Adulting - #7 Seven Books That I have Loved This Year

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

This episode is just me- as my guest was unfortunately unwell, however I did enjoy rambling on my own. Books and words are so special and important to me in so many ways and I wanted to share some books that have really impacted my life and how I face this world as an adult.Books:Everything I Know About Love - Dolly AldertonEleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine- Gail HoneymanAnimal- Sarah PascoeSapiens- Yuval Noah HarariHomo Deus- Yuval Noah HarariThe Big Little Things- Henry FraserWhy I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race- Reni Eddo- Lodge Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Hello and welcome to Adulting, the podcast where I try to question the norms and figure out a bit more about this thing called life. So it is episode seven and I am supposed to have a guest, however unfortunately they aren't very well. So I thought, God, what can I do for number seven? And I thought maybe I'll just go alone again uh so it's just going to be me I hope that that's okay feel free to turn it off I I do know that I I can be a bit annoying but hopefully you don't think that if you're listening uh having had quite an obsession as a child with magic and anything magical seven seems like a

magical number so I took this as my inspiration for the topic which is going to be seven great books that I've read in the last 12 months and they're all kind of have similar themes within them or maybe it's just that the way that I read them I tend to take either a bit of a feminist reading on them or an anthropological outlook on them and they are all except for one non-fiction which is quite new to me because I never really read non-fiction before I studied English at uni and as a child I was always obsessed with fiction literature and it was only really as I got older that I started to really find the joys in reading things which were maybe a bit more science-based or anecdotal and I just found I really enjoyed this

kind of literature. It does take a bit longer to read I think in some cases some of these books are a little heavier than others but overall I think they're amazing reads. So in no particular order I've just stacked them in a pile. A few of these books we've done at my book club but I'm basically going to take you through each one and pick up poignant quotes that I love from them and hopefully inspire you guys maybe to read them so number one is one I've read very recently and we're going to be discussing at my next book club and it's Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton who obviously is co-host of The Hilo which is an absolutely amazing podcast that I love it's like topical weekly news and she was also the dating columnist for the Sunday Times and she's just a really funny person and what I loved about this story is it's kind of like a coming-of-age tale but it's so raw in that

it talks about so many things which I think a lot of us experience in our adolescence both with incredible accuracy and it kind of makes you draw back on memories that you've completely forgotten it's quite nostalgic but also just in her openness to discuss her faults her failures as well as her her great times and her kind of getting over certain hurdles in her life and there's one bit of the book which I kind of really love because I think this is something that we all experience as we're growing up as we're adulting and it's when she's kind of realizing that maybe the path she's chosen is slightly self-destructive or maybe the life she leads isn't being true to herself so I'm going to read the passage so she says whilst my closest friends were encouraging

of the process soon it became apparent that self-examination made me boring to the wrong people I started to drink less and less always questioning whether i was doing it to have fun or doing it to distract myself from a problem i tried to put a stop to people pleasing where that giving my time and energy away so freely was what was chipping away at the void that i didn't want to turn into a quarry i was more honest i told people when i was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with a small price of an uncomfortable conversation. I became more self-aware. So inevitably, I made a tit of myself for the amusement of other people

far less. When I read that bit really resonated with me because I think maybe even on a daily basis, I'm now grappling with a bit more self-introspection and I I call this kind of time allowance a bit of growing pains it's almost like when you're younger I think I've said this before but I think when you're in your teenage years you're very much consumed in your own emotions and feelings and everything is very passionate and new and fresh and then I think as you start to get older it's like someone starts to put a mirror in front of you and whether this happens through meeting other people with traits that you also have and you find undesirable and it makes you maybe register the ways in which you could change

yourself but that's a really painful process to acknowledge that there's parts of you that you don't like and reading this book I found it not only hilariously funny but also really comforting because there are certainly traits in myself that I now am aware of which is really beneficial for me because I can stop myself from doing it or once I've done it I can reflect on it and I realized then I think the painful part is that you realize that maybe a few years ago when you're a bit younger you would just do them very freely and very unaware of the consequences, whether that would be it would offend or hurt or annoy other people, or whether it would be that actually for your own life trajectory, it wasn't going to be useful. So in reading Dolly's book,

