 and afterwards. Some of these films question whether the Uprising was really necessary and whether it wasn’t more of a tragedy for Ireland than something to be celebrated, as it led directly to the events described in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book. The fact that the modern Irish Republic was born in violence may have set a pattern and justification for further acts of violence to obtain political ends throughout the 20th century. At least, that’s the position some Irish people take today. It’s a fascinating question and I’m still making up my mind about it. Recently, I decided that you can’t really appreciate the motives of the men who planned and carried out the Easter Uprising without going back to the 1840s, the years of the Great Irish Famine. After all, the men of 1916 were closer in time to the famine years than we are to the Second World War. I’m reading an older history, “The Great Hunger” by Cecil Woodham-Smith, published in 1962, and will soon be starting a famous 1937 novel, “Famine”, by the Irish writer, Liam O’Flaherty. So, thanks again for bringing Keefe’s and O’Toole’s books to my attention. And if you haven’t seen “The Quiet Girl”, I highly recommend it. I’m sure it’s available on streaming services. The film is based on Claire Keegan’s long short story, “Foster”. Finally, “Butcher’s Crossing” sounds interesting, and your description of the Miller character hunting down his massive buffalo herd reminds me of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale.
omg bb’s first Emily Henry what era of Kiran are we in !!! but ahhh loved your thoughts on the Williams. I feel like there’s an incoming wave of interest for Stoner and it’s all reminding me that i need to pick up his other work. do you recommend Butcher’s Crossing or Nothing but the Night first? :0
if you want something super eerie and quick go for nothing but the night. if you want an elevated blood meridian style of book go for butcher's crossing. can't wait to hear what you think!!
I’ve read some other Knut Hamsun stuff and it’s almost always interpersonal drama from some tiny Norwegian village. Which it’s cool in a periodic sort of way but his characters are usually annoying as hell and I ended up just hoping and praying that something awful would happen to them. But yeah I like his writing so you can draw conclusions on how the stories usually turn out.
ok this is some good context for Hamsun, thank you!! i'm thinking of starting his book this week. i started the first page just to get a taster of the book and it def is giving village gossip 😂
I'm like you, the more people promote something, the less interested I tend to be. Might be overexposure being actually exhausting in many cases, might be just being petty lol. But I am definitely irked by the Rooney situation because my interest in her newest book has definitely been impacted by the way influencers are reading it months before the release date. I'm just like, by the time it releases, I'm gonna know so much about the plot it'll feel like I read it myself and so I won't pick it up.
i feel you!! it's that special combo of exposure and pettiness 😂 we have such a long ways to go until the book comes out in sept. i might completely lose interest in it by then!! lol
I read “Martyr” a few months ago and enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it lived up to the critical acclaim it’s received. Kaveh Akbar writes well and his central character, Cyrus Shams, is a very engaging and appealing young man, but I didn’t think the novel had anything particularly new or insightful to say about how we should live our lives. In particular, I thought Cyrus was simply wrongheaded in his search for a good death. I left a lengthy two-part review of “Martyr” at Naomi and Alyssa’s TBR Lowdown Live Podcast S3E123 from about three months ago, from which I’ll quote one paragraph: "Cyrus tells Orkideh that he doesn’t want to waste his 'one good death.' This, I thought, is an entirely backwards way of looking at things. What Cyrus should really be worried about is not wasting his one good life. Death is unpredictable, no matter how hard you may try to stage-manage it to make it meaningful. We have examples in the novel of how death can come for people suddenly, leaving them no time to prepare for it. Your life, on the other hand, can last for close to a century, a length of time more than sufficient to find ways to give your life meaning for yourself and others, and thus make it a life worth remembering."
i miss McNally's every single day...their curation is completely next level and always love how they bring in so many indie publishers too! love the fashion breakdown of the janet jackson show. i say more misc monologues PLS!
