I found the best AND worst book I've read this year back-to-back Cook & Book: Sushi Bake
Okay, so after this-- Just kidding. Welcome to another episode of Cook & Book. I think this episode you might be a little impressed by me for once. I know in previous episodes where I attempt to cook something, it leaves people very
worried at the edge of their seats that the food will not turn out good or that I'll harm myself, and that is a very valid concern. But I recently stumbled across this recipe on TikTok, I'll link it down below, for sushi bake. And sushi is one of my favorite foods. I'm gonna go ahead and replicate it for this video while I talk about the books I read this past month. I read three nonfiction books and two fiction books. One of them ended up being what might be my favorite book of the year so far, and then the other has consequently ended up being the worst book of the year, so I'm really covering the range here. You know what I notice every time I read books though? Authors really love to describe the way a characters smell. Sometimes I feel like authors end up describing the same scents
across characters so much that I wish for more variety. And as a writer myself I recently realized that a great way to be more specific and varied when describing fragrances is to look at actual fragrant samples. Which is why I'm so glad that today's sponsor is Scentbird. They are basically a company that sends you fragrance samples for you to try out. They have perfumes and colognes and a
lot of unisex options. With each fragrance you get a 30 day sample and they have so many options like Prada and Gucci. and then there are some niche brands. Those are some of the ones that I got. So the first one I got is called Bite Me which is by Confessions of a Rebel. It uses strawberry, red apple, vanilla orchid, jasmine, and golden rum. That last part gives the perfume a little bit of an
edge, which I think is very indicative of the name itself. It gives it more of a sassy vibe. And so this ended up being my favorite. The other one that I got is Honeysuckle Dream by Skylar Clear Beauty. This uses pear leaves, honeysuckle, and lily. This is more of a crisp fragrance and i think the
simplicity of just those three smells actually works in its favor. And then the last scent that I got is Cabin Retreat by Memoire. So this uses atlas cedarwood, oak moss, and sandalwood. This is like the scent that authors describe for their love interests in their story. If you love being in the woods and you love being in nature, this is the scent for you. So if you're interested in trying these out, I'll have them in my description, but if you want to see all the hundreds of other options I will link the site below. And I even have a coupon code that you can try out for 55% off if you use the code. That means you're getting a little over $7 for your first month.
This is available in the USA and Canada, so thank you Scentbird for sponsoring this video and check out the links below if you're interested. Speaking of great smells, let's go ahead and make our sushi bake. We're gonna use the entirety of the imitation crab package that I got, three green onions which I just washed, kewpie mayo which is Japanese mayo, and I have sriracha, wasabi, and some cream cheese. So first we're gonna mix together the crab sticks-- wow, I really sound like a professional chef. Maybe I really am upgrading. Is this called growth? So the first thing that you do is actually the
most time consuming part, so I'm gonna go ahead and multitask during that time and tell you about the books I read this month. The first one that I read was Disfigured. Disfigured is a book written by an author who has cerebral palsy and also loves fairy tales and fantasy stories. The entire book looks into how disabled characters have been portrayed in fairy tales and how that subsequently influences people's perceptions of disabilities or mirrors what people already assume of others with disabilities. And she talks about her own experiences with cerebral palsy too, and how ostracizing and lonely it is. She goes through a lot of examples so there's, you know,
the typical Disney fairy tales that we're all accustomed to, but she also goes into much older folklore and then she relates the themes of those fairy tales to how people with disabilities are treated in real life. I really liked the way that she connected fiction to reality and shows how they're really intertwined, especially when it comes to a marginalized group like disabled people. All the critiques that she does is very Westernized so it doesn't focus on like, Eastern fairy tales, because I feel like that would probably be a separate book to dive into.