I just found that a really great passage that helped me to see that, you know, you're not the only one going through that. Because I think sometimes, especially when something happens to you, we've all had that feeling like, why does it always happen to me of course you can only live your own experiences but the weight of thinking that perhaps you're the only one who thinks these things or has those feelings that being taken away is really helpful and that is another aim of this podcast as well of course talking about things that maybe you feel like you're alone in when everyone else has them there's another bit that I wanted to read that I thought was that was interesting so she is speaking to an older man um via text and he says

thank you for being more open with me he messaged me one afternoon it's sexy and she says obviously I would continue to just do just about anything if a man I like Tommy thought it was sexy and that's something I wouldn't do now but I think I spoke about it on the previous podcast where just to be not even to be sexy or even necessarily attractive to whoever you're attracted to but just to fit in changing your actions obviously and hindsight what I've literally just said change your actions in order to have a beneficial effect on the life of you and others is great but change your actions purely for the benefit of other people to make them like you is one of the biggest disservices you can do for yourself and the funniest thing was when I was younger I often used to play up to things or try and be the

funny one or try and make people like me in a way that maybe would have turned a lot of people off and actually if you're true to yourself it's hard to do and sometimes we are always being kind of molded by different groups of people different situations different stages of our lives but there is a real something to say for kind of knowing where you stand on things and keeping your ground because what it will mean is you'll assimilate yourself with people who also agree with you you what you might find is you spend so long which is what Dolly kind of talks about you spend so long trying to be the person you think everyone else wants you to be that you've got nothing really left of yourself so much so that you don't really have a close or

deep meaningful friendship or relationships with other people and obviously friendship and relationships are both things that during adulthood are really changing and difficult obviously I've done episodes on them so I'd highly recommend that it honestly took me about a day to read it's so funny and I think it's been the number one book for the last 10 weeks or so I think I saw that on Twitter earlier so that is amazing and the second book in my pile is also one we did at book club. It's Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. And this is the only fiction book that I've got on this list. This is just, this has also been really famous. So sorry, these are actually quite basic books in terms of I haven't gone really out there

and shown you books you won't have heard of that it just happens to be what I've got in my bookshelf in my room at the minute. But Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Again again I took a kind of feminist spin on it and it's also got this same trope of coming of age maybe it's just something that we want to talk about a bit more because it does seem like within these recent literatures it's something that's touched on especially when it comes to women's perception of themselves and along that vein there's a few bits that I find really funny it's a funny novel because it's not funny like this the story of it isn't funny but it's the way that it's told and the way that it's written and the characterization of Eleanor is just amazing so she I don't want to

give the story away but she's someone who maybe seems slightly dissociated from normalized society in terms of the way that she acts around people the way that she dresses she's not very normative and she's not kind of mainstream and that's kind of her own for a lot of her own fruition but also because of external factors but there's a part in the book where she goes to kind of make herself fit in a bit more make herself be sexually attractive and she goes I was getting the hang of this shopping business I'd returned to the same department store and after seeking advice from a different shop assistant had purchased a black dress back tights and black shoes this was my first dress since childhood and it felt strange

to have my legs on public display she tried to steer me towards vertiginous heels again. Do you know what? I don't even know if I've said that right. Why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel. On reflection though, she was correct in stating that the fitted black dress did not really go

with either my new boots, too informal apparently, or my Velcro work shoes. It appeared that nothing did much to my surprise I thought that they were the very definition of versatility and I've actually when I did this book at book club I've got a little post-it note in the book that says gender politics gender identity why do we wear heels and one of the great things I think about this book is it dissociates you in that because you're looking through the eyes of this woman who is really disenfranchised from kind of pop culture it suddenly makes you think things are strange and we normalize things when we're used to them

in fact I think that's in one of the other quotes I'm going to pull up so I'll maybe draw back to that idea but it's really beautifully written the characterization is amazing you really fall in love with Eleanor and I think that it's just got some really interesting commentary on um mother-daughter relationships which I think again is a trope that we're seeing a lot with I, Tonya I watched recently it was a great film Margot Robbie is absolutely incredible there was something else I watched the other day with mother-daughter relationships but because that one's fiction I feel a bit concerned about giving too much of the story away so I'm gonna leave that one there and then the next one that I want to pick up on is