I didn't know that McNally's organised their books by region/country! How cool! Nice to know I won't always head to Daunt Books when I want to check out something like that. I've not read either of the books that you mention having on audio, but I really enjoyed Ed Yong's 'An Immense World', if you're into animal senses; he also discussed birds' use of magnetic fields.
right!! i kind of think the mcnally's curation of books for region/country is actually more interesting than Daunt Books!! Omg thank u!! I'll check out the Yong book ty! 💖
It's always confused me how TikTok influences peoples' reading. I need more context on a book than 30 seconds! You mentioned purchasing 6 books - what did you just purchase? Never sad to see a little book haul content!
love the time stamp for the random cough OH NOOOO i was sooo excited for the CBK book !!! need the interesting notes NOW! you're so right about Intermezzo. honestly, it's gonna be either a library hold or a buy-used book for me lol i will not feed into the cycle of capitalism! but yeah, when something is marketed to a mf T, i want it sooo much less. i guess i kind of like things in aspects of The Row where during their show from last season (?) they said no phones, so not being able to see the product in its "actuality" makes it elusive, makes it wanted, more.
Hard agree on the flooding of a product in the market making it less appealing. The thing I don’t get with the Rooney is apparently no one is allowed to review it until it’s released, my local indie bookstore told me this. The hype for it seems way more tame compared to the last one so maybe that was the goal this time round.
You definitely aren't wrong about the intermezzo thing. I'm getting it from the library ( I still get the satisfaction of reading the book but i'm not losing anything if i didn't like the book!) Tiktok has influenced my reading but I have found my niche on tiktok (weird, strange literary fiction and essay collections)
i'm glad you've found an interesting side of tiktok!! sometimes i think my fyp is broken bc i get so many things i'm not interested in! i'm also happy to hear that i'm not alone in my annoyance! i also will be going to the library for that one!
Happy you liked All Fours - it was a page turner. It is certainly not something we get to read a lot about in fiction. (That brown vest is perfect, btw. ) She is very twee, that's true. Tell us more about your job, if you can, please. You were at so many good shows!
I couldn’t help but notice that you arrived in Paris on the eve of the 209th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, but I don’t suppose many Parisians mentioned that to you. Based on my experience reading “Run River”, I thought I’d be interested in Joan Didion’s “The Last Thing He Wanted”, but checking into the subject and plot of the book, I think I’ll take a pass, at least for now. “Butcher’s Crossing” seems more like something I’d enjoy reading, as your description of the novel puts me in mind of A.B. Guthrie’s “The Big Sky”, which I read and enjoyed some years ago. Guthrie’s book is about the Far West in the 1830s and the glory days of the fur-trapping mountain men. None of those young male models you showed us in that fashion show seemed very happy, or very well-fed. As for the clothes, give me jeans and a t-shirt, or an L.L. Bean long-sleeved canvas shirt, any day. And the gold feathers stuck on their foreheads … like, really?! Really??!! Imagine going through the drive-thru at Tim Horton’s looking like that! When you pulled out that knife and started opening the packages containing those little doll-like figurines, I felt a real a real shiver of Carl Jung-type synchronicity go up and down my spine. The feeling grew even stronger when you started talking about the book, “All Fours”, and women’s and men’s experiences of growing older and contemplating their own mortality. I say that because over at the Virginia Woolf Reading Group on Substack (check Alyssa’s June 9th newsletter) we’ve been discussing the novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, which includes a number of characters, men and women, who were good friends in their youth but are now in their early fifties and looking back on their lives with a mixture of nostalgia and regret. They are also increasingly aware that they are far closer to the end of their lives than the beginning. One of the men, Peter Walsh, carries a pocket-knife with him everywhere, and the significance of this came up for discussion in the reading group. So, when you began opening the packages with that knife, I immediately thought of Peter Walsh, and the fact that you were demonstrating one of the reasons why he might carry a pocket-knife around with him. I’m not so sure that middle-aged and older men and woman feel all that differently about getting older. There’s the same sense, I would imagine, of gradually losing the person you used to be and the physical capacity to do the things you used to do, combined with an inclination to sit back and reflect on things, past and present, rather than actively engage so much with the here and now. All I knew of Flannery O’Connor up until today was that she was an American writer of the mid-20th century. But I saw the film “Wildcat” this afternoon, directed by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke, as Flannery O’Connor, and I’ve learned enough about her to want to read her novels and short stories, and generally know more about her. From that standpoint, the film was a success, though not all critics seem to think so.
