gossip_guy
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Ruby might've finally found the thing that puts a stop to her critics: Releasing a video so long and undoubtedly full of such brain-melting drivel that nobody but Ruby will sit through this.
She's pulled a Machiavellian switcheroo on us, forcing us to walk a mile in her shoes; Ruby merely skims everything she ever claims to read, and now here we are, faced with a nearly feature-length display of stupid that even the bravest of people will be tempted to merely skip through.
Well, maybe not Machiavellian - like Sun Tzu, Ruby probably pretended to read Machiavelli once and was disappointed that her shrivelled grey matter couldn't find a way to apply any of it to her many scams and charity-swindling schemes.
This is apparently a video in which she reviews the 136 books she "read" in 2021. It's unfortunate that Ruby didn't go with the more accurate working title for the video:
Also for some reason she pretty much recreated the thumbnail from one of her last book recap videos because absolutely everything she does is a recycled, low-effort rehash:
Ruby kicks off the video by begging people to buy her Pumpkin Productivity stationery products. They're still in stock, y'all! Act fast! If you don't buy them now, well...they'll still be there to buy 11 months later!
Considering her other planners sold out in days with the same initial stock levels, the fact that most of her stock this year is still gathering dust in a warehouse isn't good news for ol' Rubes.
When showing off the "verrstahlll" (translation: versatile) notebook she sells, she provides yet another glimpse into the unquantifiable amounts of stupidity and insanity all vying for control of her feeble brain.
She shows off a page in one of her notebooks, which is falling apart despite very few pages being used. Such quality!
In it, she has written a schedule for her ideal Christmas. This is already weird enough, before factoring in that this is a schedule for an imaginary Christmas. This fictional Noel takes place in Heavitree, Exeter. Now, Ruby can't even spend a weekend at her uni house in Exeter, there's no fucking way she's gonna spend Christmas Eve there. And, of course, she didn't - she rushed back home as soon as uni ended on December 14th.
This magical, ideal Christmas Eve afternoon begins with a seminar. Because, for some reason, the most festive thing imaginable to Ruby is Exeter Uni imprisoning its students in mandatory study seminars on Christmas Eve, forcing them to listen to Ruby's incomprehensible filibusters about things she hasn't read or understood, leaving most of them unable to get home to see their families afterwards.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
She then notes that they'll walk into town to get food for Christmas dinner, but adds that they will already have food. So...they're just wasting money to hoard additional food that will go to waste? 'Tis truly the season of good will!
She will then walk around town with a Bird & Blend tea. If it is any other brand of tea, Christmas is fucking RUINED.
Blakeney writing her mandatory apology letter to Ruby and her parents after getting Tetley tea for Christmas Eve:
They will carry their drinks to High Street shops, advertising their Bird & Blend tea to everyone they pass. They have to be High Street shops, even though I'm pretty sure most of those are closed Christmas Eve. If they go to an independent retail location off the high street, Christmas is rendered a smouldering wasteland of festive disappointment.
They will soak everything in, including the icing(?).
After baking gingerbread and having a dance party, then it's time to decorate. Because December 24th is an appropriate time to be putting up Christmas decorations. Also sing carols.
Back home, they will make more Bird & Blend drinks. (As before: Not Bird & Blend = Ruined Xmas.)
They will go outside and assault the neighbours' ears with Christmas carols again for 30 minutes.
After hanging up stockings, Ruby will then write a letter to her favourite person (herself) to open next Christmas.
I don't know what's more strange and worrying: That Ruby actually spends time writing child-like plans like this for imaginary Christmases in her notebooks, or that the best Christmas she can dream up is basically a regular Christmas, only more dull and with sponsored ads.
After her desperate ad for her shitty products that nobody wants, Ruby appears, looking bleary-eyed, like she just woke up, even though it's daytime. Could it be that Ruby didn't wake up at the crack of dawn and actually had a lie-in?! Say it ain't so!
Also her freckles look faker than ever.