Animal by Sarah Pascoe again I did this at book club I'm being very lazy aren't I in these choices but they're just ones that I know that I've read to a point where I think that I can talk about it so this uh this is touching on the normalizing concept that I was talking about so Sarah's book sorry to give a brief analysis or a rough premise is an autobiography the autobiography of a female body and it's amazing extrapolate extrapolating all these things I've kind of discussed um sexualization of women why we do things in fact I draw a lot of concepts from Sarah's books in the way that I think about things now and I even think I mentioned her in the last podcast I'm a massive Sarah Pascoe fan um and it's because it's it's combining kind of comedy and also science as well as just kind of a

really great anecdotal story there's some quite dark bits of herself that Sarah shares I seem to be really finding a great affinity towards these women who are bearing parts of themselves and I find that that's maybe helping me in some ways and maybe there's a reason for that for me personally or maybe we all just feel like there's not enough of these narratives within literature or just within mainstream media from women and unfortunately I think a lot of the darker parts or the bits of themselves that they're bearing are actually things that are caused by a misogynistic patriarchal society and I'm not making that as a sweeping statement I'm saying that a lot of the things that women especially

suffer as obviously can't speak as a guy so I don't know I'm definitely sure they have body insecurities and things like that but a lot of it is down to the sexualization of women and this kind of onus being put on women's bodies and the way that they look so this is the bit that I've decided that I'd like to read out so she says obviously some women have breast surgery because they've suffered cancer or pain and some women need to reconstruct into their breasts after illness or dysfunction but other women physically some women need to reconstruct into their breasts after illness or dysfunction. But other women, physically healthy women, choose to have their breasts operated on because they don't like the way they look. When these operations first became widely available in the 1990s, over 90% of the women who requested them were then recorded

as having psychological difficulties or psychiatric issues. That's because back then, wanting to be sliced open to have a globule of plastic or saline shoved inside was absolute madness. But the odd thing is that the statistic is now inverted and over 90% of people who want boob jobs are recorded as being entirely sane because who wouldn't want to improve their rubbish tits when there are other options available. When something's common enough it can't be mad anymore we just upgrade our definition of sanity to include unnecessary and painful surgical procedures so i think that's a really interesting thing and and i i do guess that i have quite polemic views on surgery in that i i do i am

concerned about the increasing rise in cosmetic surgeries and I myself have never had a massive insecurity to the point where I would want anything done but it's becoming so commonplace now as Sarah says in the book that I start to kind of look at my body maybe my boobs or my lips and you're just so consumed with all this media of women who have been kind of enhanced and I'm it's it's not a degradation on the women I'm not trying to make a slight towards anyone who gets surgery I think what's more concerning is the pressures that are causing it to happen and then once something becomes normalized it then kind of takes away from the stigma of it and and I don't want to stigmatize surgery but I just feel very worried that taking myself for example as someone who maybe never had a massive desire I think at

one point I thought about getting a boob job like anyone else kind of thinks about having a sandwich that taking myself for example as someone who maybe never had a massive desire I think at one point I thought about getting a boob job like anyone else kind of thinks about having a sandwich for lunch it was just kind of a fleeting idea that was kind of like a fun thought process to think about and imagine but I've never really desired one deeply but the more and more that I am consuming media and women who are changing themselves so drastically I start to feel slightly insecure and that concerns me because I feel safe and happy and okay with the idea of women who've had massive insecurities plaguing them getting a surgery done because I think that if it's going to improve your quality

of life and you can afford to do it and it's going to benefit you then fine you should do that and I felt very safe in the fact that I knew that I didn't fall into that category but there's now this new category of it's kind of becoming a norm I got my eyelashes done they've actually fallen out at the minute but even that in itself is is such a kind of luxurious accessory that I just don't need and Zadie Smith makes some really interesting points about makeup and her daughter wearing makeup and and how her son can just put on a t-shirt and round the door and Zadie Zadie's daughter will want to sit there for hours doing makeup and she's just like it's the labor and it's it's the it's just the onus being put on women and there's obviously arguments for increased freedom and an increased kind of autonomy of your body and ability to show your sexuality but I just feel

like I grapple with it a lot it It's something that I personally struggle to understand. Personally, I went on a little bit long about that, but it's just, it's something that I'm quite, I really kind of want to discuss more because I just find it difficult and it's quite, I think you can come into a little bit of controversy if you do try to discuss surgery, especially on Instagram or anything like that and and not

get told that you're kind of being condemning or damning of women who get it done so i guess i'm in a safe space here because i've got no one to tell me off but obviously please do feel free to leave any comments um either on my page or you can message me or in the reviews section i'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback um and the next book actually i probably should do them in order because there's two by the same author again i harp on about these all the time so we've got sapiens a brief brief history of humankind and then homo deus which is a brief history of tomorrow and they're both by yuval noah harari uh you can actually listen to him on russell brown's podcast i can't remember if he And then Homo Deus, which is A Brief History of Tomorrow. And they're both by Yuval Noah Harari. You can actually listen to him on Russell Brand's podcast.