But I feel like with what we saw the Western fairy tales, there was already so much material to cover. It was really eye-opening for me. I obviously knew that a lot of times the evil characters and fairy tales and fantasies tend to look ugly or have some kind of disfigurement. Something that I hadn't considered that she brought up was the flip side, which is how there are some good characters that you're rooting for, the heroes, and they may have disabilities too, but their reward for being a good person is to be cured of the disability, and how so many times the happily ever afters that you see in these fairy tales are equated to beauty and able-bodiedness. So what does that mean for someone who is disabled and doesn't really have a choice in the way that they look like or the way that their bodies were born or became? Like what does it mean to be worthy of a happy ending or not? I really like that she brought up those things because it makes you think about all the fucked up ways that people subconsciously put into their stories and you know, the fact that we have so many fairytale retellings today, they don't really change it up that much. Like they may change up the tropes a little bit but for the most part so many characters are still beautiful and still able-bodied. We really have not progressed much because it's still the same shit.
I feel like the only fairy tale retelling that I recall reading recently that did have disability representation was actually A Curse So Dark and Lonely. That was a Beauty and the Beast retelling, and I do not care for Beauty and the Beast. Like I just never cared for that kind of story in general. It's been overdone, but the main character has cerebral palsy and came from the modern day world, so I was really interested in that aspect and I ended up really liking the book because it gave something different to the story that we've seen so many times already. Another great point that the author brought up was how the society does not change in fairy tales. The transformation is
put upon the individual instead of a systematic transformation. It also mirrors how in real life when people talk about disabled people, you talk about it in a way that seems like this person overcame their disability, it was something to beat or battle or conquer rather than just like a reality that people live with. And it also shows how the society that we live in isn't actually interested in being accessible to disabled people. That's a responsibility that's brought on upon themselves to be like stronger. Overall I just found the book to be so interesting and informative and I think it very clearly shows how the connection between society and fiction is very cyclical. Sometimes we
say that fiction is very different from reality and you should separate the two but that's almost too simplistic to say because in a way, when we look at our history and our culture, they really do go hand in hand. I would definitely recommend this to readers who regularly read fantasy or fairy tale retellings, and I would recommend it to writers as well. As someone who is writing a young adult fantasy, that was part of my interest in wanting to pick up the book because I wanted to check to see if I had any subconscious biases and I feel like it really helped for me to make a better story. Because one of the side characters in my story are not great people, but they did have certain disfigurements on their faces because they got into this battle with one of the characters that you do root for, who is disfigured herself, and her kind of fucking up their faces was almost like revenge. And so when you see those characters and you see their disfigurements it's supposed to be kind of like a mystery for how their faces came to be like that in the first place, and I feel like I added that more as revenge for the other disfigured character that you're rooting for and to add a little bit of mystery for how this happened before you find out the battle that these people had. But as I reflected on what I read from this nonfiction book, I realized that
it wasn't worth it for me to add that because being disfigured shouldn't be a punishment no matter how shitty or evil those characters are. And I feel like if those characters are evil, their shitty personalities and intentions and actions can speak for themselves. I don't need to change their appearances to add on to that. So I decided to remove those things and I feel like I was able to prevent myself from unintentionally harming actual disabled readers who constantly have to read this kind of shit. On a similar level to storytelling, the next book that I read is Story Genius. This was a book that was recommended to me by my mentor. I recently got accepted into a
writing mentorship program. What I really needed to improve upon for my story is adding more depth to the main character, because I wrote her a long time ago and when I got back to the story I added these perspectives of other characters who subsequently became more fleshed out, because by then I was an older and more experienced writer and I feel like they got better treatment into really developing their characters. Whereas my main character kind of got left in the dust because she was still a product of someone I had written a long time ago when I hadn't been actively reading books and hadn't been like as critical of storytelling. My mentor had pointed this out to me which I feel like was super valuable, and one of the books that she had recommended to read in order to think more deeply about your characters and how to make them more driven in their own stories was Story Genius. This is written by an author who is a story consultant for a lot of writers, whether that's for novels or for tv shows and movies. Her approach is a little bit different
