favourite books of the year (so far)
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- čas přidán 22. 08. 2024
- thank you so much for 5k!!! you are all the sweetest. drop your questions for a q&a video in the comments x
a mid-year check-in looking at my reading stats and my favourite books so far.
books mentioned:
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Meggie Nelson
Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge
Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World, Jennifer Higgie
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib
Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück
My Death, Lisa Tuttle
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon
The Wall, Marlen Haushofer
LARB podcast interview with Danielle Dutton: open.spotify.c...
let’s connect, honey
instagram (books): / an__otherbook
instagram (personal): / _katie.james
goodreads: / katie-james
email: katiejamesmovement@gmail.com
ko-fi: ko-fi.com/kati...
the intro! the cinematography! the sounds! the music!
@@lila3372 🤍🤍🤍
ahhh loved the way you opened this video. such a beautiful little postcard of your home
@@nathansnook a little love letter from my favourite city for you 🤍 omg yes! i was really unsure how it would turn out because these were people whose taste i admire and is similar to mine! and yeah, i imagine you’ll enjoy my death x
This was lovely to watch! Amazing recommendations thank you. Your video popped up in my recommended btw!
@@evelynarquette i’m so glad you enjoyed 🌸✨
Interested in so many of these, especially My Death and Commited. My favorites this year so far are Beautyland and Aysegul Savas's The Anthropologists. The Anthropologists, to me, was perfect and I think you'd really love it!
@@seesararead I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on the anthropologists since it was announced. It sounds so good! 🤍
What a lovely intro! I’m tempted to start tracking my reading progress because I, too, love data, but I’m also afraid that it can negatively affect my perfectionism and tendency to choose performance over pleasure. Love your picks though; Committed is already on my TBR and I’m going to add The Wall as well. To answer your question:
Favorite fiction (so far): The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Favorite non-fiction (so far): Ways of Seeing by John Berger
Biggest disappointment (so far): Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector
@@SailorMoon-in-Cancer yeah, i definitely have to keep that little voice in check but i can’t resist having data!! ohh, interesting picks! i read ways of seeing recently and really enjoyed it too. Água viva is a strange book, I’m sure it’s a love it or hate it kind of experience!
@@jameskatieYeah, I think this is just a matter of taste. I generally don’t enjoy any purely abstract art, my favorite kind is in that liminal space, hovering above the ground but still tied to reality, trying to relay something ephemeral but very much felt here on earth. That’s why I love Wolf and Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart and The Apprenticeship, but Agua Viva is more about the interaction of words and their sound and less about their actual meaning… It’d be interesting to come back to it later though, even The Waves are my love from the second sight haha. Actually, this could be a question for your Q&A - how often do you revisit books you didn’t enjoy and change your opinion on them?
love the intro!
@@maeiscompletelyfine thank you!! sending love and hoping your days are also filled with beauty and kindness 🌸🤍
it‘s always a joy to watch you talk about books. And I love that I always discover books I‘ve never heard about.
For the Q&A: I‘d like to know if you keep some kind of journal/notes on your phone about the books you read. Not the stats, but more about quotes or notes you might want to save. Or do you simply just keep a list of books you read?
@@_andreamakes thank you 🥰
Love your videos and hearing you speak about books, from one sporadic poster to another :)
your top ten all sounds so good. I’m adding several to my list as I trust your taste so much!
@@rebareads 🥰🥰🥰
Your videos are always so calming to watch! My favorite books of the year have been Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes, Anne Carson's Plainwater and Samantha Hunt's the Seas. I highly recommend Audre Lorde's Zami if you haven't read it already.
@@clara_mars ohh, this is a very good list!! i’m very keen to read ordinary notes and plainwater! i loved the seas 🤍
I will never complain about CZcams algorithm again since that's responsible for introducing me to you 🙂. You have such an engaging presence and your unabashed enthusiasm for literary fiction (which is often brushed aside as pretentious or "snobby") is such a nice standout from mainstream BookTubers. Can't wait to watch your channel deservedly gain more traction!
For the Q+A: how would you rank the genres you don't normally delve into (ex: romance, westerns, fantasy, etc.) from least likely to read to most likely? Is there a type of genre you may lean more towards if you are to branch outside your usual interest?
@@keunlee2248 thank you for the kind words! 🤍
i always love hearing your recommendations :) you have such a lovely voice! my favourite book of the year so far was a graphic novel called Frizzy. :) thanks so much for sharing!
I'm currently reading Elif Shafak's "10 Minutes And 38 Seconds In This Strange World", and I can feel it becoming one of my favourite novels. I read a diverse and vast array of books. This story is truly something else. It's about trauma and grief, but at the same time, it's about friendship and finding hope in the darkest of places. The characters feel like real people, the prose is wonderful, and I cannot recommend it enough. This comes from someone who usually reads classic literature.
@@milicadiy ohh, that feeling of being in the midst of a book and it’s already cementing itself as a new found love is such a gorgeous feeling 🤍
@@jameskatie Yeah ❤️
o nice to hear what books have moved you this year!! cant wait for the q&a
@@kiranreader it’s been a good reading year so far! 💞
I had a very similar reading experience & mindset with The Wall; was surprised by the slightly thriller-esque blurb lol because it was one of the most soothing books for me ☺
@@alattemorning exactly! 🌱🌸
Only 1:40 mins in but am loving this already, so beautiful
@@lulu_frances 🤍🤍🤍
Would love to hear about your favourite books of all time!!