She rambles about how it feels like a long time since she filmed, possibly because the last time she filmed anything was a few minutes of footage a weeks ago and has since been laying low and reusing old footage.
Ruby didn't "read" as many books as last year, but she says that's okay, because she read some good books and that's the important thing!
Narrator: "She didn't."
She starts frantically grasping at the air as if she's going to snatch a coherent thought or anything meaningful to say about any of these books she hasn't read.
It's fruitless, of course, and so she warns us that she's probably not going to be saying too much about many individual books. For that, you can apparently go watch her older videos from earlier in the year, where she also gives vague recaps of books she only pretended to read.
And then we get a selection of recycled footage that she's used in many other videos:
That's three different videos with the same footage.
If this is supposed to be an intro montage, then why does she only use it sporadically once every few months in completely unrelated videos?
It's yet another example of Ruby being lazy as fuck and woefully incompetent, so she just grabs random, irrelevant footage from hard drives and sprinkles it in wherever, seasoning an already shitty video with extra pointless stupidity like fucking Salt Bae.
And onto the books:
Ruby keeps looking off to the side on her desk, and it becomes immediately obvious that she's reading pre-prepared notes/synopses from her laptop. And even then, this barely-coherent drivel is the best she could muster.
Ruby, this is your latest reminder that the body requires nutrients for the brain to function.
At this point in the video, Ruby starts cranking the speed of her footage to around 1.25x normal speed. It's unbearable.
She only has anything to say about the title essay (because that's likely the only one she glanced at), and raves about it with manic, wild-eyed, enthusiastic glee because she says it explored "how artists see the world through the eyes of children and how BASICALLY our MAIN GOAL IN LIFE is to GET BACK to that way of seeing things". Every syllable is punctuated by her grasping at the air with a claw-like grip, her head juddering around like a bobble-head strapped to the dashboard of a car driving off-road.
I have no idea if that's an accurate reading of the essay, but it's not surprising in the slightest that Ruby fucking LOVES an essay from a respected, famous philosopher that legitimises and provides any kind of justification for her desire to completely retreat into childhood and become 12 again, even though that doesn't seem to be the point of the essay. Ruby shows zero self-awareness about this, but she will undoubtedly whip out an "ACKSHUALLY...BOULDER-LAIR SAYS..." defence if anyone points out her intensely creepy Peter Pan/Michael Jackson obsession with being a child.
"The only difference between an artist and a child is that an artist is able to articulate that, whereas a child can't," says Ruby, who's never able to articulate anything coherently.
"I also read tyoo shortsturriesbyyaddgrallenpoe." Her sped-up video and slurred, rushed speech starts to turn her words into nonsensical slurry of colliding syllables. She apparently means to say she read "two short stories by Edgar Allen Poe", although it took at least three rewatches and at half-speed to decipher. YouTube's closed captioning found it equally difficult:
Like, why did Ruby make this video? Who did she think it was for? What's the value of a poorly-made, lie-filled video where she just parrots blurbs and study guide insights she read online for books she didn't read? Why not just point people to your Goodreads where they can get the same lies in a fraction of the time?
Generally, when people make a long video like this, it's because the content creator has a lot to say about a specific topic, like a video essay on a book or film. And it's usually done by someone entertaining who you actually want to watch for nearly 80 minutes straight, like Jenny Nicholson, RedLetterMedia or Lindsay Ellis - intelligent people with something insightful and enjoyable to say, or someone like Brutalmoose, who is one of the most talented and creative content creator/editors on YouTube.
This video from Ruby is the equivalent of someone filming themselves reading the phone book, getting most of the names wrong, and then telling you that you're wrong for mishearing her because she knows everyone in the phone book personally and they told her exactly how their name is pronounced, thankyouverymuch!
She brings nothing to the table. No intelligence. No talent. Just an endless rattled-off list of lies without any additional insight. And even removed from Ruby's lies, for most of these books she doesn't say enough for people to be able to think "Oh, that sounds interesting - this lying, puddle-brained fuckwit clearly didn't read it, but maybe I will!" It's just the most worthless video I think she's ever made, and I'm nowhere near done.
