Hey guys, it's Kirsti. Welcome back to my
channel and welcome to another
installment of monthly recommendations!
The theme for April is big books, so we are
recommending books that have over 500
pages. With one very small exception
which we'll get into shortly, everything
I'm recommending today has over 500
pages, as do the subsequent books in
the series. First up, The Illuminae Files
by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. I love
the Illuminae Files so so much. If you
have not heard me gushing about these
books 10,000 times, I don't know where
you've been for the past, like, two years.
For those of you don't know The Illuminae
Files is a YA sci-fi series that is
kind of space opera-y and melodramatic and
wonderful, and it is told in a mixed
media format, and it is just delightful. I
mean, how can you pass up on pages like
this? It's just glorious. So Illuminae,
the first book in the series, clocks in
at 599 pages. The second book, Gemina, is
even longer. And there is no doubt in my
mind that the third book in the series,
Obsidio, which is now not coming out
until, like, March of 2018 and I'm so
fucking pissed about it. Anyway,
there's no doubt in my mind that that
will be over 500 pages as well. Carry On
by Rainbow Rowell. If you have not read
Carry On, do yourself a favor and read
Carry On because it is just delightful
from start to finish. You don't have to
read Fangirl to read this one - it's
basically Harry/Draco slashfic, if Harry and
Draco were like 18 and still at Hogwarts.
It is wonderful. I adore it with every
fibre of my being and I just... Baz is my
perfect little cinnamon roll and I adore
him, because he's a melodramatic sass
explosion and that, like, speaks to my
soul. Next up, I want to deal with the one
that's a little bit questionable and
that is The Knife of Never Letting Go
by Patrick Ness or the entire Chaos
Walking trilogy more specifically. Now
technically, this first book in the
series is 479 pages. The edition that I
have actually comes in at 512 pages,
because it has a bonus short story at
the end, which is why I put the trilogy
on the list because I looked at the book
and was like "Oh, it's over 500 pages!" and
then yeah. I realised that it's the short
story that tips it over the mark. But the
other two books in the series are
definitely over 500 pages in their own
right, it's just this one that comes
slightly short and given that it's, like,
20 pages short and this edition has that
bonus short story, I'm totally cheating
and including it anyway. For anybody who
doesn't know, this is a YA sci-fi
series that is set on a distant planet
where basically, there are no women left
and men who remain on this planet can
hear each other's thoughts. And things go
about as well as you would expect when a
female character arrives on the scene.
It's so interestingly written. Like, it's
written in a very phonetic style
because the main character is completely
uneducated and he's illiterate. So it's
written in this phonetic style that
takes a while to get used to but it's
such an incredible story full of so many
amazing characters and I just have so
many feelings about this series and
about the characters and about
everything. Now, because I'm me, I
obviously have a few classics to
recommend to you. The first of those is Jane
Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It follows
Jane Eyre through the course of her life.
It starts out when she's about ten and
she's living with her horrible aunt and
her horrible cousins and then she gets
sent off to school, spends a long time
there, graduates from school at the age of
16 and becomes a teacher at the same
school. And then at the age of 18, she's
like "My life is kind of shit. I'm going
to go be a governess to this to this rich guy" and
story goes from there. It is wonderfully
written, it's incredibly compelling
writing, I was just completely sucked
into the story from the very first time
that I picked up this book, I continue to
love this book with every fibre of my
being, even though the relationship
between Jane and Rochester is slightly
squicky at times. Next up is a delightful
piece of sensationalist Victorian
fiction, and that is The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins. I love this book a lot.