I can't remember if he goes on twice or maybe it's just once, which is called Under the Skin. And he's such an intellectual guy. And I'll read you actually the blurb because I don't think that I could summarize it succinctly enough. But he says, how did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms how did we come to believe in god's nations and human rights and what will our world be like in the millennia to come bold wide-ranging and provocative sapiens challenges everything we thought about we knew about being human our thoughts our actions our power and our future and this book i really

think was kind of a turning point so I started reading it in my last term of uni which was last year and actually took me a while to finish it because it's quite heavy and there's a lot to think about and you can revisit passages and kind of take them in and I wouldn't say that it's necessary it is really fun to read but it's not necessarily kind of an escapist reading. It kind of brings everything to the forefront. I guess it's in some ways has ideas of Black Mirror, but it's actually real. So that's that's really interesting. And one of my favorite quotes, I've definitely shared this before.

And I just think that it's a great bit. So I'm going to read it out. So how can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is biology enables, culture forbids. Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities whilst forbidding others biology enables women to have children some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another some

cultures forbid them to realize this possibility i think this is one of the big things on the podcast that that i kind of want to deal with is ideology because it's it's the thing that keeps us as fixed within a place and a time and ideologies throughout the the years and the decades and centuries has has massively changed and this next bit I I just read this and I was like oh that's amazing this is just it kind of blew my mind because it's something that I believe but it written down in this way i'll just read it so culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural but from a biological perspective nothing is unnatural whatever is possible is by definition also natural a truly unnatural behavior one that goes against the laws of nature

simply cannot exist so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth our concepts natural and unnatural are taken not from biology but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of natural is in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Or purpose organs have not evolved with the purpose

and the way they're used is in constant flux there is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago organs evolved to perform a particular function but once they exist they can be adapted for other usages as well mouths for example appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose but we also use them to kiss, speak and if we're Rambo to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn't do those things with their mouths. Similarly, wings didn't suddenly appear in all their aerodynamic glory. They developed from organs that served another purpose. According to one theory, insect wings evolved millions of years ago from body protrusions on

flightless bugs. Bugs with bumps had a larger surface area than those without bumps, and this enabled them to absorb more sunlight and thus stay warmer. In a slow evolutionary process, these solar heaters grew larger. The same structure that was good for maximum sunlight absorption, lots of surface area with little weight, also by coincidence gave the insects a bit of a lift when they skipped and jumped. Those with bigger protrusions could skip and jump farther. Some insects started using the things to glide and from there it was a small step to wings that could be actually propelled the bug through the air. Next time a mosquito

buzzes in your ear, accuse her of unnatural behaviour. If she were well behaved and content with what God gave her, she'd use her wings only as solar panels. The same sort of multitasking applies to our sexual organs and behaviour. Sex first evolved for procreation and courtship rituals as a way of sizing up the fitness of a potential mate. But many animals now put both to the use of a multitude of social purposes that have little to do with creating little copies of themselves. Chimpanzees, for example, use sex to cement political alliances, establish intimacy and to fuse tensions.

Is that unnatural? And he then goes on to talk about homosexuality and how it's exactly the same concept basically if we can do something oh that's the doorbell sorry saved by the bell maybe brief brief interlude there but yeah so he basically then goes on to talk about how if you can do something it is by fact natural and the thing that I found quite disturbing or or revealing about this passage as well is how much of theology and and religion underpins so much of our understanding of life whether or not you view yourself as an atheist agnostic or religious there will always be some

kind of part of your life and your your understanding the way the world works due to religious ideology and I think I talked about it a bit when we talked about sex and shame of women feeling shame from having multiple sexual partners and things like that and that comes down to ideology religious ideology and and I love as well in the book that he often uses she and her I can't actually remember if it's throughout that he does this um but rather obviously than the normative kind of functioning idea of saying he did this he did this him etc he uses she a lot I've bookmarked so many pages in these books I've actually just literally sat down with the books and I bookmark as I read anyway I think it's a really good thing to do because you can go back and read it so if something really stands out to