Blakeney, on the other hand, is her best friend and all proceeds from her book go to charity, so it's for a good cause, but Ruby had nothing to say about it and couldn't recommend a purchase.
She still clearly didn't read it fully though, and has to read her laptop screen to know what the rest of the book is about.
WHY IS THIS SO LONG BUT CONTAINS SO LITTLE?!
If this were any other Ruby video, it'd be over now. It still wouldn't be good, but at least it'd be short. Y'know, like dying in an explosion as opposed to being run over by a steamroller.
To be continued if I ever decide to torture myself for another 60 fucking minutes.
Godspeed to you brave souls who sat through this never-ending nightmare in full, I hope you had your adblock on so Ruby didn't get rewarded for this!
She's pulled a Machiavellian switcheroo on us, forcing us to walk a mile in her shoes; Ruby merely skims everything she ever claims to read, and now here we are, faced with a nearly feature-length display of stupid that even the bravest of people will be tempted to merely skip through.
Well, maybe not Machiavellian - like Sun Tzu, Ruby probably pretended to read Machiavelli once and was disappointed that her shrivelled grey matter couldn't find a way to apply any of it to her many scams and charity-swindling schemes.
This is apparently a video in which she reviews the 136 books she "read" in 2021. It's unfortunate that Ruby didn't go with the more accurate working title for the video:
Also for some reason she pretty much recreated the thumbnail from one of her last book recap videos because absolutely everything she does is a recycled, low-effort rehash:
Ruby kicks off the video by begging people to buy her Pumpkin Productivity stationery products. They're still in stock, y'all! Act fast! If you don't buy them now, well...they'll still be there to buy 11 months later!
Considering her other planners sold out in days with the same initial stock levels, the fact that most of her stock this year is still gathering dust in a warehouse isn't good news for ol' Rubes.
When showing off the "verrstahlll" (translation: versatile) notebook she sells, she provides yet another glimpse into the unquantifiable amounts of stupidity and insanity all vying for control of her feeble brain.
She shows off a page in one of her notebooks, which is falling apart despite very few pages being used. Such quality!
In it, she has written a schedule for her ideal Christmas. This is already weird enough, before factoring in that this is a schedule for an imaginary Christmas. This fictional Noel takes place in Heavitree, Exeter. Now, Ruby can't even spend a weekend at her uni house in Exeter, there's no fucking way she's gonna spend Christmas Eve there. And, of course, she didn't - she rushed back home as soon as uni ended on December 14th.
This magical, ideal Christmas Eve afternoon begins with a seminar. Because, for some reason, the most festive thing imaginable to Ruby is Exeter Uni imprisoning its students in mandatory study seminars on Christmas Eve, forcing them to listen to Ruby's incomprehensible filibusters about things she hasn't read or understood, leaving most of them unable to get home to see their families afterwards.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
She then notes that they'll walk into town to get food for Christmas dinner, but adds that they will already have food. So...they're just wasting money to hoard additional food that will go to waste? 'Tis truly the season of good will!
Her Christmas dinner consists of...some kind of pie, peas (of course), along with the featured ingredient: "Possibly loose sprouts".
Although below her festive "feast" menu, she notes that it wasn't Christmas dinner at all, but lunch. Dinner itself will consist of leftovers from lunch. So...like some pastry crumbs, a couple of peas and a possibly loose sprout.
Breakfast is porridge, because of course it is.
Although below her festive "feast" menu, she notes that it wasn't Christmas dinner at all, but lunch. Dinner itself will consist of leftovers from lunch. So...like some pastry crumbs, a couple of peas and a possibly loose sprout.
Breakfast is porridge, because of course it is.
She will then walk around town with a Bird & Blend tea. If it is any other brand of tea, Christmas is fucking RUINED.
