Hiya everyone!

I hope everything is going as best as it can be right now. After my quarantine diaries post, I told myself:

“Ilkim, this time you have no excuse, you cannot say you don’t have time because you have all the time you need at the moment. So, stop whining and start writing!” 

Which brings us to my book recommendations. If you have read my summer reading list before, or the quarantine diaries, you probably know by now that I enjoy reading a lot. To be honest, I always enjoyed reading, except in middle school when they were making us read certain books, I hate being controlled and told what to do, I guess. I realised I mentioned books on my previous post but forgot to give some of my recommendations. Here are 4 books that I have read “recently”, and I have been dying to share;

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton 

This book was a recommendation of a good friend. We have a tiny bookclub with her and another friend 🙂 She told me she laughed so much reading this. So, she brought me the book when she visited me in Alicante. It was such a fun reading; I laughed so much. The book is a memoir actually, Dolly tells us about her experiences growing up, her love stories, her friendships…

There were so many times, I felt like I was living the moment with her right there at that time. Which, I think one of the most important things to me. If I can manage to relate to the character or imagine myself being in the same scene then I enjoy it a lot. Because this means that the story is that real and fascinating that I feel like I am living it. Her writing is engaging and vigorous.

If you enjoy the book as much as I did, she has a podcast as well. Here is the link for that. Plus, she has another book coming this year on October called “Ghosts“, this time it’s a novel. Looking forward to it!

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett 

I don’t know how to express myself on this one. I couldn’t stop crying right after I finished the book either, I had to get up walk around and even get outside to breathe…

This was my last book of 2019, I started it on my flight to Turkey. And, I couldn’t keep going, it was just slow, the story didn’t capture me. I think it was around somewhere page 100 when I just lost my mind and kept reading and reading until I finished it. It took me around 4-5 hours reading from there. It was around 5 AM when I finished the book. Which is probably longer than it should’ve taken me to read it, but I had to stop time to time and just cry it out.

This is my 2019 favourite and in my all-time favourites list. The story is somehow really dystopic yet so relatable that I couldn’t shake what I’d read. As a female reader and as a person who has a younger sister, I am sure it had a bigger impact on me, even the entire story is written to the extreme, it was easy to relate to it to nowadays examples. I don’t really want to spoil anything for you, the story is a mixture of anger, magic, violence, love, feminism, women friendship and liberation…. It is just WOW. 

Remember “No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden.”

The next book on the list, which I read before this one is something similar. Feminist, strong and dystopic yet again easy to relate. 

The Power by Naomi Alderman 

In the beginning I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I might have stopped reading time to time as well, because I just couldn’t get into the story. The story is told by 4 or 5 various characters. You hear different stories from different countries about the same subject, The Power. I think it is after 80-90 pages that you start understanding. But once it does, it is a WOW. Several different points of views on the same subject and after some time the different storylines beginning to blend. The whole idea is one sex being disproportionately superior and taking the charge. Which is the World that we live in, just the opposite sex. It is sickening, but it is true, some of the things happening in the book are not that dystopic because we have seen those things in real life, again just the opposite sex.

The book made me feel weird in the beginning, somehow physically and mentally powerful but then also sick. This is how good it was written. In general I don’t really show emotions or I don’t get emotional that easy. But when I am reading this kind of a good book, I feel every word they have written. Words can be powerful!

The dystopic idea behind The Power and The Grace Year are similar at some points, as well as the feminist approach. Both books are thought-provoking, super-intelligent yet uncomfortable to read at some ends and very timely, when you look at all the sexual abuse, harassment claims the big Weinstein case. If you read and enjoy them I will highly suggest you to do a little research online and read what people have written, because most of the readers have read both of the books and there are some interesting analysis on them.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

You might have heard about this book or the author herself. Sally Rooney is also the author of another famous book “Normal People” which I adored and shared with you for the summer reading list before. After that one, I wanted to read this one as well. It is somehow the same concept; awkward friendship. I like the concept but what I like more is how she writes how she connects the dots between the characters and how the characters are built strong. As a 23-years old myself, there were so many times I found myself on the book on the characters and the circumstances as well. This is an age that we learn, we fail, and we make bad poor choices, and this book is about that.

About two friends living in Dublin studying literature, politics being in the centre of everything, making awkward friendships and growing while learning from those decisions. It is one of those books that you cannot explain what it is, because probably we will all get something different from it, we will all have a different reaction to it. To be honest, I reread some bits of the book to understand it fully because I realised I was missing some key points of the book from time to time. I will be looking forward to her next book!

So that was that, some of my recent favourites. I hope you will find them interesting as well and maybe recommend it to others. One thing I adore is sharing book ideas, books and talking about them. That’s why we have this tiny book club with friends, whatever we read from books to articles we share with one and another.

After all, sharing is caring!