me I'll bookmark it and by bookmark I mean I fold the pages over which much the annoyance of many people I know I'm a book destroyer um I I bend the spines I kind of yeah I rough them up a bit but I I like them because they're they're rustic but so I'm just kind of picking out random bits that I've I've booked my Fandu Casino Daily Jackpots guaranteed to hit by 11 p.m. with your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling saying I do who wants this last parachute I do Daily Jackpots a chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m. every day 19 plus and physically located in Ontario gambling problem call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca select games only guarantee void of platform or game outages occur

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children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you're likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need, therefore, to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in values of free enterprise, thrift, and self-reliance. I definitely don't have enough intellect or academic knowledge to go deeply into capitalism but it's something that I've certainly made an act of awareness within

myself to to understand more and I want to dig deeper into the concept of it because it is strange and it's coming back to this idea of ideology again it's just that these things that we take as a granted reading of something or understanding of something really aren't that. And I think you can learn a lot of this from reading utopian novels. One of my modules at was on utopias. And you can go back to things like Plato's Republic, Moore's Utopia, which is kind of where that the U-T-O-P-I-A, which means no place, and utopia with an E means good place. So that's kind of the etymology of the word. And we now use utopia widely, but it's actually Thomas More who coined the phrase.

And basically what those books do is they create an imagined version of the world, which would be kind of beneficial to everyone. The paradise, the garden of eden and then to maybe explain it further obviously a dystopia is something like black mirror which is normally kind of quite similar to the world that we already live in but with all of the negative traits or the fears that we maybe see could be happening in the future, kind of imagined and realised. And a utopia usually is quite far, far extrapolated from what we see as norm. And those ideas of

just playing with concepts, I think, I think a lot of that for me in my growing up process, or even just to maybe be a small period of my life, or maybe the rest of my life. But it's that of seeing kind of the world is a lot bigger than just my own space and the difficulty is once you start questioning certain things it's that concept of this pat mentality like you can't kind of you can't just be like well I don't believe in capitalism because you the world exists in that way and and so when you're reading books like Sapiens and things it just makes you more aware i really really enjoy it and again i don't want to go too deeply into it because i don't

think that i personally have the credence to talk about it that deeply um but i'm going to move on to his second book which is homo deus um and i'm going to find the bit that i literally just found it and i've i've lost it now but i also love this quote okay so this is another another really interesting way of how humans or how we we've designed the world that we live in so much so but because it's existed in this design for so long we don't really realize so this is this is another little passage so maybe the life sciences view the problem from the wrong angle. They believe that life is all about data processing

and that organisms are machines for making calculations and taking decisions. However, this analogy between organisms and algorithms might mislead us. In the 19th century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Well, because that was the leading technology of the day. I so added that well and that is not in the book oh well which powered trains ships and factories so when humans try to explain life they assumed it must work according to analogous principles mind and body are made of pipes cylinders valves and pistons that build and release pressure thereby producing movements and actions such thinking had

a deep influence even on freudian psychology which is why much of our physiological jargon is still replete with concepts borrowed from mechanical engineering i read this and i was like oh my gosh how have i not put those two things together so in the next bit he goes consider for example the following freudian argument armies harness the sex drive to fuel military aggression He goes, and allows it to be released in the form of military aggression. This is exactly how a steam engine works. You trap boiling steam inside a closed container, the steam builds up more and more pressure, until suddenly you open a valve, and release the pressure in a predetermined direction,

harnessing it to propel a train or a loom. Not only in armies, but in all fields of activity, we often complain about the pressure building up inside us, and we fear that unless we let off some steam, we might explode. When I read that, I almost felt ignorant to not realize but it's kind of I also in a way it stirs up this emotion of trying to imagine another color try to imagine a color that doesn't exist and you can't and and what I've realized is that language is so powerful it's one of the reasons why I love books so much but we have designed and named things in our own understanding of the world so much so that