Blakeney writing her mandatory apology letter to Ruby and her parents after getting Tetley tea for Christmas Eve:
They will carry their drinks to High Street shops, advertising their Bird & Blend tea to everyone they pass. They have to be High Street shops, even though I'm pretty sure most of those are closed Christmas Eve. If they go to an independent retail location off the high street, Christmas is rendered a smouldering wasteland of festive disappointment.
They will soak everything in, including the icing(?).
After baking gingerbread and having a dance party, then it's time to decorate. Because December 24th is an appropriate time to be putting up Christmas decorations. Also sing carols.
Back home, they will make more Bird & Blend drinks. (As before: Not Bird & Blend = Ruined Xmas.)
They will go outside and assault the neighbours' ears with Christmas carols again for 30 minutes.
After hanging up stockings, Ruby will then write a letter to her favourite person (herself) to open next Christmas.
I don't know what's more strange and worrying: That Ruby actually spends time writing child-like plans like this for imaginary Christmases in her notebooks, or that the best Christmas she can dream up is basically a regular Christmas, only more dull and with sponsored ads.
After her desperate ad for her shitty products that nobody wants, Ruby appears, looking bleary-eyed, like she just woke up, even though it's daytime. Could it be that Ruby didn't wake up at the crack of dawn and actually had a lie-in?! Say it ain't so!
Also her freckles look faker than ever.
She rambles about how it feels like a long time since she filmed, possibly because the last time she filmed anything was a few minutes of footage a weeks ago and has since been laying low and reusing old footage.
Ruby didn't "read" as many books as last year, but she says that's okay, because she read some good books and that's the important thing!
Narrator: "She didn't."
She starts frantically grasping at the air as if she's going to snatch a coherent thought or anything meaningful to say about any of these books she hasn't read.
It's fruitless, of course, and so she warns us that she's probably not going to be saying too much about many individual books. For that, you can apparently go watch her older videos from earlier in the year, where she also gives vague recaps of books she only pretended to read.
And then we get a selection of recycled footage that she's used in many other videos:
That's three different videos with the same footage.
If this is supposed to be an intro montage, then why does she only use it sporadically once every few months in completely unrelated videos?
It's yet another example of Ruby being lazy as fuck and woefully incompetent, so she just grabs random, irrelevant footage from hard drives and sprinkles it in wherever, seasoning an already shitty video with extra pointless stupidity like fucking Salt Bae.
And onto the books:
- A Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - Ruby reads a very basic cover blurb. "It's one of the myost famous... GARL'S... LITERATURE...BOOKS!"
- Elizabeth Gaskell by Mary Barton - Ruby reads a very basic cover blurb and a Sparknotes-level observation: "In this book she's really exposing just the, like, extAnt of poverty that existed in England, and she puts that NAXT to middle-class people and, like, the mill owners RIGHT BACK-TO-BACK to shyow just how distinct THAT distinction is." Reminder: This is a student who apparently gets consistent first-class essay grades. Weep for the reputation of Exeter University, for it is now in tatters.
Ruby keeps looking off to the side on her desk, and it becomes immediately obvious that she's reading pre-prepared notes/synopses from her laptop. And even then, this barely-coherent drivel is the best she could muster.
Ruby, this is your latest reminder that the body requires nutrients for the brain to function.
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick - Ruby points out that this is an illustrated book meant to resemble a silent film. That's it. She also claims she watched the film. I don't buy it.
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - Ruby claims this was a reread of the book. She claims to have read it multiple times, but the most she has to say is, "I love the Brontes SYO MOCH. They were SYO ahead of their time, like, when you're reading them, you could easily be reading something that was POBlished five years ago." That's probably because she just read the Wikipedia plot summary which was written five years ago.
- The Conference of the Birds: Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs - All she has to say about this is that it's "the fourth book in the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children series". (It's not. It's the fifth. Says so right on the cover, Ruby.) She also says it's "like Harry Potter because you've got, like, the real wahrld and then this, like, fantasy wahrld".
