Hello and welcome back to Char Reads. This is my February review video and as you know we always start and end with a dog. Huxley just had a groom the other day and is now so smart. He looks so neat. It's kind of like an eight-year-old wearing a tuxedo as well. Brian described it because he looks like a real dog but he's also just like a little baby. So I'll put you down there. I read four book books in February and I listened to six audiobooks which I think is a pretty good month especially considering that it's a really short month and also I don't think I'm of anything for the past like five days. The first book I read is Saberance by Ling Mar. This came out in 2018 and it is about a woman called Candice Chen. A pandemic apocalypse happens basically. Everyone gets this fungal infection called Chen Fever which makes you act really weirdly and then eventually die and Candice is one of the few survivors. We see her like three years before the pandemic as she first moves to New York and sells down. Me's a boyfriend and we see her around the time that the pandemic is appearing and everyone's leaving the city and she has to stay there for work and it's all gets really dystopian really quickly and we also see her a month a couple months later where she's in a kind of like survival cult sort of thing. Really interesting to think about the comparisons between this and our pandemic because there are a lot of similarities, a lot of differences as well. But yeah I made a video about this a couple weeks ago which I will obviously link in the description that goes into a bit more detail about it but I thought I was reading. The second book I have to talk to you about was my book club book for this month and it was everybody died so I got a dog by Emily Dean and I didn't like it, I really didn't like it, it first rated me in so many ways but the writing was funny and the pace was good so I can't give it one star. I think if I was like a fan of Emily Dean I would have loved it but we picked it on the basis of it being a memoir about grief and also about dogs and it wasn't really either of those things. Over the course of three years Emily's sister who was like her best friend her mother who was she was very close to and her dad who she was kind of a strange from but also you know shared a lot of history with obviously they all died so that happened very quickly. So the book talks about her childhood and growing up and her desire to be a dog family and get a dog but her family was always too eccentric and we're doing different things that she never got the chance to and then she finally gets a dog in the last like 40 pages. There's really not enough actual dog content of this. Also, shit dog mum, my friends don't really care about this but as dog mum it drove me nuts when she took her eight-month-old puppy to a puppy class that was only for puppies up to the age of six months and lied and said that she was only four months old and that she was just really amazingly skilled and picked up with tricks really quickly but no because you already knew them she's eight months old. Oh my god what kind of person does that and then brags about it in a book. This woman has so much ego she's both so self-centered and so insecure when she constantly feels the need to be lighthearted and funny and that makes her completely capable of like really really reckoning with grief like I'm sure she did personally but in the memoir she just doesn't dig down into it. If I've learned one thing from reading a lot of memoirs about grief you can only talk about the deep dark places you went when you let go when you let go of the perception of yourself and she just can't do that also just enormous amount of name-dropping oh my god so much name-dropping and also just two more complaints. She'd have these make these statements as if nobody had ever experienced that emotion before like literally at some point said oh but people didn't know that on the inside I was actually really insecure and introverted and I was just making a show for the world it's like hello welcome to every single person in the world she also seemed completely oblivious of her privilege. She grew up in a household that had a lot of financial difficulty and they were always living on the edge and it was really unstable but she still went to a private school and was surrounded by these like really incredible like cultural icons and influential people that completely set her up for success and I think she's got this perspective that like oh yeah but like I had family difficulties and it's like that doesn't omfiate the fact that you're extremely privileged. Oh okay right ran over. I'm sure if I like if I she does a radio show with Frank Skinner and as I think most of the people that read this book are a fan of her and if you're a fan of her and want to know more about her life absolutely fine if you're not a fan of her then this is just sick of antic I found it so difficult to read and I really didn't like it. The next book I have to talk about is Wintering by Catherine May I've just done a video on this so you can see that on my channel but it's about winter both the period of time and the feeling of sort of hunkering down and hibernating