it becomes writ it becomes law and it becomes how we understand how things work you have valves in your heart and and i don't know when i read that i just kind of i read it again i think every time i bookmark something it's because i've gone to find someone nearby to read out loud to them because it's kind of i can't take in this information on my own, I have to share it. Because we all share all of these things so knowingly. And then when when someone puts something so plainly, I mean, it's, it's, it's blindingly obvious, it's kind of there. And it's literally in the language. And going back into the etymology of etymology of words and concepts is something I find absolutely fascinating, but also quite unsettling and disturbing and I guess sometimes when you're reading these books it does give you

a sense of real stupidity and I like that because you're never going to know everything and I feel like I'm so ignorant to so many things in the world there's so many things I need to learn about and I I kind of just want to consume all the information that I can and yet I still waste hours you know flicking through Instagram pictures which is you know a lot he talks a lot in the book about the rise of technology and things um and actually I'm going to read you another bit which I was on the tube reading at the time and had to actually stop because I just can't it just was too much so uh let me find it okay so according to current scientific dogma everything I experience is a result of electric electrical activity in my brain and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate

an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the real world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future we should be actually doing such things. Well maybe it's already been done to you. For all you know the year might be 2216 and you're a bored teenager immersed inside a virtual world game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early 21st century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion. Since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite,

the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero. And actually, it kind of freaks me out even reading it again because I'm just sat in my flat on my own with a microphone looking out the very dreary gloomy weather today in London and I was sat on the tube and when I looked up and this seems to happen to me a lot I it's always when I'm reading it's never when I'm on my phone maybe that shows how grossing screens are but it's always when I'm reading something I'll look up and everyone's kind of sat down looking at their phone and I kind of got this shudder of is this real life this this weird fixation with technology and I myself I'm 100% victim to it and

spend much more time on social media than I'd like to admit in fact I got an app that allows you to record how long you spend on your phone and I actually had to delete it because it far from doing what I should have done which is correct that behavior I just couldn't didn't want to accept that I was quite so addicted to my phone as I think a lot of us are but it's a very difficult it's a cognitive dissonance going on there where I don't like to admit to myself how much of my life I'm actually wasting scrolling through curated images on Instagram um but that bit about not knowing in some ways I also then get a massive sense of relief because I think one of the greatest things you can do in being alive one of the greatest things you can realize but uh it's like you can contest this because I've said this before someone they thought was really weird but

when I'm walking so for instance I might go for a walk I love Brockwell Park and I'll go for a walk around Brockwell Park and I like feeling very small there's a there's a feeling that I often get especially when you're kind of out in nature as hippie as it sounds that you're really unimportant and I find that really consoling and helpful to think that actually I don't mean anything and I think I guess on in the other way that could be unsettling some people it's like I want my life to have meaning um but for me there's a real sense of solace in the idea that you know nothing really matters and you just got to do the best you can do and we are so so minute in in the workings of this world that

the troubles we have are just so stupid and it upsets me but I it's how the brain works and I again I'm not intelligent enough to comment on things but just reading this book I think what it does is it creates a real just a new drive within you to to understand different things in the world I can't I can't recommend these books more but I'm going to stop talking about them because I really will run out of steam in in my my terminology and my understanding of the concepts because they're much greater than than my knowledge spans but certainly feel like they've given me a new understanding of life and we're actually very nice neat little segue into the next book which is The Little Big Things by

Henry Fraser who you've probably heard of so Henry is amazing he um became paralyzed uh in an accident um when he was 16 I think I might have got that wrong and so he dived into the sea and he becomes paralyzed basically from the neck down and the story is I mean I had goosebumps when I was reading it because it's just so overwhelmingly incredible and in another way it gives you so much motivation and understanding and real love for the the existence of the world and also as I just said kind of your mortality which I guess is kind of what I was getting at in in that last bit when I was saying about how small the world makes you feel this also makes you realize how important the minutiae is and how we're so lucky to have so many things that

that we take for granted and so the bit I wanted to read out was I hadn't eaten or drunk a thing since my accident and I was still being fed and hydrated through a tube I hadn't been that hungry so not eating didn't bother me much, but not drinking water was driving me crazy. Because my neck muscles weren't working, there was a concern that I might choke, and this was not something we could risk. But I went on and on about being thirsty

until one afternoon we were given a sponge and a stick that could be dipped in a glass of water and put to my lips so I could suck it. The relief was huge. I realised I'd never been truly thirsty in my life. Water was always within reach, clean and safe and in this moment of relief I experienced a lifetime's worth of appreciation for things I'd always taken for granted. That taste of that first drop of water was so glorious that it made me reflect, if only briefly, on the beauty of life itself. Another new experience that