At this point in the video, Ruby starts cranking the speed of her footage to around 1.25x normal speed. It's unbearable.
- "The Painter of Modern Life and Other ASS-ays by Charles Boulder-laire" - "This might be my favourite book of ASS-ays I've ever read." Since she's never read a complete book of essays and certainly didn't break the trend with this one, I'm not sure what her metric is for judging her favourites. Nicest cover, maybe?
She only has anything to say about the title essay (because that's likely the only one she glanced at), and raves about it with manic, wild-eyed, enthusiastic glee because she says it explored "how artists see the world through the eyes of children and how BASICALLY our MAIN GOAL IN LIFE is to GET BACK to that way of seeing things". Every syllable is punctuated by her grasping at the air with a claw-like grip, her head juddering around like a bobble-head strapped to the dashboard of a car driving off-road.
I have no idea if that's an accurate reading of the essay, but it's not surprising in the slightest that Ruby fucking LOVES an essay from a respected, famous philosopher that legitimises and provides any kind of justification for her desire to completely retreat into childhood and become 12 again, even though that doesn't seem to be the point of the essay. Ruby shows zero self-awareness about this, but she will undoubtedly whip out an "ACKSHUALLY...BOULDER-LAIR SAYS..." defence if anyone points out her intensely creepy Peter Pan/Michael Jackson obsession with being a child.
"The only difference between an artist and a child is that an artist is able to articulate that, whereas a child can't," says Ruby, who's never able to articulate anything coherently.
- Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - It was somehow only upon reading this poem that Ruby learned that the domestic lives of women have value, too. She offers no further insight other than "It's like the Iliad or The Odyssey".
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë - Ruby claims she read this again for the first time since she was 12, but I think she just got confused and meant that she read it for the first time ever and thinks she's 12. And by "read it", I mean "looked up a synopsis online". She says she fell in love with it all over again, and proves this by...um...reading a synopsis she read online (note that her eyeline keeps drifting to the off-screen laptop with the synopsis cued up, and she's unable to get out a complete sentence without several choppy edits). "I love the way it uses a diary narrative a--" Ruby cuts mid-sentence and skips to the next book.
- The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick - Ruby rants about how shameful it was that immediately following the holocaust, people didn't have entire days to commemorate and remember one of the most indescribably horrifying events in history moments after it happened. But how were people in the 1940s supposed to bilk people out of charity money if there were no holocaust remembrance charities? Shocking stuff, indeed!
Ruby credits "a television show" with sparking a resurgence of interest in holocaust remembrance, but doesn't name the show and throws a cover image for the series (Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep and all-around terrible person James Woods) on-screen for a mere fraction of a second. Unsurprisingly, she has essentially nothing to say about the book itself.
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt - Ruby rattles off a cover blurb/synopsis as her dog barks loudly in the background. Again, she has to read crib notes from her laptop, since she didn't read the book.
"I also read tyoo shortsturriesbyyaddgrallenpoe." Her sped-up video and slurred, rushed speech starts to turn her words into nonsensical slurry of colliding syllables. She apparently means to say she read "two short stories by Edgar Allen Poe", although it took at least three rewatches and at half-speed to decipher. YouTube's closed captioning found it equally difficult:
- Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe - Ruby evidently saw the memes surrounding this story going around online last year, since the only thing she mentions is that it's "GENUINELY syo wahrth reading NOW" because of its parallels to the Covid era. Reminder: When Ruby says "GENUINELY", it means she's lying about something. She didn't read this. She couldn't even recall the name of it and struggles to read the title even off her laptop screen.
- Hop-Frog; Or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs by Edgar Allen Poe - "I also read Hop Frog." That's all she has to say. She gets the title wrong when she flashes it on-screen for an instant.
- The Cry of the Children by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Ruby conspicuously notes that she "put down" this one on her list rather than read it, making it seem like she compiled a list of books in general rather than was reading a list of books she's actually read and remembered. Her reciting of a general, vague outline of the theme of the story provides no indication that she read this.
