SableCaught

The Wellcome Book Prize asked me if I would like to take part in a blog tour reading one of the six books that had been shortlisted for their 2017 prize. And honestly I almost said no, until I saw what book it was they wanted me to read. The Wellcome Prize celebrates books that further the understanding of medicine - and I’m no biologist, no doctor, no student of sciences - I had assumed it celebrated books that weren’t for the likes of me.

But when I was presented with When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi it gave me pause. This was a book on my radar, and a man I had heard about, who had kindled curiosity within me and a want to read his story.

So I read it. And it was a brilliant book, but one that’s hard to talk to you about. When Breath Becomes Air is the autobiographical recounting of Paul, who has trained all his life to become a become a doctor, and finds out shortly before he graduates, that he has terminal cancer. He speaks with earnestness, and poise, and from a position of unapproachable authority. It’s impossible for me to give some blithe summary without it being obvious as the trite and pale thing is it.

What I can talk about though, is what this book brought forth in me. And why I would ardently recommend others also seek it out and meet with what he has to say.

Firstly, I found meaning in the literary way he writes, heavy with reference. I have had a great many therapists in my time: counsellors and psychiatrists, good ones and bad ones. For me, the best of them spoke of books. And that is the manner in which Paul writes. He curates and quotes; in this book he has become a vessel, long trained and steeped in knowledge through which lived experience has been poured. He specifically talks about that dichotomy, between the academic and the lived-in, between reading and being. He has honed both highly and yet kept them in balance. He has witnessed and himself gone-through the extremes of mortal existence, but what makes this a book, is that he can communicate them, in manners deep and thought-provoking. He writes in the context of what has been written before and quotes Beckett and Eliot as he forms a sentence, bringing forth their ideas and weaving them into a high-level language of their own, asymptotically reaching up towards new levels of understanding.

I should also say, I couldn’t escape the fact that for once in my life I was reading non-fiction. That there was a real person and a real person’s family behind this book. That - by the time I was reading - Paul was two years dead - but that he had really sat down and struggled with what on earth you do when this shattering diagnosis lies at your door. When you have to figure out what to do with what time remains to you, when you don’t know how achingly short that time might be. It burned into me that we all live according to these priorities of an expected lifetime, assuming we will be able to do things in an order that might not present itself.

It’s oft toted, but still true, that repetitive realisation that books about death are really books about life.

In fact ‘books about medicine’ are actually books about life, viewed through yet another lense. In When Breath Becomes Air Paul talks not only of his experience of being a patient, but his experience of being a doctor, of physicality and its interaction with concepts of self, of the role of physician as guide, in making space for life reimagined. The reason this book exists is Paul’s time was short, shorter than it was supposed to be. But he clearly gathered much in that time, and crafted it into a story, a communication, something that espouses on human experience and that is quietly revelatory.

This video is inspired by Sara Barnard’s new novel, A Quiet Kind of Thunder. It centres around a girl called Steffi who has anxiety, who as a child was selectively mute, and who beginning sixth form, still often can’t talk to people. I’m gonna tell you a story about a girl called Stevie, and a time when she couldn’t talk to people.

A while ago, I had a different job, and that job was good for a long period of time, but somewhere along the line, it became... not so good.

I can’t pinpoint exactly what happened or when, god knows I’ve spent hours and hours searching through my memories, trying to figure out what it was I’d done wrong. Whatever the reason, at some point, for some motivation beknownst unto them, two of the men I worked with decided they didn’t like me anymore. I think maybe they thought I was ignorant, or lazy, or for some other reason not pulling weight. They basically decided they didn’t want to work with me anymore, and the solution to this was they should spend their working days, essentially, bullying me.

They did this in lots of ways; by not doing work I needed from them, by sending me snide and aggressive emails, or breaking and hiding my things. One of their tactics was to deny me the ability to speak. There was often only them or one other in the office with me, so whenever I would open my mouth they would systematically shut me down. They’d bitterly snipe and argue with anything I proposed, instantly jump on any attempt I made at humour or light conversation. That or they’d just completely and utterly ignore me.

And this was my workplace, there was no escape from them. I had to go and lock myself in a room with them every day for unending hours.