I've only read 6 books so far, so that tells you the state of MY mental health this year. I did have one book that I loved and it's Motherhood by Sheila Heti. Great writing, super relatable, and it gave me so much to think about. Can't wait to read more from this author.
@@janngio i hope the rest of the year is filled with good reading for you 🤍
My favourite has been Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter and I also really enjoyed Strong Female Character by Fern Brady and My Death by Lisa Tuttle also!
I love the sound of the twins book, I'll have to look it up 😊
@@vanessalaughtland4417 ripe wasn’t really for me but i did love the hovering void, had such a sweet spot of recognition for it haha. Yes! More My Death love!! 🖤
Read My Death recently and really enjoyed it. Also read Água Viva on holiday after seeing it in your last video and loved it so much. It was dense and I don't think it's ever taken me so long to get through 90 pages, but such a rewarding read. East of Eden and The Wren, The Wren were also standouts last month for me. A book I just couldn't warm to this year was Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. I wanted to love it so much and still can't put my finger on why it just didn't click for me, but definitely my least favourite read of the year so far.
@@laurad1234 ohh, interesting! i read east of eden last summer and absolutely loved it and pond was one of my favourite reads last year!! 🤍
Considering that you have beautiful handwriting, i was wondering if you prefer reading essays or writing essays? Do you ever read stories to Anouk?
I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo which is becoming my new favourite book, but I am highly anticipating the upcoming Eva Baltasar book in September!
@@courtenaywrites I’ve been seeing a lot of love for the count of monte cristo lately!! i’m also very excited for the new baltasar 🖤
2 recent favs I think you’d love: The Details by Ia Genberg and A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigurd Nunes. I loved My Death too, made my book club read it so I could reread it, and we all came away with something different.
@@robotnic yes, i think I’ll need to seek out the details, it sounds like my kind of writing! have yet to read any nunez but a lot of people with similar taste love her work, so likely a good choice for me! ✨
loving the reccs!!! fave book so far, by FAR, is the details by ia genberg (i reread it as soon as i finished it!) and most disappointing would have to be the years by annie ernaux, i wanted to love it but it just fell flat. picked up the lost daughter after your recommendation and am so enjoying it especially reading it right after the nursery by szilvia molnar!
@@michaelaym3968 oh, I’ll have to look up the details! So happy you’re loving the lost daughter🤍 everyone needs some frenetic ferrante energy in the summertime haha ✨
@@jameskatie genberg's writing is feverish and reflective, 5/5 read! the frenetic ferrant beachside thrill is so the vibe :)
My two fav books that I’ve read this year were Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. My biggest disappointment was definitely the latter half of Brideshead revisited.
@@travisjohnson18 giovanni’s room is a stunning book! i loved it so much 🤍
I love your videos so much, you have such calming energy that i could listen to you all the time. It gives me so much peace.
also my biggest disapointment this year is Breast and eggs by Mieko Kawakami, it was so boring i just didn't get it. But the best by far was Perfume by Patrick Süskind and Love letters: Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. it was so beautiful i'm sooo in love with it 💌
@@whiimsiical thank you so much 😌🌸 ohh my sister did not enjoy breasts and eggs either! I haven’t read the love letters but I bet they are stunning x
I'm very sorry, but my best book of the year is translated from Norwegian into German, but not into English (yet). And there's not really a big disappointment either, because I dnf books. The only one I can think of is The Girl at the Door by Veronica Raimo. I read Lost on Me by her, which I loved, so I picked up this one from her backlist and didn't like it.
But we definitely share our top five of moods with our books.
@@ameliareads589 oh man, picking up a new book by a writer you love and finding it disappointing sucks ): hopefully there’s an English translation of your favourite so far on its way! x
@@jameskatie It's 'Makta' (original title) by Heidi Furre. So keep your eyes peeled, because I think you would be interested in it. It comes with trigger warnings though.
Which book got you into reading?
Book-related: What’s your favourite opening line in a book?
Non-book-related: what’s your favourite flavour right now? ✨
I read both Paul by Daisy LaFarge and Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton upon your recommendation and loved them (thank you! ❤) My biggest disappointment was Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez for a book club. Oof.
@@nazreenmujib3036 ahh this makes me so happy!! such beautiful books! oh man, there’s something especially disappointing when it’s a book club book that doesn’t hit x
Love your glasses, where are they from?
Loved the vid!! And my fave book was definitely Orlando by Virginia Woolf, unlike anything I’ve read before! Although my new fave author that I’ve discovered this year is Rachel Cusk! And sadly, Kairos is my biggest disappointment this year - I can admire what it was doing but I just didn’t find it that enjoyable :(
@@tobi_adediran i’m definitely looking forward to reading more woolf and cusk!! orlando sounds incredible 🤍
Hola pelomlargo,, que cambiarias si pudieras del mundo
Un abrazo
Very worried for your white tshirt this whole video. Hoping you got the stain out.
@@r.enee.morris thankfully it was totally fine 🙏🏻