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Let's Talk about Books

2017-10-03 · review / recommendation · John · 3:33 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing · mode: Advice & reviews · tags: self promotion

A week before Turtles All the Way Down comes out, John recommends his favourite reading of the year by genre: YA novels led by The Hate U Give, literary fiction, poetry and nonfiction on refugees, climate change and OCD, and asks viewers what they are reading.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Turtles out in a week; YA picks: The Hate U Give and The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

  • ★★★ John's new book, Turtles All the Way Down, comes out in exactly one week. — 00:00:00 · Turtles All the Way Down
  • ★ John jokes about the sound his anxiety makes as the release nears. (playful) — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Repeating his blurb, John says he truly believes The Hate U Give will be remembered as a classic of our time. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John recommends a few more YA books, all of which made him cry, though he admits he is a bit teary of late. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John recommends The Inexplicable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, whose books are always tender and generous to the reader; it might be his favourite of them. (hedged) — 00:00:00

00:00:37 — YA (We Are Okay, Piecing Me Together) and literary fiction (Little Fires Everywhere, Alarcón's stories)

  • ★★ John recommends Nina LaCour's We Are Okay, a poetic meditation on loss that took him back to the last days of adolescence. — 00:00:37
  • ★★★ Renée Watson's Piecing Me Together genuinely changed how John thinks about the role art plays in human life; he read it in two days and has thought about it for six months. — 00:00:37
  • ★★★ John's favourite 2017 literary novel is Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere: brilliant, and rightly much talked about. — 00:00:37
  • ★★ John thinks Celeste Ng's books should be discussed alongside other great chroniclers of American suburbia such as John Updike. (hedged) — 00:01:06
  • ★★ John recommends Daniel Alarcón's The King Is Always Above the People: his stories still astonish John with their precision and power. — 00:01:06
  • ★★ In full disclosure, John went to high school with Alarcón, who beat him for the Creative Writing Award three years in a row, with good reason. — 00:01:06
  • ★ The King Is Always Above the People is a finalist for the National Book Award. — 00:01:06

00:01:36 — Poetry, recommended by quoting: Sealey, Akbar, Clint Smith

  • ★★ John has read a lot of poetry this year (2017), not knowing why, and it has been a tremendous consolation to him. — 00:01:36
  • ★★ Instead of summarising, John recommends three poetry books by quoting a line from each: Nicole Sealey's Ordinary Beasts, Kaveh Akbar's Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Clint Smith's Counting Descent. — 00:01:36

00:01:57 — Nonfiction: City of Light, City of Poison; City of Thorns; The Water Will Come; The Man Who Couldn't Stop

  • ★★ City of Light, City of Poison is a history that reads like a thriller about Paris's first police chief investigating poisonings possibly involving aristocrats close to Louis XIV; John found it bonkers and loved its portrait of ordinary 17th-century Parisian life. — 00:01:57

  • ★★★ City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence follows refugees in Dadaab camp over many years; a difficult book without easy answers, it shows that refugee stories are human stories. — 00:01:57

    “refugee stories are human stories”

  • ★★ Dadaab refugee camp was once home to over 500,000 people. — 00:02:27

  • ★★ The Water Will Come, about climate change and humanity's future, is a rare page-turning science book: a thriller in which the hero in peril is us. — 00:02:27 · climate change
  • ★★ John loved David Adam's The Man Who Couldn't Stop, a good starting place for Turtles readers who want to learn more about OCD. — 00:02:27 · Turtles All the Way Down

00:02:56 — Books he looks forward to, the comments ask, Turtles release and tour, sign-off

  • ★★ John looks forward to unread books out this month (October 2017), Okorafor's Akata Warrior, Lockhart's Genuine Fraud and Stiefvater's All the Crooked Saints, so his tour reading is sorted. (hedged) — 00:02:56
  • ★★ John asks viewers to say in the comments what they are reading and enjoying. — 00:02:56
  • ★★ In one week Turtles will be out and the brothers on tour; Nerdfighters can find out more at turtlesallthewaydownbook.com. — 00:02:56 · Turtles All the Way Down, Nerdfighteria

In the description and comments

  • ★ John credits the authors of two nonfiction books he recommends: City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker and The Water Will Come by Jeff Goddell. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

People: Ben Rawlence · Benjamin Alire Sáenz · Celeste Ng · Clint Smith · Daniel Alarcón · David Adam · E. Lockhart · John Updike · Kaveh Akbar · Louis XIV · Maggie Stiefvater · Nicole Sealey · Nina LaCour · Nnedi Okorafor · Renée Watson

Works: Akata Warrior · All the Crooked Saints · Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe · Calling a Wolf a Wolf · City of Light, City of Poison · City of Thorns · Counting Descent · Genuine Fraud · Little Fires Everywhere · Ordinary Beasts · Piecing Me Together · The Hate U Give · The Inexplicable Logic of My Life · The King Is Always Above the People · The Man Who Couldn't Stop · The Water Will Come · Turtles All the Way Down · We Are Okay

Organizations: National Book Award

Concepts: anxiety disorder · climate change · obsessive-compulsive disorder · refugee

Places: Dadaab refugee complex · Paris

Only in the description or credits: Angie Thomas · Holly Tucker · Jeff Goddell

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