Like, why did Ruby make this video? Who did she think it was for? What's the value of a poorly-made, lie-filled video where she just parrots blurbs and study guide insights she read online for books she didn't read? Why not just point people to your Goodreads where they can get the same lies in a fraction of the time?
Generally, when people make a long video like this, it's because the content creator has a lot to say about a specific topic, like a video essay on a book or film. And it's usually done by someone entertaining who you actually want to watch for nearly 80 minutes straight, like Jenny Nicholson, RedLetterMedia or Lindsay Ellis - intelligent people with something insightful and enjoyable to say, or someone like Brutalmoose, who is one of the most talented and creative content creator/editors on YouTube.
This video from Ruby is the equivalent of someone filming themselves reading the phone book, getting most of the names wrong, and then telling you that you're wrong for mishearing her because she knows everyone in the phone book personally and they told her exactly how their name is pronounced, thankyouverymuch!
She brings nothing to the table. No intelligence. No talent. Just an endless rattled-off list of lies without any additional insight. And even removed from Ruby's lies, for most of these books she doesn't say enough for people to be able to think "Oh, that sounds interesting - this lying, puddle-brained fuckwit clearly didn't read it, but maybe I will!" It's just the most worthless video I think she's ever made, and I'm nowhere near done.
- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong - I have no clue what the fuck she was trying to say about this one. This one seems especially sped-up. "Every single line makes you think about things in a new way." Ruby was apparently re-evaluating her life with every single sentence of this book, yet she can't say anything more than the back cover blurb. She provides no examples and expands on nothing.
- Bat Wings and Petticoats by Blakeney Clark - Now, this is one I'd believe she actually read. It's a children's book. It has pictures. It's short. That's Ruby's three literary interests all in one. It's also created by her roommate/best friend/stalkee. And Ruby still can't offer anything more than the back cover plot summary.
Blakeney, on the other hand, is her best friend and all proceeds from her book go to charity, so it's for a good cause, but Ruby had nothing to say about it and couldn't recommend a purchase.
- Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen - Ruby rants that she fucking hates Jane Austen with a passion that burns so bright you'd think ol' Janey A. came between Ruby and some free gifted candles or something. Ruby says she "likes the idea of liking Jane Austen", which sounds like the kind of shit someone whose entire personality is a superficial, fabricated patchwork of borrowed traits and lies would say.
But even though she hates Jane Austen, she loves Sense & Sensibility. What changed? Well, she read the other books years ago in like 2016, back when she at least occasionally attempted to try to read things before getting bored, misunderstanding it, giving up and deciding she hates it. She still does that occasionally (see: The Art of War) but mostly nowadays she doesn't even bother skimming to see if there's any scene of rich, privileged white girls getting bullied that she can claim happened to her.
So when it came time to pretend to read S&S, everyone else who'd reviewed it on Goodreads loved it, and that's where Ruby got her opinion from.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole - Ruby rambles about how Florence Nightingale was a lazy, overrated shit who probably doesn't deserve the credit people give her. Then she repeats her dumb-as-fuck comments from one of her previous videos: She was disappointed with this memoir, because it didn't have a traditional narrative storyline... Ruby, it's a fucking memoir, not the latest James Patterson book.
- Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty - Ruby didn't like this one because the story wasn't very compelling. Why? Who the fuck knows, Ruby doesn't elaborate. It's a YA book though, so Ruby not liking it probably means that there weren't enough scenes of bullying for her to borrow fake life stories from, or that there were three-dimensional characters and realistic teenage relationships in them, which she doesn't like.
"It's a very "pink spinner" book, which is what my librarian used to call it," she says, smugly. She offers no further details. I Googled "pink spinner" and "pink spinner book" - they're phrases which do not appear to exist or have any common meaning.
This is like me saying "Citizen Kane? It's a real flim-flam nozzlebuckle movie, like my grandpa used to say. Well, anyway...bye!"
