 Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you're all doing really really well. So before we jump into this video I just have a couple of adminny, updated things I want to tell you about. Firstly I just want to say sorry for not having a video up last week. It just didn't happen last week. It just didn't happen. Secondly I now have Instagram. I realise that for those of you who don't follow me on Twitter you wouldn't know that I had Instagram now. Maybe you don't care, maybe you do. So I just thought I would let you all know. I'm really really enjoying having Instagram so far. I'm really loving posting pictures and seeing what you guys are all up to. I love posting pictures of what I'm reading and what I'm wearing and what I'm doing. So if any of that seems interesting to you at all then I will leave my handle down below and you can go over and follow me over there maybe and say hi. I would really like that. So for today's video I am here with an original tag which is so so exciting and it is called the Literary Fiction Book Tag. So I've just made this tag for a bit of fun really. I've always really enjoyed doing tags myself and I've always really liked the idea of making my own tag but thinking up a tag that hasn't been done before is really really hard. So then I took a step back and I thought big picture what do I love? Literary Fiction. And can you believe that nobody else out there has ever made a Literary Fiction Book Tag before? Because I can't. So here we are. I've made an original tag and I'm pretty pleased with it if I do say so myself and I just hope other people will enjoy it and maybe celebrate their love for literary fiction with me through doing the tag. So this tag basically just gives people the opportunity to talk about a lot of literary fiction books they love for various different reasons and so hopefully that will help everyone give everyone else a variety of literary fiction book recommendations. I will be tagging some specific people to do this tag at the end of the video but I just want to say that I wholeheartedly tag everyone to do this. If you love literary fiction at all and you fancy giving this tag ago then please do it and please let me know down below when you make your video as well and I'll go over and watch it because I would love that. That being said if you don't have a book tube channel and you aren't going to do this tag in video format but you want to answer along to the questions down below in the comments then please feel free to do that. That would be really really fun and we can all get some recommendations from each other down below. So the first question in the tag is how do you define literary fiction? So this is a pretty broad question in that literary fiction is quite hard to classify. Some people don't even think it exists I don't think but it definitely isn't a genre and there isn't any one clear definition for literary fiction out there. So please feel free to interpret this question however you want, please discuss away. I for one find this so fascinating and I'm really interested to see what other people think of this question. Personally I tend to define literary fiction in terms of what is sufficient to constitute a literary fiction novel rather than what is necessary to constitute a literary fiction novel. By that I mean that there are some key characteristics that literary fiction novels may have that make them literary fiction but there is nothing that a literary fiction novel has to have to make it literary fiction. So some of the characteristics that literary fiction may have in my opinion are social, political or human commentary, introspective character exploration, not being focused or driven by plot and also a large focus on language. In my mind literary fiction novels will generally include one or more of those characteristics but as I said none of them are necessary. And this isn't clear cut at all, the lines surrounding what is or isn't literary fiction often appear blurred to me. It's very hard to pin down an exact definition but generally I find that to be a handy classification and those are the main things that tell me that something may be a literary fiction novel. Question two is name a literary fiction novel with a brilliant character study. So for this question my answer is going to be Normal People by Sally Rooney. I read this novel for the first time this year and I absolutely loved it. It's one of the best literary fiction novels that I have ever read. This book focuses on two characters, Connell and Marianne, who have quite different backgrounds to one another and we follow their relationship from when they're teenagers over a few years until they're young adults. The entire focus of this novel is on these two characters and their lives and their relationship with one another and the character presentation and analysis in here is just exceptional. Throughout this novel you get such an incredible insight into these characters' minds and their beliefs and their feelings and their mindsets that have been ultimately shaped by their upbringings and backgrounds. You get to witness their personal shortcomings and how they express themselves and how they communicate and how they try to adapt and change. There are so many complexities that make up a human person and in my opinion Sally Rooney does a pretty good job at pinning some of them down and exploring them here. Content warnings for this book include physical, sexual and emotional abuse as well as mental illness. Question two is name a literary fiction novel that has experimental or unique writing. For this question I have to answer with a girl is a half-warmed thing by Ema McBride. Ema McBride has one of the most unique writing styles I have ever read. She's incredible and so clever and I just can't. This novel follows our protagonist who is a young woman who has a very tumultuous life. Her brother has a brain tumour, her mother is very ill and can't look after them properly and many other terrible things happen to her while she's growing up. Ema McBride breaks a lot of boundaries in her writing in this novel. It's very introspective, we spend the whole novel looking through the eyes of our protagonist and it's written in a stream of consciousness style. All grammatical rules are defied, the writing is very fluid throughout but at points it also becomes very staccato and disjointed. What is happening in the present or what has happened in the past or what is happening in the protagonist's mind all become very blurred together. And this all makes for one of the most immersive and convincing and intense reading experiences I have ever had. This is certainly a challenging read and not just in terms of its writing but I think it's incredible and so worth it if you want to give it a go. There are a lot of very important content warnings that need to go along with this book and they include rape, sexual assault of a child, self-harm and suicide. The next question is name a literary fiction novel with an interesting structure. So literary fiction novels don't typically follow the conventional storytelling structure that we are used to in novels. Plot is a huge focus in genre novels, we are usually driven through the book by the plot in genre novels with their very clear beginning, middle and end structure but literary fiction novels don't tend to do this, they tend to be very free with their structures. So my answer for this question is going to be White Teeth by Zadie Smith. This is a huge literary fiction novel that I absolutely adore. This novel follows the lives of two North London families. One family is