I studied this in first-year university
for English and it's great. Basically, the
main character, Walter Hartwright, he is
going to his new job as a drawing master
to this young lady and he's walking
across Hampstead Heath at night and he
comes across this woman in a white dress
and has this very strange encounter with
her. And then he gets to his new job and
he's like "Wow, this girl I'm teaching is
absolutely beautiful, I'm instantly in love
with her". But she's engaged off to this,
like, creepy older man who has an
incredibly creepy old Italian friend and
the story kind of goes from there. I love
so many of the characters in this book, I
love the way that the story's told, how it
jumps around between the narrators, each
telling their own key little parts of
the story. It's just wonderful and, like, I
mean, in modern-day terms the big plot
twist is kind of pointless and dumb
but for the time it was, like, incredibly
scandalous and completely wonderful and
I just love this book so so much. The
final classic that I want to recommend
is Bleak House by Charles Dickens, which
comes in at just a fraction under a
thousand pages. This thing is an absolute
brick. But it is such an amazing story
and I love it so so much. I really need
to reread this book. If you're hesitant
about it, just know that this book
includes spontaneous human combustion, so,
like, how can you pass it up?? Essentially
this book revolves around a court case,
Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, and this court
case is tying up the fates of, like, a
whole huge number of people and so the
book basically follows all of the people
who are involved in that. And there are
characters who fall in love, there are
characters who have mysterious parentage
and find out their, kind of, history and
their backstories, there are characters
who are incredibly funny, there are
characters that you feel for. It's just
great. Like, I know a lot of people are
really scared of this book because it is
so absolutely enormous, but it's full of
some of Dickens' best characters and some
of his best and funniest writing and,
like, I just love this book to death.
Moving back to stuff that was written,
like, you know, in the past 15 years, The
Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
It was translated from Spanish by
Lucia Graves. It's set in Spain just after
the Second World War, and it's the story
of a boy named Daniel who, on his tenth
birthday, his father takes him to this
amazing bookshop and says to him "You
can pick one book as your birthday
present, and it will be your
responsibility to look after and care
for this book for the rest of your life."
Fast forward like five or six years and
he comes to realise that all the other
copies of this particular book are being
destroyed, as are all the other books by
this particular author, and so he starts
to investigate. It has a very kind of
Dickensian, Isabel Allende sort of a feel
to the writing. I love the absolute crap
out of this book, it's just so
beautifully written and so compelling
and just completely fascinating. Sticking
with the Dickensian historical fiction
vibe, I want to recommend Fingersmith by
Sarah Waters. Fingersmith has just under
600 pages, and the best way to describe
this book I think is Dickens With
Lesbians. Basically everything that you
think is happening in the story, you're
completely wrong. Like, there is one
particular moment in the story where you
think you've got your head around
everything and you know
exactly what's happening. You turn the
page, the perspective changes and you're
like "Holy fuck, I had no idea that was
coming. This book has just blown my
fucking mind, I don't know how to deal
with this." But yeah, it was absolutely
amazing. I loved this book so so
much. I really need to reread it because
it was wonderful. Again there is a wonderful
BBC adaptation of this that is
definitely worth checking out. But, like,
after you read the book, because the book is
better. One final historical fiction book -
The Diviners by Libba Bray, which is the
first book in a quartet, I believe it's
going to be? But only the first two are out
at the moment, the third one comes out
later this year and, like, I'm dying, I need
it immediately. This one is set in the
1920s and it tells the story of a 17
year old girl named Evie whose parents
basically decide that they're sick of
her behaviour and they're going to send
her off to live with her boring museum
curator uncle in New York. Obviously she
loves being sent to New York because she's
a total party girl, and when she gets
there, things take a turn for the
paranormal. People start being murdered
in horrible ways and she ends up
involved in the case because, like, she
can touch objects and see what happened
to the dead person. So I just really
loved the language in this book, I love
the characters in this book. The second
one gets very diverse very quickly which
I absolutely adored. I just really
loved the writing and the characters and
the series and I need book 3 now.
Next up I want to recommend an action
and adventure one that is also a kind of
historical fiction, and that is Temple by
Matthew Reilly, which I adore. This one is
just under 700 pages and it was
published in 1999, so it
is now quite dated, but I still have an
incredible soft spot for this book and I
absolutely love it. So the gist of this
book is that there is a young
linguistics professor at NYU who the
military comes to him and says "Hey, we've
got this medieval Latin manuscript that
we need you to translate because this is
going to help us find some object in the
depths of the Peruvian jungle, and we
need the object now and so you need to
come with us and translate this document
on the way." So it's partly the story of
him going with the military and what
happens when they get to Peru looking
for this mysterious lost idol. And it's
partly the translated manuscript, which
is set during the Spanish conquest of
Peru and it's written by this renegade
priest who ended up helping one of the
Incan princes to escape and kind of
his story. And the two weave together so
so well and like I said, it is a little
bit dated because it was published in
1999 but it's still just
so much fun, if you can suspend your
disbelief because so much of it
is completely ridiculous and
over-the-top, but I still love this. Next
up, I want to recommend a crime novel and
that is Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter.