I should have spoken up about it. But I thought my managers would consider me paranoid, imagining viciousness behind what was really nothing. That if they believed me at all, I would just seem like a weak little girl unable to deal with what was really just the basic workplace environment. I was in my mid twenties, I wasn’t some school child who was s’ppose to go running to some adult when others were mean to her - I should be able to handle something like this. To me, it showed there was something inevitably wrong with who I was, that they had decided it was ok to treat me like this.

I deteriorated quickly, falling back to bad habits, rushing off to the loos and locking myself in to hide tears and anxiety attacks. And I stopped speaking. Originally I tried, I’d fight my side when my suggestions were inevitably yet again met with whatever criticisms they could hastily gather about themselves. But attacks eventually wear you down. I started stammering a lot. I was often trying to talk and then getting emotional and my voice would break and weedle away. I came out of so many meetings feeling exhausted and mortified at how others must clearly view me. Eventually it was easier to just not say what I thought, if I could help it, to just not speak at all.

After about two months of this I met with my manager for a routine annual review. He took me to a coffee shop, and bought me a latte, and then he sighed and asked me why these two men were treating me like this. It took everything within me to not cry in front of him then, to shakily and carefully bring forth words. I was so grateful, in a way, that he had said this to me, because it meant that this really was happening, so much so that someone outside had noticed. It wasn’t just me, it wasn’t just that I was unable to cope with the normal level of things. I was also angry with him. Furious. He had seen these things happening and until this point he had done nothing about it, he had let them bully me.

He spoke to them then, and they were slightly better, less overtly malicious, but it was all now too late. I’d never be able to be normal around these people again, a person who wasn’t their victim, both to them and within my own mind. And that talk with my boss, when I had sat there basically choking out the words that ‘no, I was not ok’, it had rekindled some sort of resolve back in me. I stolidly applied myself, applying to jobs elsewhere. And finally something caught and I got myself out.

It took a little while, being in a new work environment, to start to slowly regain some confidence. I think in some ways I hadn’t really realised how bad things had actually been until I once again found myself in an office where colleagues weren’t dedicating large swathes of their time to trying to get at me. I remember it shocking me, coming in in the morning and people genuinely asking me how I was, how my weekend went, actually interested, and listening to my answers, not just waiting to jump on the first mistake I made in order to murmured some fetid joke at my expense.

This is the second book Sara Barnard’s published, and the second I’ve read and I’m already eagerly awaiting the next. Her first book, Beautiful Broken Things, was about abuse, and friendship, and staying alive. Within it, and within A Quiet Kind of Thunder, I felt like I found some very true things. They’re some of those ‘best of books’ where you stare in wonder at the words before you because they’ve somehow traced out what you previously thought only you had ever felt. Yet here it is now, delivered up to you by another. In fact, here it is represented in such a way, that it makes you look again, makes you understand differently.

My brief experience of being forcibly quietened was a far cry from someone who, like Barnard’s main character, has struggled with mutism and voice, across the years and across various strata of their life, however I still felt like she’d got it. In her words, Barnard had perfectly represented the struggle I had sometimes found in attempts to communicate, the frustration of trying to get across to others what is so clear and definitely clever and witty while it stays within your own head.

Barnard draws a good representation of mental health. Within her books there are no magic wands, there is a lot of mundanity and grinding, and doing stupid crap that you feel you should already be able to do but is somehow so hard for you. There’s medication and therapy and getting better and getting worse, in no neat and linear order. There are people and things who come along and make it feel ok for a while, but there are ultimately no saviours who will fix you for you.

This book communicated that well. I want to now present it to others and say, ‘look, this is what I was trying to tell you’.

See you in my next video. Bye guys.

So, this is not the first time I have scripted, filmed and edited an entire video just to justify making a different one.

Intro

An author of mine, whom I love and respect hugely, was talking on twitter a little while ago, about how much they objected to book bloggers being paid for reviews.

I hastily swept thumbs across keypad, riled and raring to launch myself into impassioned debate ...but gave up quite quickly, as at the time I was meant to be waddling round Uxbridge city centre not furiously misspelling onto my phone, not to mention I’ve generally found 140 characters not to be my absolute preferred medium.

But I did think on the issue long and hard that day, not least ‘cause I knew I wanted, for some far-off future project, to take payment in exchange for a video. This video is here for you now, because the next one coming up on this channel, in a few days time, will be one I am being paid to make.

Here’s my argument for doing so, I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts at the end in the comments below.