the family of Bengali Muslim Samad and the other family is the family of his best friend Archie. Structurally, this novel is set over a very long period of time. It opens in the 1930s and runs all the way up to the 21st century. Each chapter focuses in on a different character and it is similarly paced all the way through. There are no clear climaxes in this book, there is no real feeling of resolution. It's a very steady book and this is very clever because it makes you feel as though you are merely witnessing these characters' lives over these years as they are lived. You are not reading a constructed story, you are reading about people's lives. It's a very observant and insightful novel that looks at different people and their lives and their identities and their relationships and their beliefs, and I think this is mirrored perfectly in the structuring of this book. Question five is name a literary fiction novel that explores social themes. My answer for this question is going to be Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. This novel is set in a small town in America and it focuses mainly on the wealthy Richardson family and their tenant who is a single mother who is trying to make it as an artist. There is also a secondary story line that runs throughout the novel that focuses on some friends of the Richardson's who are going through a custody battle to try and adopt a Chinese-American baby. One of the main social themes that is explored in this novel is motherhood and what constitutes motherhood. This theme is explored in some quite obvious ways throughout the novel, mainly to do with the custody battle surrounding the Chinese-American baby, but it is also explored in so many more subtle ways throughout the novel as well. Celeste Ng comes at this theme from so many angles. I absolutely loved this theme throughout the novel. I think it's a really interesting and important theme to think about as we are in some places in the West coming into kind of a new age of reproductive freedom and diverse families and different ways to reproduce. Celeste Ng is also particularly strong at looking at family bonds and family strains, so she smashed this motherhood theme. There are also a couple of other really interesting social themes explored in this novel as well, including cultural identity and socioeconomic status and privilege. This novel is just fab, it's really readable and addictive but so thought-provoking and intelligent as well. Question six is name a literary fiction novel that explores the human condition. What I mean by this question is name a book that explores what it is to be human and what it is to live a human existence, so something that explores the characteristics and situations that are typical of living a human life. My answer to this question is Tin Man by Sarah Winman. Without hesitation this is one of the most human books I have ever read. Simply put this is a short novel that focuses on the lives of two men, Ellis and Michael, who have been best friends since they met in Oxford when they were 12 years old. This book looks at these two men's identities and how they grow over time and how they are affected by the relationships they hold. It presents their emotions and their conflicts and what they aspire to. There's love in here, there's loss, there's understanding, there's friendship, and all of these things are explored with the complexity that they deserve. This novel is so attentive and so truthful. This book and these characters, it just felt so real to me when I read this book. It's so reflective and insightful and so emotional. I just think it's amazing. Content warnings for this novel include HIV and mental illnesses. The next question is name a brilliant literary genre hybrid novel. So this just means a novel that falls into a particular genre but it also feels like literary fiction. So my answer for this question is going to be The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremaine and I consider this to be historical literary fiction. This novel follows a young boy called Gustav Perler who was growing up in Switzerland in the 1940s and it follows his friendship with a young Jewish boy called Anton Schwebel. Throughout this novel we get to learn about Gustav and Anton's relationship over many years until they are older men. We get to see how the relationship grows ever the more complex and how the two men become really interdependent on one another. There are also many other incredibly complex relationships in this novel and all of them end up being tangled together in the most realistic way. Rose Tremaine just does the best job of looking at these characters and their relationships but also the time setting and what's going on externally and how all of those things affect the characters. This is a fab book and it is the perfect balance of literary fiction and historical fiction in my opinion. Question eight is what genre do you wish was mixed with literary fiction more? So historical literary fiction novels are my favorite kind of literary genre novels so in a way I guess that's my answer because whenever I read them I tend to love them but I do feel like there are already quite a few of those out there so I'm going to give a different answer. So I'm going to say fantasy because I do love reading fantasy every now and again. Sometimes I'm really in the mood for just the imagination of the different worlds and the different magic systems and sometimes I do just want a novel with an amazing story and a really great overarching plot that will drive me through the novel that will excite me and surprise me but when I want these things I don't want my characters to suffer. I still want the characters in the novel to be really believable and fully fleshed out and complex. I don't want one great thing to mean sacrificing another great thing. And there are some books out there that do tick these boxes. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss for example is a novel that I absolutely love and I consider that to be fantasy but with literary fiction characteristics. I also hear that Robin Hobb is really great with her characters in her fantasy novels as well so I'll definitely try her at some point but generally more literary fiction fantasy hybrid novels are very welcome. So that's it those are all the questions in my tag, we made it. I'm now going to tag a few of my friends who I know enjoy reading literary fiction and I'm hoping will be nice to me and do this tag please. So the people I'm going to tag are Rick from another book blog, Renée from Renée Pierre, Robert from Barter Hort, Eric from Eric Carl Anderson, Mark from Mark Nash, Jason from Old Blue's chapter and verse, Alex from What Page Are You On, Claire from Claire Reads Books, and Beth from Beth Chats Books. So if you guys want to do this tag I will be eternally grateful and I'd really like to watch your videos so please let me know if you're going to do it. So that's going to be it for this video everyone, I really really hope you enjoyed my original tag. I think it went quite well, I definitely had a lot of fun filming it so thank you all so much for watching. Like I said if you want to do this tag then please do it and let me know, I'd love to see your videos. If you're not going to do a video and you want to answer the questions anyway then just let me know your answers down below, I can't wait to read them. Thank you so much for watching once again everyone, I honestly am so genuinely grateful, I hope you're all doing really well, I hope you're having really nice weeks and I will see you soon with another video. Bye everyone.