Hi guys, it's Sophie. So I had hoped to be able to do my July haul for you today, and nearly all of
the books are here,
but there another two that I'm waiting for so I thought I'd hold off. I'll do it for you
next weekend and who knows maybe I'll grab a few more in the interim, it's me, there might be a
bigger pile next time I look.
But yeah so look out for, that'll be
there next week. Just now for now I thought I'd
do a currently reading video because I'm reading three bigger books at the moment and will be
doing for a little bit of time just because they are so large. So I wanted to have a chat to you about them.
The first of the bigger books that I'm reading I know you guys have heard me talk
about before and it is A Strangeness In My Mind by Orphan Pamuk. I think this book
looks bigger than it is because it is,
that is a big book,  but it's
800 or so pages long I think. It's actually a little bit short than that, about
750 pages.  I am just really
intimidated by this.
I've started it and I've read 68 pages
so far
and actually I found it really easy to
read, when I was reading it, but I put
it down and I jumped into some shorter
things
in the beginning of May and just haven't come back to it yet. So it's on the pile. I think I'll
try to do is each time I finish a book
I'll try and read 100 pages of this one and
maybe it will just take off and I'll just
keep reading it. I just want to keep
bashing on through.
I don't want to end up with those books
'stuck' on my TBR again. And the next book is one that I haven't
hauled for you guys unfortunately, it just arrived at the wrong time, and that
is The Crow Girl by Eric Axl Sund. This
is an awfully big book. It is so heavy
and relatively fat and relatively tall
as well.
So it is even bigger than it looks in person. It was originally three
novels, a Swedish trio, and and it's
been condensed down into one novel for the UK
and release in The States and Canada. This is the edition from The States which
I think is much prettier than the UK one that we have. As a book itself, as a physical object, it's
gorgeous and got, I don't know if you can see it, the deckled edges all the way along.
So yeah that's lovely. A couple pages were literally stuck together and I had to get a knife and
take them apart, so that was quite nice.
I'm a fair way through this book. I'm 
hoping to finish this off today. I am
here. I have some significant
issues with this book and I am going to
make a video just chatting about this one on its own because I have enough of an issue with some of the
things its doing that I want to just rant about it. But yeah, I mean I've only ever
heard, I've only heard positive things from
everyone else and so I don't knwo
quite what it is that they are enjoying to be perfectly honest but yeah I will rant about this one
very shortly. I might make this my Wednesday video if I finish it this weekend.
And then the of last of the big books that I'm currently reading is definitely the one that's the
most intimidating. So again I haven't hauled this one for you. I bought Infinite
Jest by David Foster Wallace and I'm buddy reading this one with Phillippa from
The Garden of Readin'. Because it was sitting on her shelf and she'd said that she wanted
to get to it haven't got to it yet and I
had sort of had my eye out for it.
You know that I love books that are challenging and a bit, sort of, poncey to some extent
and I just thought that this would be
right up my street. So I said, you know if she
wanted to read it then I would buddy read it with her.
So I've been reading this all week and I'm 80 pages in and that feel like such an achievement.
This book is dense, it's heavy, it's
complicated and I absolutely love it.
I'm finding it really funny
and when I'm sort of thinking back on it,
despite the difficulty in the language
and the sort of complexity of the topics
broached, you could remember in quite so
a simple way and it just kind of quite funny and
yeah. So I'm bashing my way through this one.
I'm really enjoying it at the moment.
I think when I finish The Crow Girl today and get that thing done
I'm gonna spend most of my time on
Infinite Jest which probably means this
month I'm not gonna have a an awful lot of books read.
So just be aware this is going to be
probably a pretty short sort of wrap up
for me at the end of the month because I think I am going to be working on some really big chunky books
this month. The other thing that slows me down about Infinite Jest
but I want to keep doing it, is that I have this little book here and what I do
is I have words basically that I have found in my books.
So there are some, like I have some Arabic words, there is some Latin in there
then there is just some complicated English words.
So whenever I find a word I don't recognize in a book I write it down and I go away
and I look up the meaning and I write
that down next to it. I think
that means remember the words better
because if I read over something and let's say
like um, pedagogical, was one that I've read and, I can't remember what it was, Mislaid, I
think it was in and I knew I had read it
before and I knew I'd looked it up before. It was just
really frustrating because I felt as though if I haven't learnt it then I haven't actually done
anything and for me writing stuff down
really helps it stick for me and I can think
'oh I wrote that before and it sort of
triggers the memory a little bit
more' So yeah, that's my aim, sort of expanding my vocabulary a little bit more but because
Infinite Jest is Infinite Jest,
there are hundreds and hundreds of words I don't know and it means I'm stopping probably
four or five times page on average to
write down something and look up something.
So yeah, it's just going to be a little of a slow read but I am actually really enjoying
reading those bigger books at the moment. I normally tend to go for like 200 page books. Clearly
now is the time for the 700 plus. I hope that you guys are enjoying your reading this weekend and
Let me know if you have any great big
intimidating books that you also working
your way through whilst the weather is
lovely and your mood is high and you're not going to get
depressed and throw yourself off a bridge if it's
a book that's more than a hundred pages
long. I hope you're well and I'll
see you soon in my next video which is
probably going to be me ranting about The Crow Girl. Bye bye.