I think the strongest argument against getting paid to make content is that is biases the creator’s opinion.

The thing is, book bloggers and booktubers, their opinions are already biased, to a certain extent. No one lives in a vacuum. They might not get hard currency delivered directly to them a lot of the time but money still often makes a huge difference as to whether a new book will get talked about and get reviews. I have seen this system from both sides and I know that bloggers and vloggers are much more likely to review a book that is sent to them for free, a book that has a marketing spend behind it, gets beautiful proofs made, adverts on the tube and has a fantastic, exciting launch party. On a very basic level if a book’s publisher pays for a publicist to work on it, to tell people it exists, this can be the difference between a book being highly anticipated or published quietly into obscurity.

So I think we need to complicate the binary of ‘paid for’ or ‘not paid for’ content. ‘Not paid for’ can often still have huge amounts of money behind it, or it can still offer some sort of incentive to the media outlet covering it, whether that be in the content it can offer them to run, experiences surrounding it or just building relationships. We need to identify as false and discard the idea of ‘natural’ book discovery, the idea that there are any people or media outlets out there that can conscientiously consider and choose what to cover, from all the books that have ever been published.

Because it’s often not an issue of saying good things when you would have said bad things, but the selection of which three items to say good things about out of the hundreds that you could have chosen from.

So is all content a book blogger or booktuber presents really paid for content? And does that mean you can’t trust anything I recommend to you? Anything I say at all? - pause - Being paid money to make something doesn’t mean you have to stand in front of a camera and lie to your viewers, it doesn’t mean you have to tell them a book is great when secretly you only read the first 40 pages and spent the majority of that time wishing to pulp the thing in a high intensity blender.

See the problem I have, with my channel, as I think you might have noticed somewhat over the past few years, is that I simply don’t have the time, or energy, to make all the videos I would love to make. See here, these are scripts and scripts and scripts, of things I have wanted to make going back years. And they’re just the few that managed to get out of my notebooks or even out of my head.

So with this upcoming video, I was offered money to make it. I was offered money to make something talking about an author whom I’d already read, who I already knew I adored, and the email suggesting it, instantly brought to mind for me, a topic I’d really been wanting to talk about for quite a while.

If I get paid to do this, it’ll mean I actually do it. Instead of just saying I will for the next six months. Like I said, I’ve read this author before, I loved their debut novel, did I make a video on it? No, because I didn’t have the time.

Being paid to make a video can very simply mean that I have more time to make videos in general. ‘Cause to makes sure I don’t drown in an endless del’uge of debt, I do freelance work of all sorts. If I can get paid to do videos, videos I can make fit-in to what it is I already do, rather than work which has no relation to this art I try to create - then all the better.

Being an internet person who is paid for content is a topic broadly debated, I’ve seen it scorned a lot. Instagrammers who are paid to wear certain fashions, youtubers who get money to eat cereal. But I honestly don’t see the difference between this and magazines running adverts, or the commercials that play between favoured tv shows - as long as that paid material is clearly delineated as such. And having some income from it can be the difference between a channel or website or whatever it is, being something a creator can move to working on full time, it can be better production values and content that has twice the time invested in it, it can be a domain name paid for, or your monthly data covered and that thing you produce being at all financially viable.

So I’m going to get paid to make something, but I promise that I will always highlight when I’m being paid, and I promise that even being paid, I will never endorse what I don’t believe in. But occasionally getting some money from this will hopefully mean I can do a little bit more. I hope you agree with my reason and I hope you enjoy my next video regardless of the fact that it’ll be contributing somewhat to my financial stability.

See you Monday.

Bye.

Another collab, Brock, Kaitlina nd I live listen to an audiobook together, the first four minutes of Brandon Sanderson’s Edgedancer. Some interesting reactions.

Brock, Kaitlin and I tuck into the latest work from Brandon Sanderson, Arcanum Unbounded. Join us for the read-a-long at #ArcanumReadalong

I never realised how desperately my home was lacking in artisan candles and those jar-mugs with candy-striped straws, until Instragram came into my life.

Intro.

This is a video for me, but it's also a video for a friend of mine. You'll probably find it twee, and will argue there's some reason it doesn't really apply to you but I think it does. A bit.

When you're a depressed and anxious individual like myself, or just generally feeling more low than high, social media can sometimes be a bad thing to be surrounded by.