I was adding to all the others. To know something that I hadn't known before meant I could never unknow it and somehow this struck me very forcefully as I quenched my raging thirst with a couple more drops of delicious water. There's so many things to say about this book and you kind of learn vicariously through Henry so many things about life but on the flip side I realised very sadly that I read the book and I took so much away from it and as I was reading I really felt overwhelmed with gratitude and it's kind of actually making me emotional even thinking about it now just because it's he is incredible and the way he writes is amazing but it kind of it's a similar feeling I don't know if you guys have ever had this where maybe you've been in a country where there's a bit more kind of

depravity and then and it's more impoverished and the way they live their lives is simpler and you see happiness or even when you're watching something like comic relief and you see happiness and children who really have nothing and it kind of gives you that sense of I'm going to now endeavor to make my life more meaningful through the things that are really important but unfortunately I put this book down or you stop watching that program and what happens is you are consumed by capitalist consumerism social media the ideologies that I'm very much trying to question are so absolute in the world that we live in that it does prove quite difficult to implement changes that are going to enhance your

life which is I think quite sad but after reading it I do feel like it just gives you it gives you a belief in yourself but just overall just Henry I mean I say that but then I also don't know I could never know unless you've been through what Henry's gone through but he also now does these beautiful paintings you can follow him on Instagram he's at Henry Fraser zero and the book's actually with a forward from JK Rowling which um I very easily could have done the Harry Potter books as this because I'm a massive Harry Potter fan but yeah it's just something that I think you just have to read take in and and absorb because it again it was a really quick read it's not a very long book and it's just so moving and you

just want to know every second and take it in and I think that gives you a lease on life so that's very much kind of I guess the antithesis of Yuval Noah Harari who maybe goes into the dregs and the darker sides of life which which are curating a space which maybe we actually don't even know we're occupying and Henry's book does the complete opposite of going into the places where life is so incredibly amazing even if you don't have the ability to live it in the way that you once could and so I think those two books actually balance out really nicely and they have very different very different arguments not that they're arguments but I hope I hope that kind of makes sense and then the last

book um that I'm going to finish on is again one I've spoken about a lot is Renée at a Lodge why I'm no longer talking to white people about race so I read Renée's blog post which um was came before the the book a couple of years ago I think and as soon as I found out she was writing a book I was so excited I went to a talk that she did was it last year at Stylist Live I didn't even know what Stylist Live was but I just knew that Rennie was talking and I had to go because her impact and like her words and if you haven't read the blog post then I highly recommend that you just pull that up online quickly because you can get through that in about 15 minutes and it's a very kind of diluted version

of what the book is but it's blimey it's powerful and it's all about white privilege and the history of racism within the UK which is just a very much untold story and obviously being a white privileged cisgendered woman living in the UK I have so much privilege and yet I do obviously talk a lot about feminism and and fight the fight for feminism and the parts of the book I mean all of it is absolutely fascinating and and at the same time heart-wrenchingly awful gut-wrenchingly horrendous when she goes through the history of of racial um prejudice in in Britain and the the awful things that kind of minority ethnic groups have been subject to right under our noses for so long and how those those concepts are still implemented in structural racism again they fed into our ideology i think i've said that word too many

times but the bit that i really wanted to have as a kind of take home um was when she talks about how important it is to be an intersectional feminist which is to realize that the fight for feminism more often than not is a white middle class women's fight and that doesn't make it any less uh credible but if you're fighting for equality and you're fighting for equality with women at the forefront because they are the more marginalized sex um at this point in time then you have to fight for black women as well and for other ethnic groups yeah so I'm going to read this out but it's um it's quite a lot so in British feminism questioning whether women could have feminist politics and do traditionally feminine things was a sentiment and that intrigued women's magazines in the 1990s and early noughties can you be a feminist and wear