Ruby, if you're going to offer no real critical opinion on something aside from some invented slang term, you have to let people know what the fuck that term means when there's no way to intuit the meaning from the context of its usage. Telling us that your librarian used to say it shockingly doesn't shed any light on what the fuck it means.
Oh, god, we're only ten minutes in...
- Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery - Big shocker: Ruby loves the third book in the Anne of Green Gables series because Anne is at university and so is Ruby, and Anne retains her childlike spirit even at uni!
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - "Don't need to give a synopsis for that; we read this for my Victorian module." Did we, Ruby? I can't believe we all forgot that we spent the past year at Exeter Uni! Your entire audience wasn't enrolled on your Victorian module, Ruby, you fucking donut. Ruby loves this book because of "Carroll's use of nonsense and his, like, use of illustration. He's syo attentive to the process of reading which is what I love about reading Lewis Carroll now."
- The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal by Deborah Goreham - Ruby says she did A LOT of research on Victorian girlhood for her module but this was the only book she read front to back. Admitting you only skim all that critical reading and secondary research you keep bragging about doing is not quite the flex you intended, Ruby. She says, "If you want an overview of Victorian girlhood, then this is the book to read." But then she does that one-eyed squint thing that she always does when she's lying:
- The Nursery "Alice" by Lewis Carroll - Ruby mentions twice that she wrote an essay on this. She says this book is "qwooul" because it tries to teach morality to newborn babies.
- The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne - She mentions that this book (which she kept seeing in Waterstones, of course) should have a content warning because of the VARRY uncomfortable racist, colonialist, imperialist content of the story (it was published in 1857). Which is usually the kind of content that Ruby rushes towards, but whatever.
Ruby's not wrong about old/classic literature that contains dated, culturally insensitive/outright racist content benefiting from a content warning, but this is the first time Ruby has ever mentioned this for all the Victorian-era fiction she claims to read and all the romanticising of colonialist culture she does. I do not believe that she gives a crap about outdated and offensive content unless it's aimed at her, but she likely looked around online for existing reviews and saw this was a common complaint that she borrowed. Again, tellingly, her eyes keep drifting off to her laptop screen for her crib sheet. No chance she read this.
Also this book was the inspiration for The Lord of the Flies, which I feel like a self-proclaimed English Lit scholar/bookworm would be aware of and have something to say about.
- Introducing Children's Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism by Deborah Cogan Thacker and Jean Webb - Ruby reads the back cover blurb, says a "LACK-CHUR-RUR RACK-UMMENDED IT" to her. She struggles to remember what even the basic content of the book is and has to read off the screen again. Definitely didn't read it.
- Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920 by Hilary Marland - Ruby gushes about this one because it explores the idea that age does not define the boundaries of childhood. Even if you're 21, you can still be a child! You might see a pattern emerging. Ruby just wants to be a child again and loves finding literature that encourages, enables and normalises her desire to live and act like she's 12.
She still clearly didn't read it fully though, and has to read her laptop screen to know what the rest of the book is about.
- Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll - "Alice's Adventures Under Ground is a FACSIMILE of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Ruby has to stop to look up the pronunciation of "facsimile" (likely after all the criticism she's gotten on Tattle for mispronouncing it endlessly before). Unfortunately she didn't look up the actual meaning of the word while she was at it.
Alice's Adventures Under Ground is not a facsimile of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
A facsimile is an exact copy or recreation of something (for example, a manuscript). But Alice's Adventures Under Ground came before Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - it was the original, handwritten/illustrated manuscript version of it. The latter revised and expanded on that original manuscript; the two are distinctly different works, and Ruby even remarks that it's "very different from the original".
You could say that modern published versions of Alice's Adventures Under Ground are a facsimile of the original handwritten manuscript, but it's not a facsimile of AAiW. Stop using words you don't know the meaning (or pronunciation) of to sound smart, Ruby. It only has the opposite effect.
Christ, it's not even fifteen minutes into the runtime yet.
WHY IS THIS SO LONG BUT CONTAINS SO LITTLE?!