because it emphasizes characters above everything else. Usually I think writers think of the plot first, whereas this author is really getting you to figure out who your character is first and that will determine the rest of the story. I think what i really liked was that the author had a very different take on story structure because a few months ago, I did read the Save the Cat book, which I think is kind of like the default book that a lot of writers go for. That book pretty much
just outlines the story structure that you need to follow and certain beats for you to hit in order to be like a cohesive story. But my problem with that kind of approach is that it's almost like a paint by numbers and it's almost like limiting in a way because you're just following examples of what other books have done in a very specific Westernized rubric or standard for good storytelling. And also why my mentor wanted me to read it in the first place is the author's concept of a misbelief, which is the worldview that the main character has that has flaws in it, but that misbelief had to have been shaped by something that happens in the main character's past for them to believe that. That misbelief will also play into the character's development. How are they gonna have their worldview challenge, what are they gonna unlearn by the end of the story? Thinking about those things will help you build out your character arc and the world around that character. I definitely can see how I need that to be more explicit with my main character. Like by the end
of the story I want you to feel like she really has changed and developed and grown as a person. I feel good about how I've revised it now that I look back on it because what I decided the main character will do in her very first chapter is something that's so different from what she does in her last chapter. Where she did something very selfish in the first chapter that completely screwed over a poor innocent woman for the sake of benefiting herself versus what she does towards the end that is very selfless and something that she would have never done if you were reading her from the first chapter. And that's because the misbelief that she had about the world and about herself has changed. But there were a lot of things in the book that I wasn't so sure about. The first
was that the author only walks you through one example of another author that has applied her method. Some of the decisions that the author decided to do to improve her story because she wanted to like, work on the characters development, were decisions that I felt like were forced just for the sake of the character developing. It just felt like a very ridiculous plotline that came from a Hallmark movie. So I would have liked to see other examples from different genres. The thing is I feel like storytelling is so subjective and can be so unique and different that bolstering some kind of method as like a one-size-fits-all solution does not ring true to me. Another thing that I didn't care for was just the way that the author really emphasized on this book having science-based insights, because this just felt more like pseudoscience. Because the author is not a neuroscientist, and I looked at her other books that she's published. She has only published these
guides for how to write better books but not actual novels herself. So I'm just like, how much should I really trust you? And then the last nonfiction book that I read for the month was The Art of Drag. This is a really fun colorful illustrated book that goes into the culture of drag and how it came to be, so we look at historical events, we look at big influential people who really pushed boundaries and set the bar. Most of it does cover Western events
and people, but there are some inclusions of Eastern influences like with kabuki and South Asian dancers and even Thailand's Miss Tiffany Universe, which I hadn't known any of these things. I know nothing about drag history. I also didn't even know that there were drag kings, which were women who dressed up as men and performed as men. There were other genderqueer performers that try to do like a mishmash of gender and just playing around and deconstructing the binary that I thought was really fun. I really love art that challenges you to think differently of things.
And a lot of the people featured in this book were women and people of color, so I was happy about that too. I feel like because we get more history and inspirations of drag and cultural movements throughout time, this gives the story a little bit more depth compared to other coffee table books. But it's still very pretty. The art is so fun and bright and bold, I'm gonna put together some pictures that I took just so that you get a feel of the art style. And the artists come from a variety of different genders and race so I really liked the diverse team behind the book too.
