Confession:

I’ve developed an addiction ever since I moved to London. A shopping addiction.

I’ll stop you before you envision me ravishing every shop on Oxford Street or compulsively hitting the “add to basket” button on Asos. I’m talking about a book shopping addiction. Specifically, charity book shopping.

Three factors spurred this dependency: the proximity to Oxfam, my kindle dying, and finally having a bookshelf in my new rental. And it really doesn’t help that everything that catches my eye is under £3.

So, most of the books you’ll see in this wrap-up and my December TBR are second-hand. I’d been eyeing all of them for a while, and I was shocked to find them outside a conventional bookstore. 

(I’m pretty sure a TikTok book girly donated a big batch last time I went, because I’d never seen so many popular titles in a second-hand bookshop before. Thank you, whoever blessed Oxfam with your donation! You’ve made at least one reader extremely happy!) 

Without further ado, here are the books I read (or listened to) in November…

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

…and not just a fun age, but an extremely fun read as well. From the first page to the last, I was not able to put this one down. By telling the story of young black babysitter Emira, who gets confronted by security in a high-end supermarket because she is seen as suspicious looking after a white toddler, the book examines instances of everyday racism and subtle biases people don’t even realise they have. Reid has a straightforward and subtly humorous writing style which makes the narrative flow seamlessly. Every page begs for the next one to be read.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

Evaristo’s prose is intoxicating. This is another instance where I had to force myself to put the book down. But whereas Reid’s snappy style kept me going, the opposite hooked me to this one. Girl, Woman, Other is a verse fiction exploring black womanhood in Britain across the decades, through the perspectives of twelve characters. Each point of view is so distinct and fleshy, by the end of the novel you not only feel like you personally know the protagonists, but also that you’ve peeled all their layers and inhabited their skin, lived and breathed as them. This is a tremendous achievement on the part of the author, considering that each character only has one POV chapter. By the end of the book, my brain was tingling when I was trying to put together how all their stories connected.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I mean this as the highest compliment: this book made me sick. Reading it felt like a punch in the gut. It’s rare that a book evokes such a guttural reaction without being explicitly evocative. Listening to this audiobook was the equivalent of binge-watching a whole Netflix series in a day. And yes, I somehow listened to this whole thing in less than 24 hours (my flat had never been cleaner before). 

It follows Vanessa Wye, who, at fifteen, becomes entangled in an affair with her much older English teacher. The narrative is split between past and present, as Vanessa struggles to come to terms with the reality of what she considered a consensual relationship, as trauma juxtaposes perceived infatuation. On a metatextual level, the book is written in conversation with Nabokov’s Lolita, part-response, part-reframing. This book is like a curse: I won’t be able to ever not think about it. And honestly, I’m already considering re-reading it. (Well, re-listening).

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

Diaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao was one of my favourite reads last year, and I’ve had my eyes on this as an audiobook, but couldn’t justify spending a credit on such a short listen. Low and behold, I found this in Oxfam! It was an instant buy!

Those of you who’ve read TBWLoOW (what an abbreviation!) know that even though the book’s protagonist is Oscar, its narrator is Yunior, Oscar’s friend. Oscar and Yunior mirror each other as much as they are opposites in society’s eyes: both massive nerds, but Yunior knows how to hide it better.

Yunior is the protagonist of This is How You Lose Her, both as character and narrator. The book follows his many affairs, as he struggles to stay faithful to his partners. It also delves into his childhood, showing how he’s modelled his behaviour on the male figures in his life, as well as on what he’s told a Dominican man should be. He’s a bit of a dickhead, but nonetheless, the book is endearing, funny, and, like Diaz’s previous novel, it enmeshes 80s sci-fi and pop-culture references with its prose to create exquisite character profiles.

I highly recommend reading Oscar Wao before delving into this one though! This felt more like a companion novel and, if I were to read it as a stand-alone, I wouldn’t have found it that special.

This has been it for me

So, these are the four books I read in November. I’ll probably write reviews on all of them at some point in the near future. I’ll also be dropping my TBR soon. Yeah, that’s right! I’m not playing here, I’m a serious book blogger now!

What did you read last month? Anything we should know about?

Drop it in the comments & happy reading in December!