Whether it's facesomething, twitris, whats-snap, or an unending procession of verbs that have an r glued on the end - perhaps it's youtube and videos, like this very one - without meaning to, all these platforms can conspire together to make you feel pretty shit about yourself.

Across them all you probably connect with a lot of people. How many do you follow? Subscribe to? Are friends with?

Hundreds? Thousands?

It is in these arenas that people share. Often their successes, layered over with camera tricks and filters, puffed into prose-purple and scattered liberally with fawning emojis.

Now even if each person only shares a success every month, or every six, or once a year, there are enough people out there for it to feel it a torrent. You are constantly drenched in an unending harry of other people’s happiness, and every day there is always someone out there to compare yourself to and to come up poorly against.

And successes, sometimes, can be very minor acts. Oh look at them, they’ve posted a photo of a teacup at sunset, they must inevitably be feeling great about themselves and doing so much better at life than I ever could.

When I go through an entire month lacking the energy and too full of self-hatred to dare film myself, my subscription box taunts me. Look at these 1000 people who’ve uploaded something today. Doesn’t matter what they’ve uploaded, just that they’ve uploaded /something/. You, having not uploaded something today, or yesterday, or for whatever ridiculously long-last stretch of unending time; are unarguably a lazy, terrible failure - compared to them.

*Sighs*

I wake most mornings, roll over, and check my phone. For the time, to batter ineffectually at the alarm that’s meowling at me to retreat from the warm cossetings of dream, and of course, I then check my feeds. Facebook, twitter, alerts, and notifications. From my very waking moment I’m once again slap-bang in the middle of the lives of everyone I know, scratch that, many more people than the people I actually know.

I have some people I follow who are amazing skilled at make up. They post pictures every day of the fantastical creations they have wrought across their faces. /Most/ people I follow, however, do not have these skills, and do not post thus. I have some people I follow who have championed the written word, the writing world, have achieved book deals, sold seven mill, and won a prize or twelve. But most not. Some people are getting married, others have children, are buying homes, are traveling the world and back. Most not. Everyone has their own singular skills but if you actually think about it no one has all these skills, no one is doing well at everything.

And yet, when I'm low, I berate myself for not somehow being the Frankenstein's monster of social, financial and familial achievement, some svelte beast sewn together from all the very best parts of my friends lives.

The thing is, you lack perspective when you feel like this, surrounded in a whirlpool of others successes.

Here's the bit where you'll disagree with me. People think this about you too. It's only when you say to others outside yourself that you feel like a miserable smudge on the crook of the world - compared to them, and her, and everyone else - that they turn to you in shock and ask you what the bloody hell you're talking about. They want your job, you hair, your ability to craft a joke or a macrame handbag. Qualities you didn't even know were enviable are suddenly heaped upon you. Sometimes the very opposites of what you were envying in others. I wish I had your independence. I know your job doesn't have the creative outlet you eventually want, but you've no idea how much mine keeps me awake at night worrying about the money I don't have to pay the rent.

No one, not even you, has been denigrated by all of society as the failure you sometimes feel you are. You are, by definition, too close to yourself. Of course what you see everyday has become mundane, but take a slice of it, present it to the world and that unfamiliarity allows it to gleam.

Do what you can, what you love, do strive to achieve those goals but don't berate yourself for not instantly achieving everything that everyone around you seems to have already done so effortlessly.

Because the social media web is a lie. It is the pepperings of the very best bits of a thousand or more people's achievements, which only seem accomplished and secure because they are legion. And under six layers of juno filter anyway.

So it all boils down to this. You’re doing ok, I promise. And I’m relying on you to assure me of that back. You’ve done some excellent things, some astounding things, even if you forget them sometimes, and they all seem to get lost in the machine. No one draws up well against the entire world, everyone has highs and lows, and it’s not fair to compare your moments as a flicking mess to someone else’s as a glittering gilt monument. And at any one time you’ll always be able to find that one person. Think what you would say to a friend who did that, that’s what I did. And realised how undeservingly cruel we are to ourselves alone. Seeing such banality in the whole rather than simply the magic of a highly narrativized instant.

In 2010 I made one of the hardest decisions of my tiny life so far, I decided to drop out of university.

Intro

There is no denying that school Stevie, was a clever Stevie. At 17 I would have given Hermione herself a run for her galleons had she been interred in a west London comprehensive rather than tootling about some enchanted castle.