high heels the magazines asked can you be a feminist andies. Can you be a feminist and wear high heels? The magazines asked. Can you be a feminist and wear makeup? Can you be a feminist and get your nails done? These were the most facile of questions giving rise to the most facile of magazine features. The can you be a feminist and question were all predicated on tired stereotypes of feminist activism from the 1970s patriarchal press depicting feminists as dungaree wearing angry women who sought to crush men under their Dr. Martin clad feet. In this stereotype of the scary imaginary feminists as dungaree wearing angry women who sought to crush men under their dr martin clad feet in this stereotype of the scary imaginary feminists that no woman would ever want to be her appearance was the antithesis of all beauty standards it was complete rubbish of course if the last five years have taught us anything it's that a feminist is a broad church

that has less to do with the upkeep of your appearance and more to do with the upkeep of your politics instead of asking about high heels and lipstick the pressing questions we've always needed to ask are can you be a feminist and be anti-choice? Can you be a feminist and be willfully ignorant on racism? Feminist themes seem to ever seem to be ever present in television and film at the moment. This is a marked improvement from the media that went before it. Feminism is thriving in journalism and music and it is all over social media with no signs of subsidising. The people who are calling themselves feminists

are getting younger and younger due in part to their favourite pop stars and actresses demystifying the word. Each time a celebrity stakes her claim on feminism a little bit of the stigma surrounding the word is shattered. With country-wide political landmarks like the legislation of same-sex marriage everyone is keen to look like they approve of progress.

But among feminists, there are a few ideological standpoints, race, reproductive rights, conservatism, that continue to cause immovable fault lines in the movement. Too often, a white feminist ideological standpoint does not see racism as a problem, let alone a priority. The backlash against intersectionality was white feminism in action. And she goes on to talk about why it's called white feminism and just kind of explaining this concept more. But to kind of maybe try to give a little bit more depth on this, the concept of privilege, which Rennie probably actually articulates a lot better than me, but I don't think I bookmarked that page is that you're there are certain things that you have no control over that benefit you or maybe don't if you lack them so being white in our society in our world is a privilege because what it means is there are underlying ideas and

conceptions of people that have been in implemented from years and years and years and years going back to slavery and before of the way that we look at people which have now filtered in subliminally into culture and mindset and ideology there is again that mean that if you're white you basically have more privilege and this isn't meaning that you necessarily are richer or that you have finer things it's not privilege in a tangible way it's an an unspoken, it's, Reading talks about in the book, it's getting a job based on the fact that your name sounds British or English,

as opposed to having a name that maybe sounds like it's from African descent. It's these small little things that mean that you just have a slight lug up. And that lug up is by standing on other people who don't have white privilege and I know that it can be quite a hard pill to swallow and it the reason that the book maybe or even the article when it first came out people take umbrage white people might find like

it's an attack on them but it's not it's an attack on the structure white it's not about you personally it's about the structure that we all fit in and we all buy into because as a white person because it doesn't affect you these issues of race on in general you can bypass them without ever knowing it's their privilege is being able to not acknowledge something and it works the same way with sexism men might not be outward feminists or be fighting a feminist fight because they don't face catcalling every day or they don't face the fear of being attacked or there's when when it doesn't directly affect you you have the ability to be blind to it and that is the privilege and what Rennie is saying is if you're a woman that is a woman that is asking for equality then you have to see and you have to start seeing that your privilege needs to help those who don't have as much privilege via race

and the book is about a hell of a lot more than that um but I guess in terms of my reading of it and what I took away from the book it's how am I going to make sure that my feminism one isn't just collectivism because I'm very aware that I am maybe someone who's quite vocal but do I necessarily do that much probably not uh do a lot of writing online about things that I think or maybe even just thinking I guess a lot of my activism isn't actually me doing anything it's kind of me thinking about issues and trying to unpick them and understand them in my brain which I guess you're kind of getting an insight into now but that book I just think everyone needs to read it's just well Rennie's just amazing I also really love her as an orator so I've listened to her on a few things and she's

recently been on Emma Gannon's podcast and her voice I find really soothing so I actually when I was reading it could hear Rennie talking it so I just recommend the book completely and entirely and that's all my books um I will leave all of the names in the description box so you can have a look at them uh I'm sorry I know this has just been me talking but I've actually quite enjoyed it and it's um I hope that you guys did too and I will have a guest back with me next week and yeah you'll find out who it is and what we're talking about next week but I hope you all had a lovely Sunday so far or having a lovely Sunday it is Wednesday today while I'm recording this and yeah as I said the weather is terrible but all right okay see you bye The podcast you just heard was recorded with Anchor.

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