Pretty Girls is just under 700 pages and
it's a standalone whereas most of Karin
Slaughter's books are part of an overall
series, but this one is a standalone. And
holy shit, this was terrifying. So this
book tells the story of two sisters who
became estranged 20 years earlier after
their teenage sister disappeared in
mysterious circumstances. She has never
been found, the sisters haven't spoken
since. Now one of the sisters, her husband
has been murdered. She and her sister
come back into contact again and they
start to join a few dots that are
happening with the disappearance of a
teenage girl fairly recently. They start
to think it might be connected to their
sister's case and then they find out all
this super creepy stuff. It is a pretty
horrifying book at times. Like, if you
can't deal with gore, definitely don't
read this one, it is very very
confronting. There are scenes involving
machetes which ha no not okay with that.
But this book was so so compelling and
so creepy and so amazing and I
absolutely loved it, I sped through this
book. And finally also because I'm me, I
want to recommend a couple of nonfiction
books. The first of those is Amazons:
lives and legends of warrior women
across the ancient world by Adrienne Mayor.
It starts out dealing with evidence of
the Amazon people within Greece and
then it talks about, like, the
anthropology and archaeology of the
people who were basically referred to as
the Amazons but were essentially, like,
steppe tribes across Central Asia and then
it deals at the end with warrior women
in other parts of the world. So it
includes Mulan, it includes women in I
think Egypt and in India and stuff like
that. So it's really really fascinating
and I think the thing I love most about
this book is how well it deals with
archaeology and how well it looks at
archaeologists making assumptions about
things. So it talks a lot about male
archaeologists in particular uncovering
a grave and it has grave goods that
would typically be associated with a
warrior, and so they just automatically
look at this grave and go "Well, based on
the grave goods, this grave belongs to a
man." And yet they've done tests on a lot
of these graves and found that something
like 25% of these graves
that were assigned male based on the
grave goods actually belong to women. So
that kind of stuff I just found really
really intriguing. It's just really
really fascinating reading.
And the final book that I want to
recommend today is Alexander Hamilton by
Ron Chernow. If you have not read this
book and you are a fan of Hamilton, you
definitely need to read this book. It is
very dense, it is very long but it's
really really interesting to see the
bits that Lin-Manuel Miranda chose to
include and chose to leave out and the
bits that clearly influenced him in
writing the songs because there is a lot
about Ron Chernow's style of writing and
about the way that he weaves the story
about Alexander Hamilton that does actually
come through in the musical, which I
absolutely love. I will admit that there
is a big chunk in the middle of this
book that gets very very boring very
quickly, because unlike the musical you
don't get to skip over like six years of
Hamilton's life with Non Stop. You
actually have to read about all the
shit he was doing in that time, which
included setting up, like, the financial
system and stuff. So if you're not
interested in the history of economics,
that part of the book is incredibly dry.
But the rest of the book, particularly the
beginning where it's dealing with the
Revolution and then, like, once you hit
the Reynolds pamphlet, that shit takes
off again and it's just amazing and
compelling and I absolutely loved this
story. I cried reading this book. Like, a
thousand times. Because I am trash. So
if you're a fan of Hamilton or you're fan
of historical biographies, definitely
definitely check this book out. So there
you have it, friends. That is all of the books over 500
pages I have to recommend to you today.
If you have got suggestions for me,
please let me know down in the comments.
Also if you've read any of these and have
thoughts on them, let me know that as
well. Thank you guys so much for watching,
I love all your faces and I'll see you on
Friday. Bye guys.
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