If this were any other Ruby video, it'd be over now. It still wouldn't be good, but at least it'd be short. Y'know, like dying in an explosion as opposed to being run over by a steamroller.
- Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Ruby rambles about casual magic nature fetishism. Is it October yet? In Ruby's mind, always. And not just because most of her planners are defective.
- Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films by Aaron Kerner - This is a book about "cinematic adaptations of the holocaust". Add "adaptation" to the list of words Ruby doesn't understand. Ruby reads the cover blurb and nothing more.
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens - It's a 900 page book. Zero chance Ruby read this. Ruby continues suspiciously reading pre-prepared quotes off her laptop.
- Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - Ruby positively butchers the author's name. Ruby's thoughts on "HAROOKU MOOROOKARMI"'s book: "IT'S VERY LYRICAL AND I LIKE LYRICAL BOOKS AND CHEESE LYRICAL BOOKS BECAUSE LYRICAL BOOKS ARE LYRICAL AND WHEN I SAY A BOOK IS LYRICAL I MEAN WOW THAT BOOK IS LYRICAL". She loves the book because it interweaves time and different people. Y'know, like every fucking book ever. She did not read this.
- Girlhood by Marianne Farningham - Learn how to be a girl, the Victorian way! Ruby says this is an instruction manual for how to be a Victorian girl and offers no further details.
- Midnight Library by Matt Haig - Ruby says she adores the "CON-SAPT" of this book about branching, parallel life paths and the choices we make, which is weird since in real life Ruby refuses to progress down any path at all that doesn't involve trying to forever be the spoilt child screaming for more presents at her 10th birthday party. "VARRY GUD. VARRY FAST-PACED."
- Alice Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll - Ruby gets the name wrong (she calls it "Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass") and has nothing further to say. Not even kidding. She literally just reads the title, gets it wrong and then she's on to the next book.
- The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel - Oh, look, another one about the holocaust.
Ruby, they won't give you extra holocaust memorial charity money for pretending to be interested, you know.
- People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd - This book is apparently about a social media influencer who presents a fabricated image of perfection but is actually a massive liar who stages everything they show online in order to get more attention and clicks. Without a glimmer of self-awareness, Ruby groans that this character is the worst and a terrible person.
What's even better is that someone recommended this as her book club pick of the month, and I want to believe that it was an intentional troll that she never picked up on.
- Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid - Ruby recites the cover blurb and rattles off a couple of very soundbitey, robotic and clearly pre-prepared sentences about the book tackling systemic racism, but this is another case where it seems so rehearsed that, combined with every other aspect of her life and personality, I don't believe for a second that Ruby read this book or cares about racism in the slightest because it doesn't affect her.
- King Solomon's Mines by H Rider Haggard - And on that note, Ruby's entire summary of this is "Like Coral Island, I keep seeing it in the Children's SACK-SHUN at WATERSTONES! But it's VARRY PROBLEMATIC." And that's all.
- Mapping the Holy Land: The Foundation of a Scientific Cartography of Palestine. By Haim Goren, Jutta Faehndrich, and Bruno Schelhaas - Ruby says she read this because there was a map in King Solomon's Mines.
"It's quite interesting," she says. "I wouldn't recommend it."
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - "Oscar Wilde is the best writer of all time," Ruby declares. On the topic of Dorian Gray, she says, "It's the idea that when we do bad things, it imprints itself on our physical bodies. If I stole something, you'd be able to see that on my face..."
Hold on, Ruby, let me zoom in, I think I might be able to see something...
I see what you mean, Rubes! It's definitely a fascinating anomaly!
Okay, I've sufficiently amused myself enough for one day and this shitshow of a video isn't getting any better. I'm tapping out.To be continued if I ever decide to torture myself for another 60 fucking minutes.
Godspeed to you brave souls who sat through this never-ending nightmare in full, I hope you had your adblock on so Ruby didn't get rewarded for this!
slowing brain function
and Vegan
)"
OH NO, TECHNICAL ISSUES!
