- Hey everyone.

It's your girl, Jenn

and I am back to discuss my

most recent reads

books are probably my favorite topic to talk about,

so let's get cracking.

I want to do a huge thank you to our sponsor,

Book of the Month,

for sponsoring today's video.

Over the weekend,

I received my Book of the Month package

and I spent all of Sunday reading.

So book of the month is America's fastest

growing online book service.

Each month, they provide five book options

and you get to pick one or more.

Their mission is to shine light on new and emerging authors

and help readers discover books they're gonna love.

They do all the work for you.

They sift through hundreds of books, each one,

and then they provide you with a curated selection of

new and early release titles.

So that way you can spend your time reading and less time

faffing around trying to find something to read.

So this month I chose People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd.

It's about a married couple and it switches between the

perspective of the wife and the husband.

So Emmy, the wife, is an Instagram mom.

So she's completely obsessed with social media and

everything she does is so calculative to ensure that she

stays relevant and relatable, but her husband, meanwhile,

Dan, he's honestly sick of it.

Emmy's moral compass becomes more skewed and it's intense.

It's just so, so intense.

It's the first time I've ever read a contemporary thriller

about social media. So I thoroughly enjoyed this.

I'm so happy. I found this book through book of the month.

They have got the best price of new release fiction books.

You guys should definitely try it.

It's risk-free you can skip any month,

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If you want to get started today,

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to get your first book for just $5. All right.

So now let's move on to other books that I have loved this

past month.

So this year I focused a lot of my attention on the

importance of being more critical and mindful about my

social media intake.

I loved Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Irresistible by Adam Alter

And of course the documentary, The Social Dilemma,

if you have not seen that documentary yet it's on Netflix

and it is a required watch,

but I was listening to an interview with Tristan Harris and

he posted an excerpt from this book,

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

So this book was published in 1985 and he was talking about

the negative effects of television and how it was morphing,

the public's ability to critically think and to be able to

have productive public discourse.

Honestly, if Postman was concerned in the eighties,

he would probably be even more disappointed in us to see how

we have managed to unfold into this messy pool

that is today.

People just don't read anymore.

And as much as I love to make videos and learn from videos,

it's not the same as reading a book and Postman goes

to explain history of the age of topography,

which is the era when books were the only source to get

ideas and like a full, comprehensive way.

I feel like books are an excellent container for information

that's been analyzed and accumulated.

And the issue with TV and the internet is that it's created

an abundance of information, but they're all scattered.

And de-contextualized, they're just bits and pieces.

And it's hard for us to connect everything all together.

In 1984, so many people were proud

and relieved that the reality had

not prophesied into what George Orwell

describes in his book.

So people were stoked.

They were like, yeah, we avoided it.

But no, Postman describes another dystopia

that we've managed to sink ourselves into,

which is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

So this is a dystopia where the people are living in excess.

They're constantly amused,

constantly laughing and just not thinking.

It's a dystopia

where no one cares that they're only focusing

on irrelevant things.

No one cares that they're being surveillanced and

forced to comply.

It's just a world where distraction is

the only thing that matters.

And he's implying that that is the world that we're living

in today.

But I can go on about this book and it is actually

December's book pick for my book club, Curl Up Club.

And if you would like to discuss it with me

and other club members,

please check out the Instagram page for more information.

And I do understand that there is a level of hypocrisy

of me promoting my book club and me uploading this video

on YouTube. But you know what?

Yes, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance.

But the thing is,

I think the more information I learn about just being more

critical about technology and what the earth has become,

it's just going to work in our favor

In order to solve a problem,

you must admit that there is a problem.

All right, let's move on to the next book.

Next step I have The Best We Could do by Thi Bui.

This memoir had me in tears.

It was so beautifully illustrated

and I couldn't help,

but resonate so much with her family story.

So this is an illustrated memoir about a Vietnamese family

and the struggles that occur when a family is displaced.

Bui's parents fled Vietnam in the seventies because it was

war-ridden. And after the fall of South Vietnam,

there was just no opportunity there.

So they immigrated to the United States.

