The book that made me glad to be autistic
Ready for a magic-filled library haul? This week, I’m diving into 8 incredible books that have quickly become some of my favorite reads of the year. From an enchanting tale of an immortal girl and a forest god to a deeply compassionate look at 'wonky brains,' this long, chatty video covers my honest, spoiler-free reviews of the best fantasy, literary fiction, and murder mysteries I've found. Grab a cuppa and join me for a love letter to libraries!
If you've read any of these - or you've got a recommendation you think I'd love - tell me in the comments. I'm always hungry for more, and I actually do read them!
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Hi everyone, I'm Zuzu, and today we're going to talk about books. I have got a big pile of books in front of me. They're all from my local library, which — if you have a local library and you're not using it, you want to get on that. Libraries are magic. You can just go in there and they let you walk out with books for free, as many as you want. It's incredible. Anyway, these are all my library books for the week.
They're just about to go back to the library so I can get the next batch, and I thought I would talk you through my favourites — what I liked, what I didn't like. And actually this pile has several that have been some of my favourite reads of the year so far, so it's a really juicy one. Okay. So without further ado…
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — V.E. Schwab
I fucking loved this book, it was wonderful. It's about a girl in the 18th century — I think it's 1714 — and she basically makes a deal with an old god in the forest to escape from an arranged marriage on her wedding day. She wishes for more time, and she wishes to never belong to anybody. And of course this is granted to her. She is given immortality, and the caveat is that no one will ever remember her. She can't say her real name, she can't write anything down. If she tells anybody the story of what happened to her, they just don't hear her. She'll have these incredible connections with people and then the following day they don't know who she is. It's incredibly lonely and incredibly difficult, but incredibly free. She feels incredibly liberated by this.
Every year the god comes to her and says, will you surrender, will you yield your soul to me, are you ready for this to be over? And she'll remember seeing the sunrise over Paris, or the opera, or a piece of art that particularly moved her, or dancing, or music — she'll remember all the places she hasn't yet been, and she'll say no. And I think there's also some defiance in her as well: it's like, you tricked me and I'm not going to let you win. Which sort of comes to a glorious conclusion at the end.
Part way through, she meets somebody who does remember her. I really liked the way it was done, in that it wasn't this epic, towering love story. The thing that she most wants is to be remembered, which is what this man can give her — but it's not like he just happens to be her soulmate and the most perfect person for her ever. They do have a wonderful relationship, but there are complications, and she loves him in a way, but he's not the love of her life or anything. The author manages to maintain Addie's independence the whole way through. She's never at the mercy of a man — even the old god, who comes to her in the form of a man, and they even have a love affair for a while. She never surrenders herself, she never gives up her agency. She takes what she has been given and she owns it. She accepts the consequences for her choice and her desire, even though she was tricked. She never makes it into a self-pity story, and she never makes her life about anybody else. It's about herself, and she lives it for herself.
Highly, highly recommend this one. It was a real treat. Really, really enjoyed it.
That's Not My Name — Megan Lally
This one was recommended by a booktuber I follow and I can't remember who it was. I'm sorry, I'm just getting over a cold at the moment so my voice is a bit like… so I apologise if you can hear that.
It's a murder mystery book, and I didn't realise it's actually a YA book. I read it the whole way through and it was fine, it was good, I enjoyed it. I can't remember a great deal about it, but it bowled along merrily and a good time was had by all. It's about a girl that goes missing, and her boyfriend, who everybody thinks killed her, goes on a mission to try and find her and figure out what happened to her — investigate where the police gave up. It was fine. I love a good murder mystery, and it's not particularly because they're the best literature in the world. I find them incredibly comforting. It's just lovely escapism. I love a good murder.
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
This is actually the only non-fiction on this pile. Walter Murch is a famous movie editor. Honestly, I had never heard of him, but he edited Apocalypse Now and The English Patient. Apocalypse Now I have not seen all the way through, but the clips that I have seen, the editing is one of the things where I'm like, fuck, that's clever, I like that. There's one scene where there's a guy in a hotel room talking about his memories of the war, and there's a shot of the ceiling fan going around, and it's cut with the sound of helicopter blades, and then it sort of merges into a helicopter. It's just really beautifully done, really clever, really smooth and lovely.
As I'm doing more YouTube lately and really getting into the art of filmmaking and what makes a good video — I feel like every YouTube video is essentially a little short film. Some are more elaborate than others, but you're always looking for ways to keep people engaged and to keep the momentum going. I wanted to see if this gave any insight.
This was actually the only one on the pile that I didn't finish, because the interview style was all a bit self-congratulatory — that I'm a smart man and you're a smart man and all our friends are smart men. It was all very kind of… a lot of willies being whopped around, you know? And that always just turns me off cold. There was probably some good editing insight in there — why certain decisions were made — but honestly I couldn't get through all of the ego and the self-congratulatory-ness to get into that. There's another book by Walter Murch called In the Blink of an Eye, which is purely his guide to editing, how he edits and the things that are important to him. I think that's the one that I actually want to read.