and it being difficult and cold and sad and dark but you're getting through so it talks a lot about winter on a practical level and how like people in Norway get through the dark winters and about sea swimming that I really liked and about the passage of time and marking time throughout the year but it also talked about like illness and depression and just difficult periods in life. Got a package and I'm all flustered. Where are we? Wintering yes. Didn't care for it that much as a memoir it was quite disjointed but the vibe like the meandering musings of winter and how to do winter well was lovely. We're super recommend it only to read in winter. No summer reading this book. The next book I have to talk about is Queenie by Candice Carthie Williams. This came out in 2019 and I want to it's been so hyped up. I'm just reading this book so much that I put it on my Christmas wish list and forgot about it and bought myself a copy and then forgot that I bought myself a copy so when I received it Christmas I was like oh my god I can't wait to read this I really want to read this for ages came home and then it was already on my shelves and I was very confused. Anyway this is a Jamaican British 25 year old girl living in South London and having life shit on her for a bit. Having great friends and great family but sort of going through a breakup and dealing with that by sleeping around and not really being sure what she wants from these people and from life and getting very confused and going to quite a dark place but then coming back out of it and being renewed sort of a wintering of sorts. I think this was a very accomplished book um technically very good. It covered such a wide range of topics and covered them all really well and I would recommend it a lot. There were a few things that I really didn't like about it that pulled me back from super enjoying it. I didn't really like Queenie that much as person and a couple plot points but I made a video about this book where I talk about it more fully so check that out if you hear more about it. Those are all the physical books I read this month. I also completed as I started last month and talked about the Jeeps and Worcester Audible collection by Seen Fry. The ones I had left were right-how Jeeps, the Code of the Wisters and Joy in the morning and they were all just delightfully enjoyable. Apart from the Code of the Worcesters I was sitting there doing my puzzle and I was just listening to it and I was like this is so much fun. I'm enjoying this book so much. I don't know what it was about that one. They made it so much more fun than the other ones to me. Like they were easy, comfortable, happy, funny listening but Code of the Wisters I was just like absolutely riveted in this this scenario where Bertie has to steal this anti-cal creamer but then he has to also not steal it and like loads of pizza. It's it was just hysterical and I loved it and I felt really weirdly invested in it. The trouble with PG Woodhouse's Jeeps, it's not the trouble but they sort of similarly to Charlotte Holmes completely fine in isolation but I do reference the past quite a bit especially like characters returning and it's like oh we have that thing together and it is quite delightful listening to them chronologically to get that that sense of history and to kind of feel clued in on this life in a very linear way but man I kind of just want to be like if you're going to start somewhere start with Code of the Worcesters because it's so good and at that point now where I want to buy all of them there's a is it is it reachable? Yes it is. Arrow make these copies of them not all of the ones that are in the Woodball collection but most of them and a few extra ones are really gorgeous type and I like them a lot and I think I might just get a full set of them because I like doing that and when I finished listening to all of them I was like okay I need something new to listen to while I do my Jeeps laws and my code and I mentioned this last time of like I don't just want to keep listening to Harry Potter turns out I do I just want to read this entire product haven't done it in like a year and a half maybe that's probably not true I probably did six months ago and didn't log it but yeah I started listening to Harry Potter again I'm like halfway through Goblin at Fire now and I still love it and want to continue enjoying it so glazing my eyes over not giving Jackie a really anymore money but enjoying my audiobooks my battery is blinking battery's blinking poor little boy just wants to lie down and I just want to pick him up and cuddle him for my video he's so sweet he's like a different dog now that he's had his hair cut though I almost don't recognize him I can see it in his eyes he's the same boy but he'll surely love me as much anymore maybe it's good I have to put him through that room you know you can get in the SNIP next week you don't know how hard that's going to be thank you for watching this video I hope you had a good February as well what did you read what was the best book you read in February I'd love to hear it and I will see you next time in March goodbye goodbye is it mean that I'd do this make you wave goodbye to them do you mind?