Bui's parents did everything to try and make ends meet,

but just like the weight of their past and the adjustment to

an environment that's just ultimately just not

welcoming to Asians,

had an effect on how they

would raise their children

Growing up,

I have only seen America's standpoint about the Vietnam war,

nowhere in our history books

did we see it from the Vietnamese perspective

So it was so eye-opening and just a complete tragedy.

And it's crazy how the effects of war

can affect generations for years.

It also made me reflect about my parents and how the

displacement and the immigration affected them.

I think this book is definitely going to hit home with

anyone with immigrant parents.

So the next book I want to talk about is the Silent Patient

by Alex Michaelides

And damn.

This was another psychological thriller that I completely

devoured. So it's about a famous painter, Alicia Berenson,

who shoots her husband,

kills him and then never speaks a word.

So all the trials happen and she doesn't say a peep.

And this book is narrated by Theo who ends up

being her therapist.

And he's just dying to know what happened

the night of the murder.

And he just wants to help her.

And I'll just leave it at that.

If you enjoyed Girl in the Train or Gone Girl,

this book will be right up your alley.

So my next read is kind of spooky.

It is called Chaos by Tom O'Neill with

Dan Piepenbring

this would have been really good to read in October because

it was kind of freaky. So this book is very dark.

It's about the infamous serial killer Charles Manson.

And really quick, if you guys don't know who he is,

he was a cult leader that brainwashed and manipulated his

followers to become murderers.

It made everyone so paranoid and afraid during the sixties,

and everybody was watching the trials really closely.

So 20 years ago, Tom O'Neill

agreed to do a piece for a magazine about the

murders, but during the investigation,

he uncovered a lot of evidence of a potential

coverup behind this story.

And honestly, reading this,

I realized the sixties were crazy. Like actually crazy.

We think 2020 is bad, but Lord, after you read this,

you'll realize that the sixties were chaotic.

There were LSD mind control experiments,

FBI smear campaigns, and just the CIA was so careless.

It's a hot mess. After reading this book,

I definitely want to check out Helter Skelter because

O'Neill does a lot of exposes and the contradictions

in that book.

So I would really like to see both sides.

After reading this book,

do I know what really happened?

No. They say that this book kind of borders on conspiracy

theories, but hey, I was in it for the ride.

And the reason why this book looks untouched is because I

read it on my Kindle,

but I just thought it looked really nice on my bookstand

Moving on, I have Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.

I mentioned my thoughts about this in a blog previously.

And I said, I wasn't wowed by it, but you know what?

I thought I would mention it anyway,

because I didn't hate it. And I did learn a few things.

It essentially explains how behind every or many successful

companies, there are great leaders who create environments,

where people will feel comfortable and have a sense of

belonging and just feel proud to work there.

He also talks about how every leader creates a circle of

safety, which means you set culture values.

You give power to people to make decisions and you offer

trust and empathy.

Humans work best when they don't feel like

they're in danger.

It was a great reminder for me to remain calm and relaxed

when I'm working with my team.

I know it seems like common sense for leaders to treat their

employees with respect and empathy.

But when you have a larger corporation, I guess it's easier,

easier for them to see workers as a disposable cog in a

system. I'm not saying it's right,

but I'm just saying the bigger the company is the more

abstract the workers become. It's like that one quote,

the death of one person is a tragedy,

but the death of a million is a statistic. And yeah,

it just explains how,

when big numbers start representing humans,

our ability to empathize begins to falter.

It's a decent read about good leaders who care about their

people and see their workers beyond an expendable resource.

My last book is called Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant.

Now I have had this on my bookshelf over there

for literally years. I got this book in Oakland,

I guess I've always wanted to know more about the taboo

subject of sex workers.

This book is not like a detailed exposee essay about the

conditions of sex workers or like,

or even like a day in the life memoir.

It's like a pretty like sterile outline of why sex work

should be considered and treated as a job and why it should

be decriminalized.

I appreciate the fact that this was

written by a former sex worker.

So she goes through case after case on why sex workers

rights are human rights.

There was one part that really stuck out to me.

She explains that sex workers are always bombarded with the

question, are you empowered by this work?

Like, do you feel empowered with what you're doing?

And it's, it's hard because if they don't say yes,

then suddenly they're not being listened to because suddenly

they need to be saved.

And now these are sex workers that choose to be sex workers.

So that's something to keep in mind.

This question about empowerment in a job is not asked when