unfortunately, no one mentioned the Battle of Waterloo! i think you'd like butcher's crossing - the writing is very nice and the descriptions of the natural world are beautiful. would love to hear your thoughts if you read it! i think the tim hortons staff would have a field day if a customer was wearing feathers like those models 😂😂 i really need to check out the Virginia Woolf Reading Group on Substack - it seems like it would be right up my valley. i was once gifted a pocket knife, but in one of my moves it seemed to have disappeared. as you point out, opening the package would have been a great use case for it. i'm glad that little moment reminded you of your reading. i think its so delightful when those moments of synchronicity occur! also! i'm so happy you mentioned wildcat!!! i was thinking of watching the film but I saw some negative reviews of it so i decided to forgo it but its good to hear that you appreciated the film. i'll see if i can watch it online as its no longer playing in the theatres in my area. i haven't read much of her work but in my writing class last year, we read and discussed her short story, "Good Country People." it is such an interesting read!! very layered. i also recently acquired The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie which looks at O'Connor and 3 other Americans' relationship with Catholicism.
@@kiranreader I’m lucky to have a three-screen art-house cinema within a 20-minute drive from home, but you have to watch their schedule carefully or you might miss something. “Wildcat” only had a few screenings over the course of a week, but I was able to catch one. Unfortunately, I missed the showing where a professor of English from the local university gave a brief lecture on Flannery O’Connor before the film. I gather from some reviews that the film skated over some of O’Connor’s now questionable opinions on race and society, but I was interested enough in her writing to order a copy of her collected short stories, so from that point of view, “Wildcat” was worth the price of admission. Another film I would highly recommend is the Irish film, “The Quiet Girl”, released in Ireland and the UK in 2022, but not released in Canada and the U.S. until last March. Perhaps because the story reminds me so much of my years working with children, parents, and families, there’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about it-the cast, the characters, the setting, the cinematography, the music, and above all, the final scene. You can probably watch it on streaming services. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2023, but for some unfathomable reason it lost out to “All Quiet On The Western Front”, a decidedly inferior film, in my opinion.
oh my GODDD this vlog was so much fun. the issey show!!! what a dream!!! glad you got along with All Fours!!! Miranda is def from the twee generation. loved your notes about hormones in midlife and the female experience. and i had no idea there was a new Hjorth?? also a fellow cucumber muncher. pls pls pls more sonny angel hauls. also WHAT is the tea on croissants?! 👀👀👀
So jealous of the Egypt trip!! Dream destination. I also thought When Women Ruled the World was really interesting and the author was super enthusiastic in her narration. It always blows my mind how long the Egyptian dynasties ruled - wasn't it something like >2500 years. Crazy
Very lovely video!! We need more lifestyle vlogging (also the blue sweater is gorgeous on u and i love to see it lol never change it!) Also about the lip products try k-beauty ones my favourite recently is the Romand Glasting Melting Balm, it’s a thick glossy balm thats pretty great for daily use. And about the food maybe try açai with the granola as a substitute for yogurt, its very berry flavoured tho but depending on the place the tanginess changes.
@@kiranreader Yes! Books - loved All Fours (me and everyone else, I know) and surprised myself by falling for Big Swiss. Clothing wise, I am very into my new A.Emery sandals and my every summer St Agni bag (which is the exact one you have except in a woven leather - it's so perfect, I agree!). As always, sun protection Super Goop, linen Uniqlo button down over everything when walking and hats 💛