The Lion Women of Tehran — Marjan Kamali
I really like this one as well. This is about two women in Iran. They're born in the 50s, so it goes through the 50s, 60s and 70s, when Iran was a lot more progressive — certainly in terms of their attitude to women. I don't know what they were like in other respects, but probably not that great. But certainly in the attitudes to women they were a lot more open-minded: hijab wasn't mandatory, they could get an education, they were allowed to go places unaccompanied.
And then the fall of the Shah, who everybody kind of hated — everybody wanted a revolution — and then the Ayatollah came in and took over power from the Shah and enforced these really, really strict religious laws. Women were basically just downgraded instantly, particularly when it came to wearing hijab and being covered. If you could see a single strand of hair, you could be beaten and whipped, imprisoned. This is the story of two childhood friends: a woman who leaves Iran just before this kicks off and goes to live in America, and her best friend who stays and becomes a freedom fighter, is imprisoned on multiple occasions, and fights her entire life.
It was really moving. I think Iran is an absolutely fascinating country, and there are a lot of unfortunately interesting parallels between what's happening particularly in the US, and certainly in the UK to a slightly lesser degree at the moment — certain rights, particularly for women and marginalised people, being rolled back. Just the horror of seeing how these things that we think are inalienable, that we think are just a part of how we operate as a culture and a society — to see how easily those can be stripped away. And even now Iran hasn't recovered from what happened in the 80s.
The subject matter was fascinating. The writing I found a little stiff, and I think that's probably a stylistic choice, because it's mostly told from the point of view of the woman who escaped to America, who is quite stiff. She's very concerned with how other people think of her, and she's not the most likeable character. Her friend, who we see less of, is actually a far more interesting, likeable, active character — but the point of view we get through most of the book is this more passive, stiff, conformist character. So I think the writing style illustrated that quite well, but it did kind of trip me up. It took me a little bit to get into it, but the story's great. Not my favourite one of this pile, but I did really enjoy it.
My Favourite Mistake — Marian Keyes
Another comfort read. I wasn't feeling particularly inspired — last month was super social and outy, a lot of people going on, and a bit poorly — so I just wanted something I could snuggle up with, revisit characters that I already know, which is one of my favourite things to do. Sometimes meeting new people even between the pages of a book is a bit much. So I'm always glad when authors revisit characters in multiple different books. This is another Walsh family book from Marian Keyes.
It's a lovely, frothy, light-hearted book about trauma and depression — which is always fun. Marian Keyes has a wonderful light touch with things like that. She's one of my favourite comfort authors.
Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado
Another book of short stories. Now, if you watched my last book video, you know that I feel some kind of way about short stories. When they're good, they're very, very good. But most of the time they're not. I like a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end — I'm quite rigid in what I like. When it comes to short stories, I don't really enjoy vignette-style ones. I want you to tell me a fucking story. Don't just create an atmosphere. That's not good enough.
This one I actually enjoyed. It didn't knock my socks off, but I did thoroughly enjoy it, and I actually read all of them all the way through. They have a sort of surreal edge, and they're about women, women's bodies, violence against women — obviously, since putting together Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello last year, this is a topic I keep coming back to over and over again. If you've seen any of my art videos recently, you'll know that the whole idea of the experience of having a body is something I'm deeply engaged with as an idea at the moment, and I think my next body of work — no pun intended — will come from that place.
It was interesting: quite dark, quite surreal, some horror elements, some queer stuff going on, quite sexy at times, weirdly funny. There's one story which is just 272 episode ideas for Law and Order, which follows this whole body-snatching narrative and hungry ghosts, and it's just mental and weird and funny, almost like a prose poem. It's the sort of thing you couldn't do for an entire novel — it would just get tedious — but as a way of telling a story in this format, I thought it was really clever and it really worked well. There was a story about women disappearing and becoming invisible and being sewn into the fabric of prom dresses. A story of a woman whose head is only held on by a ribbon, and her husband unties the ribbon. Looking back over it and remembering it, I'm like, oh shit, yeah, no, I enjoyed this one a lot. For short stories, I liked it.
The Note — Alafair Burke
Another whodunit murder mystery. This one's by Alafair Burke, who is an author I pick up quite frequently. Again, not the best book I've ever read in my entire life, but I thoroughly enjoyed the couple of hours I spent in that particular world. They bowl along and they take you out of yourself for a couple of hours. I didn't really have anything to say about it other than: if you like murder mysteries, Alafair Burke's a decent author.
It's interesting, because — I was going to say I have a high tolerance for trash, but it's not even that. Sometimes I just want to switch my brain off, and books like that, a solid three-star Murder Mystery, nothing too taxing, you kind of know what's going to happen. I'm not looking for anything too good. I don't want my brain to be excited. I just want a nice predictable story to wash over it so it can calm down. And that's what murder mysteries do for me. I don't care if they're predictable — in fact I'd rather they were predictable, I'd rather they were a bit formulaic. I don't want to be challenged, I don't necessarily want the characters to be relatable. I'm very happy for them to be incredibly heteronormative, just really bland and boring and normal. It's like just pressing an off switch in my brain. So when I go for comfort reads — comfort murder — that's exactly what I'm looking for. If it's a really, really great murder mystery, it doesn't do the same thing for me. I like good books, obviously, but there's a particular thing these do for me which nothing else does.
