vlog • quiet diaries: cozy days, rare books, library visit. transcript

Good morning. It is a really lovely sunny Saturday here. I really like the really sunny days in winter. I think they're just really nice for going out, especially on the weekend. So, plans today: I'm going to get my fringe cut, which is great because it is not cooperating right now. This is the longest it's been in a while. I'm going to go do that soon. And then I'm meeting up with a friend for lunch. We're going somewhere for pasta, I think.

It'll be nice. And then we're going to check out the rare book fair. I've never been before. It's at the state library here. For my outfit today- I wear this all the time. You would have seen it so many times if you've watched my videos. I'm wearing this soufle yarn sweater from Uniqlo. I actually have a couple, and it's just kind of my go-to at the moment right now. Wearing another layer underneath it as well because it is pretty cold here.

I'm wearing the Uniqlo culottes as well today. This has also been a go-to. I bought these a couple of months ago. I have just mentioned so many times, but I love Uniqlo's clothes, but also their pants in particular. Whenever a new one comes out, and I like them, I will sometimes buy two. Not really sure what coat I'm going to wear. Probably the same one. You always see me wear the grey high-neck one because another go-to winter item.

I feel like in winter, I just get into a cycle of wearing like two or three outfits on repeat. I'm also going to wear these shoes. These are the leather boots that I bought in my last video from the vintage market. I haven't worn these out yet; I've fully cleaned them up now and polished them up, and they're looking good. So, I mean, hopefully they're comfortable. It's always a bit risky wearing a new pair of shoes out for the first time, and I will be walking a bit today.

For my bag today, I'm going to try this new one from, you guessed it, Uniqlo. Yeah, because I got this for an upcoming trip and I just want to see how I feel with it, with like my cameras and stuff. I also want to take some pictures on my Fujifilm as well. I don't think I've shown this camera yet, but a couple of months ago, I bought the Fujifilm XE5, which is quite an investment for me. I'd always wanted a Fujifilm, though.

It's kind of like a dream camera for me, so I've never taken it outside before. It's like my baby, and it's very precious. So, I've got it fully protected, like in a special little bag. But yeah, this bag seems to be a good size that fits my headphones in it as well, which is important. And of course, I'm going to take my Kindle as well. I should probably head off now. So, I'm going to take you along with me. For the rest of today, I have to come home and do a bit of admin work and some editing, and then I just want to play Bloodborne tonight.

So, I'm going to come back later and talk about that, and I'll also talk about the books I've been reading. Yeah, I think that's it for me. So, I'm going to head off now. Just got my fringe cut. I'm kind of panicking because one of the heels of my boots is twisting off. Um, this is what happens sometimes when you buy into shoes. So, I am walking very slowly right now to a supermarket around the corner, and hopefully it will all work out.

I'm in Muji trying on the Hakama pants. I have the black ones, which I wear all the time, so I'm going to get another pair, but I wanted to try on the white ones. It's hard to tell because they're all stitched at the bottom, but I feel like they could be potentially see-through, so maybe not, unfortunately. Hello, I'm back. I just wanted to go through the books that I've been reading lately and what I'm reading now and just do a quick little review as well, like I usually do in these videos.

I also bought some new books, so I want to show you what I got recently. I'll start off with this book, which is Elric of Melnibone. I showed this in my last video because I had started reading it recently, and I have now finished it. I got through it a lot quicker than I expected. As you can see, it is pretty big and chunky, and as I've talked about a lot, I have been on this journey with dark fantasy, medieval books because, for me personally, I didn't really enjoy reading fantasy [until now.

Of course, I've read a lot of Tolkien; I'm a huge fan of his books and also George R.R. Martin. This year, I just wanted to get into more of these. So, I came across this one, which is apparently one of the most well-known, most loved fantasy epics of all time; I just kept coming across it, and I heard a lot of good things about it. And yeah, I got through this one really quickly. And I think as somebody who struggled with fantasy in the past- sometimes I found with some of the books that I tried to read, there was just too much going on for me that I would kind of get overwhelmed with, you know, how big these worlds are, how many characters there are, you know, sometimes there's a lot of magic and things like that, but what I really liked about this book is just how straightforward it was with all of those kinds of things.

I found it really easy to follow. I thought the plot was really interesting and enjoyable. And also, the dialogue as well was really simple at times, but I really liked that. I would like to check out more of these books because I think I mentioned in my last video, as I was starting to read this, I found that Erlic was a complex character, and that definitely deepens with his character progression over the course of this book and what he goes through.

He's this emperor of this dying kingdom, very multifaceted because he kind of doesn't want to be in this position. So, it's not really what I expected because a lot of times when you go into these stories, you know, these kings or emperors, people that want to be there and enjoy having that power, but he was really different in that sense. Whenever he got into these tricky situations, which I'm not going to go into, obviously, just in case, he ended up doing the opposite to what I expected pretty much every single time.