I got good GCSEs and good A levels and this obviously meant I was going to go to university. Clever people universitied. I couldn’t imagine myself not going to university.

Which is where my problems started.

I was never the most assured of what it was I wanted to study, just that I wanted to study something. And have that romanticized, bohemian lifestyle of learning great things.

I went back and forth between maths and English literature, unlikely pair that they are. As applications went in, the most recent role of the die came up literature, and thus I applied.

And thus I got rejected.

I was stunned.

I had ‘A’s enough to my name to market my own brand of screamingly good alphabet soup, and yet, no one wanted me.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn't fail things, I never had. And I didn't understand what it was I had done wrong. This wasn't some simple test that I could have returned to me to work out the answers for next time. It didn’t have marks, grade boundaries, or constructive criticism in any form. I worried that this was simply something beyond me. Clearly, there was ‘something’ very clever admissions people could see was lacking in me and that was it, I must contain some forgone hamartia that would forever be my doom.

I had before me very little choice but to try again next year. And I point blankly refused to make such a choice. The idea of working and travelling for a year, of seeing the sights that so excited so many of my friends, horrified and terrified me. I literally had no idea what to do with myself.

Until I found a way of sneaking under the lines. I could change my subject and some universities would reconsider me.

So English literature became maths, and Warwick gave me an offer. And to Coventry I was sent.

Warwick started badly and continued worse.   

I don't think I understood how to learn there. Modules were taught mostly through lectures and I couldn't keep up. I was too deaf to hear tutors, read too slowly through squinting, dyslexia to copy down what was being bashed out on the blackboards. I had a 4th year who was meant to supervise me along with a handful of other bright-eyeds but they really struggled to communicate even their greetings let alone complex mathematics.

At school I had been a good number cruncher, able to differentiate this and simplify that, but university maths was cold and confusing and seemed to lack my friend Numbers entirely.

At the end of my first year I knew I was in trouble, I honestly didn’t feel like I had learned a single thing. I sat their night after night, in front of impenetrable problem sheets, waiting for understanding to dawn... And it never did. At the end of my first year I knew I couldn’t continue. But I literally couldn’t envision any other option.

Bullheaded and brutish, I gathered up my life and I stayed. Second year began and I crumbled away.

It’s hard to really remember those days. I think my mind went somewhere else for long periods of time. I started out with all optimism, enthusiasm and determination held tight but soon hit the same unrelenting brick walls that I had battered myself against before. I slept a lot, sometimes 18 hours a day. I didn’t really leave my room, I was scared to run into housemates that I felt bullied by and just couldn’t really see any viable way out, any real reason to do anything. I played a little, read a little, sang a little. That’s it. From a year’s worth of time I can recall about 6 staid and stuffy sketches.

I did do a small course in History and English, I remember that having it’s shrill and panicked moments as well, but it was something kind of solid when all else was simply a torrent, unfaceable. I remember moments of excitement with that, of nodding in agreement, of essays I created and was proud of.

I stopped attending anything to do with maths at all. Exams ticked by as I resolutely sat in my room and hid.

The decision came slowly. There wasn’t a single moment where my resolve hardened and I decided to leave. The thought tickled at the edges of my mind in its terrifying unthinkableness and I flirted with it bit by aching bit as I didn’t attend this, and isolated myself further from that. Maybe I never decided to drop out, and my grand statement at the beginning of this video was all a lie. Maybe I eventually just couldn’t carry on anymore and finally, while all this time I’ve been saying over and over I didn’t have a choice, finally I really didn’t have a choice.

I dropped out. I went home and broke to my parents that I wouldn’t be going back to Warwick. Or to maths. Not in September. Not next year. Not ever.

And although this seems like it might be the low point in the story, it really isn’t. By then storms were starting to clear somewhat. I got a job, and then a better job. I saw doctors and family and was outside in daylight and talking to people once again.

And the memories of intrigue and interest I had found in history books and novels, in that odd extra course I had taken, they had taken root and were remembered.

A part of my mind opened up again and brought back things I had once wanted. And half-hopingly I applied for those other subjects, and that storybook-rare institution I had once harboured dreams of.

And they welcomed me.

So although this is a story of dropping out of university it is also a story of attending university, enjoying university and graduating university. The latter only possible at one place because of the former not possible at another.