Also just seeing the connection between queer liberation history and drag really makes me have a deeper appreciation for drag itself because it has impacted so much of the LGBT community. So as someone who knew nothing about drag culture, I had such a fun time learning more about this. Alright, I have put all of the ingredients in my bowl, so we're gonna mix it together. This part also takes a long time, so I'm gonna go ahead and tell you the best book thatIi've read this year so far. That book is Our Wives Under the Sea. This is a very short book that is a little bit of literary, a little bit of horror, and all amazing writing. It is about a woman who just got her wife back
from an undersea mission that the wife was on that went terribly wrong. Their submarine went below the ground, they were only supposed to be there for not that long of a time in order to do research, but their submarine fails because all the lights go off, the computers don't work anymore, and they end up being stuck there for six months. Can you fucking imagine being stuck below the sea, trapped in a submarine for six months? You literally can't even tell what time it is because it is completely dark. I would not fucking survive. I do not have that great of a will to live. I would have fucking open that door and just bounce the fuck out. So you jump between the perspectives of the main character dealing with her wife today who has returned, but she's obviously not the same anymore because some shit went down below the sea. The wife has just been acting really weird,
not really present. She keeps on locking herself in the bathroom and putting herself in the tub and turning the sink on so their water bill is so much higher than it needs to be, and she just stays there in the bath the whole time, and the main character doesn't know how to communicate with her. And it's about her dealing with the grief of essentially losing her wife and the person that she had been when they married. And it really brings up an interesting point with how a lot of times when you marry someone, as you two get older certain life events can happen that can completely transform them as a person. And what happens when the person that you initially loved or married is not the same person anymore? And I can see a lot of the connections to that with people getting older and dealing with dementia or Alzheimer's. I mean, that's not what the wife is dealing with, but I can
see like the real life connections there. Then the other perspective that you get is the wife from when she went down in her submarine with two other people and you see these vignettes of what happened. Nothing too juicy or scary, there's definitely some horror elements because it is pretty terrifying to be stuck there for six months. One of her crewmates will hear this constant sound that just happens like over and over, and they don't know where the sound comes from and it kind of feels like their mind is going wild. I am done mixing together the bowl which means I'm gonna go ahead and put the rice on top of my baking pan. So what I really loved about this book that made it five stars
was the writing. The writing was so fucking good. The moment I started reading it, I was just so completely immersed every time I picked it up. What I want to warn you though is that this book is not for everyone, because it's very slow and there are long paragraphs. Pretty much every paragraph is a long ass paragraph. And nothing much happens, but if it hits for you, it fucking hits. I feel like when you read a lot of other books, you can tell when an author is trying really hard to be descriptive and poetic. But when I read this book, I felt like the writing was so natural that I couldn't even comprehend how the author was able to put these strings of words together to make these beautiful sentences. It almost seemed like it was so innate to her. And what's wild is
that this is her debut novel. I was talking about this with someone who also loved the book. She described it as how when she read it, the flow was seamless like ocean waves, and that it felt like she was floating while reading. And I feel like that's such a powerful experience that only super extremely skilled writers can pull off. I would never be able to pull off that shit in my life, but damn. When I was reading that I was like how does she do it like an icon? Making the rest of us look bad here. I mean, sad lesbians, what more could you want? There's a quote that i found from
an interview that she did about why she decided to make a gay ocean horror book. And she said: "I think it also has something to do with the fact that the sea can be many things at once. It can be very calm on the surface and something can be going on underneath that speaks to the way that we as queer people have to be so many different things to so many different people. To our parents,
at work, to society, to our partners. etc. It's a really useful tool in queer storytelling which is why people return to it." So she used the ocean as a setting for this queer romance or horror because it's like the symbol of something forbidden. One of the quotes I really liked from the book that one of the characters said was: "I think that the thing about losing someone isn't the loss but the absence afterward. The endlessness of that. My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. iIt's all they can manage. It doesn't mean they weren't sad, just that things keep going. It's hard when you look up and realize that everyone's moved off and
left you in that place by yourself. Like they've all gone on and you're there still holding on to this person that you're supposed to let go of." I feel like these discussions about grief are so poignant and nuanced, and overall it's just an amazing book. The crab meat is all spread out on top of my rice. I'm gonna put some more furikake on it, and then I'm gonna put some more sriracha on
top, and then just a little bit more kewpie mayo. Okay, I fucked up my kewpie mayo but i'm actually trying to not use that much because this shit is kind of expensive. It's still gonna turn out good though okay? Trust. Trust the damn process. I am gonna put this in the oven for 10 minutes to broil. While we wait for our stuff to bake, I'm going to talk about the last book that I read which was Baby Teeth. It was so bad and ridiculous that I plan on making a separate video about it. It is a horror book about a woman who is struggling to take care of a child who acts like a demon. The
child is seven years old and while she terrorizes her mother both mentally and physically, whenever the dad is around she puts on this innocent face and pretends to be this sweet angel. And the dad is like the dumbest fucking person ever. His only personality trait is that he's Swedish. And I'll talk more about that in the video but god is he so dumb. Like the mom will literally tell him,
hey our kid is torturing me by fucking trying to kill me, and the dad is like nah she's just playing around. And it's like hello? You should be taking this shit more seriously. She would like go on the dad's computer and look up these scary things like this one particular story about a witch that lived in France who was executed because people thought that she was a witch, and so the witch would chant things in French. This seven-year-old child would start chanting in French as if she were the witch. The mom is horrified because she thinks how can this child speak such fluent French?
