reading update

I spend way more time thinking and talking about reading than I do actually reading! Lol.

I'm going to be spending next week at Uni Bastions working on my André Breton essay due on week 0 of Hilary. I was looking for audiobooks for Breton's Nadja (I now realise you can't really do an audiobook of it) when I found a YouTuber called Antastesia who made a video about it in French. It felt so good to listen to people speak in French at length again and she was also a really interesting person so I've been watching her videos which are generally about literature and just her life training as a teacher and all that. It's so fascinating... this girl reads so much. It's very inspiring. So apparently there's this whole niche part of YouTube called BookTube where people just... review books? Wow.

Which leads me to the fact that I have 2 weeks to read 3 books if I want to complete my Goodreads reading challenge of reading 25 books a year. I don't know if I can make it because I'm absolutely crawling through Herzog right now (it's so boring to me... it's such a classic 'man and his inner angst' novel so far. Like I just do not care that his wife left him for his best friend - I have no sympathy for this man who apparently cheated on his wife too and is a bad father so like. Boohoo.) I'm also reading Griselda Pollock's absolutely fascinating new book on Charlotte Salomon (I bought it after I went to her guest seminar this term on the same topic) but it's literally like 500 pages and 3kg and I can't figure out how to hold it comfortably so I'm just avoiding having to pick it up. Oh my god why is it so heavy.

Tomorrow I'm going to town and going to do some shopping for Christmas. I think I'm going to treat myself to Elif Batuman's first book, The Possessed, because I love her and want her to be my mentor. I'm still thinking about The Idiot... It's had such an impact on me!

But in the meantime I need to use every cell in my body for the strength of restraining myself from becoming a BookTuber too. Or an 'ideas' YouTuber like Contrapoints and Philosophy Tube or the cultural critics I've been watching like Lindsay Ellis. Considering that a) I barely even read anymore / know nothing and b) Have no interesting or original opinions, it would be of no benefit to anyone. But the urge is so strong... I have such a weird compulsive need to share myself to an anonymous audience (like this blog) - I log everything I read onto Goodreads and all the movies I watch onto Letterboxd. It's not even so people will read it necessarily, but more for myself. It's fun to go back and see how I live through the media I consume. And yet the fun is in the fact that it's online - if I was just keeping a Word doc on my computer of the books I read it would be so boring. But I also don't, like, super crave attention. I only have about 3 friends on each website and we never interact on there. I wonder why I'm like this. Such an utterly modern phenomenon.