Looking back, I am now very happy that I reapplied and tried studying again. But even if I hadn’t, that would have been ok. Dropping out was the hardest thing, but it was definitely, without a doubt, the right thing. If I later, hadn’t got in somewhere else, or hadn’t even applied somewhere else, that would have been fine. I would have stayed working in bookshops (what I spent the majority of my time between Warwick and Oxford doing) or I would have applied for internships with publishers and literary agencies and tried to get on the job ladder sooner. Hell, maybe I would have written my damn novel by now.

The point is, out of Warwick I was moving, and able, and whatever it was I was doing, it was better than the prison I had made for myself in that first tangled, scar of a failed-degree.

It was so hard to leave - for the loss of face and status; for having to explain to parents, to potential employers, and friends; even for knowing what the fuck else to do with myself. But stepping into that void, that was the best thing I ever did, terrifying though it was. You find amazing things in the unknown, especially when the known is not good. Often that space, is possibility. Beyond what you could have ever previously imagined for yourself.

It took me a long time, but I finally loosed myself from the trap of myself. And it was good, it took me to now.

Do join Mariam and I at 7:30pm GMT, Tuesday 31 May to discuss feminism in fantasy literature.

Why do all good books always end at two AM?

Is it ‘cos you push yourself on to finish them? ‘Cos these books can’t wait? ‘Cos you necessarily reach a tipping point, sometimes that long fought for climax, sometimes a point that is on you before you’ve mastered page three, where you just can’t be calmed anymore? The point of no return. You have to keep going and pouring yourself in, until there is no book left to contain you.

You have to press on beyond the ache of your eyeballs. Beyond the knowledge that you’ll hate yourself come that jagged alarum, when you slump onto your rush hour commute and waiting for you at the office, all wrapped up in the ribbons of a stuffed and roasted inbox, the boss has bequeathed you a thousand and one spreadsheets, all to go over with the finest of fine-toothed combs?

You can’t leave a good book unread - ‘cos here is the cure you had quested for, the dragon? they’ve bested her. That half forgotten, broken love you thought you’d smashed out on your bedroom floor.

In that moment of reading, all else is receding and you’re not sure what you’ve gripped but you’ve grasped it closer and more clearly than ever before. It’s got a visceral strangle hold round all you hold vital, it tipples you a’little, plays you like a pipe organ beating your heart for you and sucking up your breaths. You’ve become unstrung, undone - you didn’t feel it worm its way in but now it’s begun. It’s unhooked you from all that is civil and stable and able and you belong to a dappled set of creatures now. Readers, all enthralled by a lifeblood of story.

But this inevitably means you finish books alone.

In the dark of night when you pushed past the paths that mere mortals dared to tread. The problem with fighting your way out to the peak of the pinnacle, the crescendo of the storm, is that - you read the deaths, the departures, the fraught farewells and fated curtain calls when you are alone and there’s no one there to see how bereft you are. No one who can attempt to offer you some semblance of solace.

Even the happiest ever afters can be Such Sweet Sorrow. Because to you, what is this but some moribund full stop? That speaker, that narrator, those characters who became your beloved and best of friends? They are no more. The tracks have run out. You have to open your eyes again and remember that you have your own mortal soul to drag about this plain.

I sat there at 02:43, according to the blink of my phone, which I had checked hoping for company. But, even with a whole address book more than Holden, I still had no one I could call. Which feckless wreak would thank me for yowling their phone with dawn pending. Just to wail to them about the great and fictional losses I had suffered.

But it was agony. This sudden nothingness, this weight of grief that a final page had sprung on me. I looked about my room, for I was lost and needed desperately to be found.

And there they were, waiting for me.

Books.

Other books, more books, books beloved and books unknown. Books I had began that ached at me, their prodigal reader, to return to them, new journeys that caught the eye and tantalised and promises all a reader could ever have wanderlust for.

And even the book on my lap. Even that book which had just taken me apart. It was there for me. I could always turn back to page one. And there would be a story, with everyone waiting for me, ready to take me along on the adventure once more.

I am always seem to finish good books at two AM. I start many more at three.

I read 5 books in November. Only most of them were Brandon Sanderson.

I got to meet Brandon Sanderson. And he totally told me how every book series is gonna end. I have the book learnings now.