The Book of Form and Emptiness — Ruth Ozeki
The last book I read this week. I actually wrote about this one in my newsletter — if you don't get my newsletter, it comes out every week, or every other week depending on what else is going on in my life. I always talk about what I'm reading, films, what I'm working on, what I'm thinking about, what's going on in the Haus of Cats. If you're not already signed up, you really should do that. Link is in the description.
I spoke about this one in my newsletter because it's one of the most beautiful, interesting and compassionate treatises on mental health that I've read for a really, really long time. It's about a 13-year-old boy whose father dies — in the very first chapter — and his mother is grieving and develops hoarding tendencies. The protagonist, this 13-year-old boy, hears voices — the voices of the inanimate objects around him — and he's sort of plagued by them, until he goes to a psych ward for children and meets a girl there who calls herself the Aleph. She's an artist, and she leaves these little notes like a sort of scavenger hunt in the library. Again, all centred around a library. Libraries — mwah — amazing.
There are a lot of homeless people that hang out in this library, and she introduces him to a Slavic poet known colloquially as the Bottle Man, who is a very famous poet in his country and is also, in America, homeless — has just kind of fallen through the cracks. Benny discovers that he also hears voices, and he says, oh my god, you hear voices? And he's like, yeah, of course, that's where the poetry comes from. He challenges Benny to decide for himself what is real and what makes him crazy.
It's this beautiful exploration of the distress and suffering of people who have various mental health diagnoses — caused not entirely by the fact that they have something quote-unquote wrong with them. Ozeki's approach is that when you're treating any kind of quote-unquote mental illness, the circumstances of a person need to be treated as much as whatever is supposed to be wrong with them. You can probably tell I'm very uncomfortable with labelling these things as diseases or disorders, because oftentimes it's just a case of a brain being different, and the suffering caused by that is not just because of what the brain is doing — it's also because we live in a society that penalises wonky brains. We hear about somebody who hears voices and we think schizophrenic, we think crazy, we think there are dangers to themselves and others, they need to be medicated and put away. We hear somebody who is autistic or ADHD and the prevailing narrative is that we should be looking for a cure for those things.
What this book does so beautifully is acknowledge that having a brain that perceives reality differently — there's magic in that. There's suffering and there's struggle, of course, but there's also magic in it, and beauty. As somebody who has a bouquet of mental health diagnoses, disorders, conditions, what have you — that really spoke to me. I hate the portrayal of autistic people in popular culture generally. There are some improvements over time, but most of the time it's like autism is this tragedy, and these poor mothers have to deal with these autistic kids who aren't like normal kids, and all they want is for their kid to be normal. If somebody gave me the option to give up my autism and be normal — for all of the difficulty, all of the suffering and the pain that I have on a day-to-day basis — I wouldn't give it up for the world. I think that part of me is the most magical part. The way my brain puts things together is what makes me an artist, what makes me an independent thinker, what makes me — as Naomi Klein puts it — immune to fascism. It helps me to see things differently from other people, it helps me to be more empathetic, more compassionate. Everything that I like and value about myself comes from autism.
It's always interesting, especially when we look at high-functioning / low-functioning labels, which are just such bollocks. All of the diagnostic criteria around autism in particular is about how much your autism impacts on the world around you. It's never about how much you are suffering — what you need. What do you need in order to be functional? To feel safe, to be happy, to live a well-rounded life where you can thrive? I've been incredibly fortunate in that, through more accident than design, I've fallen into a set of circumstances where that is a reality for me. I can have, most of the time, a life set up in that way where I can thrive. For many, many years I did not have that at all, and it was brutal. Really, really brutal. And I know that my behaviour and my distress was all viewed through the lens of how it was disturbing to other people, how it impacted other people.
Anyway — this book. Really, it turned me inside out. I think it's one of the best books I've read for a really long time. It's a beautifully compassionate book about people who have wonky brains, without ever minimising or dismissing the struggles of that, but also acknowledging the beauty and the magic and the joy — the magic of having a brain that sees a table and hears poetry. Who wouldn't want that? It's magnificent.
Final Recommendations
So, off this stack: the Ruth Ozeki is a must-read. Must-read. And also The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — must-read, amazing, really, really good. Then The Lion Women of Tehran and Her Body and Other Parties — also solid, great books, recommend them as well. Everything else — I mean, if you like a trashy murder as much as me, these ones are great.
I've been talking for nearly an hour, so I think that's probably quite enough. If you've watched this far, thank you so much. Why don't you tell me if you've read any of these books yourself in the comments, and give me recommendations — I am always hungry for recommendations. I read really quickly, which I know people fucking hate on the internet. I'm sorry, I just do. It's a blessing and a curse. I can never have enough books, so please give me your recommendations, anything you think I'd like. Some of the books I've read from your recommendations have been amazing, so thank you very much.
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Thank you so much for watching. Happy reading, and I'll see you in the next video.
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