But then when we read the kid's perspective she's literally just repeating what she heard to scare the mom. So she's just fucking around. So she's not even actually possessed by a witch or a demon. She just is like seriously fucked up and has mental issues or whatever, and is just trying to like scare the mom and fucking kill her. And it's just so weird because it's like what is the point of this book? And also how is a seven-year-old that advanced? How could she speak fluent French just from hearing it a few times? How can she plot out to kill the mom in such advanced ways to the point where it seems like she's a child genius? And the mom surely must have a lower IQ than child herself because why the fuck is she not pulling out her phone to record any of this happening? Don't you have a baby cam or something? Don't you have a Ring camera? Can't you just set your camera on the whole day and show the wild shit that's happening to your husband? But she doesn't. It makes no sense. The
child fucked up the mom so much that she becomes like, increasingly disabled a little bit. Like the kid will mess around with the mom's medication and then the mom will end up having a bunch of diarrhea and then the kid will also put a bunch of thumbtacks on the ground and get the mom to come out. And so the mom ends up stepping on all the thumbtacks and then now she has to wear crutches because she can't like, fucking move anywhere. It's just like a freaking mess by the end of the book. As you go through these increasingly sophisticated methods of torture, and the whole time the husband is like nah the kid is just messing around, like she doesn't know what she's doing, I'm like dude you're so fucking stupid. Go eat your Swedish meatballs. Where the hell do you even go during the day, Ikea? The entire plotline just relies on impossible circumstances. Things don't make sense. It was definitely trying to be shocking but it didn't have any actual substance or message
or purpose. Because the whole time reading this I'm like what is the point of this? Nothing. There was no point. You're just seeing a seven-year-old child torture the mom for the entirety of the book and there's like no meaning to come out of it. I would recommend this book if maybe you want to read it to go insane. I would especially recommend to listen to it on audiobook. The writing is already ridiculous but then when you listen to the narrator it just like enhances it even more, because the narrator is like "I'm gonna torture Mommy! I only want Daddy to myself! [snickers]" What a hot mess. But you know what won't be a hot mess? My cooking for once in my goddamn life.
It is a little burnt. But I don't mind because I do like it a little burnt anyway. Isn't this so beautiful though? It looks so good. Okay, so after this-- Just kidding. Clearly after the sushi bake is done, you collapse the camera into your sink. Then after you're done moving on from that moment you cut up some seaweed.
I'm gonna put my sushi bake inside one of the seaweed pieces, and then you have your sushi bake. Cool, so that's how you make sushi bake. I'll put the TikTok video that I followed in the description. I'll put the other books in the description too if you want to check them out. Thanks for watching. Go ahead and unsubscribe from my channel, and goodbye.
2022-08-12 11:30