And I really like that because it just kept me guessing. I really didn't know what he was going to do next or how he would handle things. He is kind of kooky in a way in that sense, I think. And he's sort of moody. I really enjoy a complex character, I guess. So, I definitely want to read more of these. Looking in the back of this book, there is actually a reader's guide to all of the books in the Elric Saga. There's a lot more than I thought.

So, I would like to check them out because yeah, I think this was great, and I would rate this a four out of five, and I do recommend checking this out if you are into dark fantasy epics. After finishing Elrich, I then started my Patreon book club read. So, every month in my book club, we have a poll, and then we vote on what we're going to read for the month. And for August, we are reading Bone of My Bone by Joanna Van Veen.

This just came out recently, I believe. I had this on my radar for quite a while because I really like this author. Last year, we also read Blood on Her Tongue together by this author, and this is one of the best books I read last year. Absolutely loved it. This was a five-star read for me. Also, just love the cover of this one. You can't really tell because this is on my Kindle, but the cover of this one is really gorgeous as well.

This one is set in the 1600s in the 30-year war in Europe. For me personally, my knowledge on that period of history is not great, but at the start of this book, and I'm just a few chapters into this, the author does give you some helpful context with this. There was also a list of some trigger warnings. As I've started to read it, I found that was helpful to know because it is very dark, which is not a problem for me, but I'm kind of glad that I had a little heads-up going into it and, yeah, a bit more of an idea of what this war involved.

I'm really liking it. I feel like this is something that I'm going to get through really quickly. There's a lot of elements to this that I really enjoy. I'm learning a lot about this period of history as well, which has been great. So, if you've already read this one, let me know what you think. But when I finish it, which will probably be soon, I will come back in the next video and talk about my thoughts about this.

Before I show you the couple of books I picked up this week, I do, of course, want to talk about Bloodborne a little bit because I finished that game just this week, which was a huge feat for me. I know a lot of you probably expect that I'd already finished this game. But this game took me like a year and a half, nearly 2 years to complete, which is pretty insane considering I played Elden Ring in like 1 month. Dark Souls two weeks maybe, and I talk about Bloodborne all the time.

It's influenced me quite a lot even though I hadn't finished it. And I'm sorry if you've already heard this before and I'm repeating myself: I started playing Bloodborne, and as my first From Software game, incredibly difficult- a really hard learning curve for me- but that obviously helped me get into the other games. So after months of progressing through that game, my PS4 died. So I had to start all over again earlier this year because I picked up a PS5 for Christmas.

So, I think my progress into Bloodborne before I committed this week to finishing it was maybe like 70%. So, I'd done, you know, quite a big chunk of it. After playing Elden Ring and Dark Souls, I found this game a lot easier. It's not exactly the same. All of these games are really different in their own ways, so you can't really expect, going from one to the next, that you're going to just breeze through it. Slight variations between all of them.

Some of them are completely different. And not saying that Bloodborne wasn't difficult, but obviously coming back after quite a while and having more experience, I got through this pretty quickly. Really happy that I finally finished it and I got to see the ending. I've watched a lot of videos about, you know, the lore of Bloodborne, so I kind of already knew what to expect. So, I've started the game again. I need to get to the DLC again as well because I would like to try to get a different ending.

I also need to go back and play Dark Souls 1 and 2 as well. I really like to just focus on one game at a time, but I'll probably take a little break now as well after having these very intense weeks of gaming, which has been a lot of fun. Okay, so I picked up three books this week, so I'm going to show you what I got. The first one is Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. I think quite a few of you did recommend this author to me when I was mentioning that I was getting into dark fantasy, medieval books.

It was kind of difficult to choose which ones to read. I decided to go with this one, which is from the Farseer trilogy, because I'd heard some really good things. This book is a lot smaller than I expected. If I'm really into it, I could get through it quickly. So, I'm going to start this one soon. Let me know if you've read it. The next book I've got here is Once Was Willem by M.R Carey. This cover is so nice. This is a dark medieval tale, which sounds pretty much up my alley for what I'm reading right now.

There's mention of some twisted folklore, macabre magic, and the strangest of found families. Just sounds really interesting to me. Going to read this one soon, too, hopefully. And the last one I've got, which is a little different, is Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. This is by Satoshi Yagisawa. I do really like to break up my reading when I'm getting into a particular genre, just to keep things fresh and to take a little break.

This book is about a woman whose family has had a bookshop for three generations. Just sounds really cute and light and a little bit different. It is an international bestseller, so I've seen this one around a lot. If you've read this one, let me know what you thought about it. Another thing that I would like to do this afternoon is organise my bookshelf behind me. I'm not somebody who needs to have a well-set-out bookshelf.

I kind of like things being a bit chaotic and messy, and when I get new books I will just kind of slot them in wherever there's space. I'm going to try to organise this a little bit. So, I'll show you how that goes as well. Okay, so I'm back home now, so I'm going to start cleaning up and maybe reorganising this bookshelf. I just realised that last year, I think it was maybe the year before, I did release two bookshelf tour videos.

Obviously, they're updated, but I'll link those below if you're interested in checking them out as well.