Yeah...no way she read six books in a day and no chance she's read all these books on any timescale. It's entirely possible that a person could read those very short books in a single day, but it's almost guaranteed that
Ruby didn't/wouldn't.
I think what actually happened was that she had a handful of short library books loaned out, realised she hadn't gotten any on-camera prop mileage out of them (which is the only real reason she borrows books) and staged a readathon around them before they were due back. She did some Googling prep-work/read-throughs of basic plot summaries and reviews to brief herself on them before even opening the book (which she's admitted to doing countless time before), skim-read bits for the camera and got a bit of time-lapse footage and that was it.
'Invisible Cities' by Italo Calvino (150 pages). She claims she filmed a very thorough, in-depth review, but her camera didn't record it. Sure, Jan. Instead, she waffles faux-intellectually about the vague themes of the book and tries to run out the clock by talking a lot but saying nothing. "Like, if it's imaginary...that means it's made up...but if it's invisible...ummm...it just means that, like, it's there, but you just can't see it..." is an actual sentence she says out loud.
She seems to spend most of her time just skimming for "quotable" passages to mindlessly copy into her reading journal and her "cwommonplyace bock". Nothing says reading for the joy of it and immersing yourself in a story quite like derailing every few minutes to pointlessly copy extracts into various different places.
The library mislabelled this as 'Translated Spanish Fiction', but since Ruby only pays attention to the covers of books, she takes this as fact and gets the nationality of the author wrong despite him having the most Italian name ever. His first name
literally means "from Italy". She wonders what the "original Spanish title was" despite the original
Italian title being the first thing you see if you Google the book (which I'm sure she did, since she doesn't appear to have read this fully for herself). Ruby even claims (quite unbelievably) to have read other books by Calvino before, so has even less excuse for screwing this up. She loves shouting about how much she loves research and self-learning until it's time to do any, at which point her brain goes on vacation.
'Keedie' by Elle McNichol (207 pages) is the one book here she's most likely to have actually read, given her weird bullying fetish and her tendency to only read middle-grade-and-below fiction about young girls standing up to school bullies. She's also delighted to learn that this is a prequel to 'A Kind of Spark', so not only does it fulfil her 'young girls getting bullied' requirement, but it technically has a young girl aging in reverse, which is Ruby's lifelong dream. But she has nothing really to say about the book beyond what's on the back cover and spends more time patting herself on the back for pretending to get bullied in school.
She proclaims that this is the first, greatest piece of autistic representation in middle grade fiction. I'm not sure how
Ruby would know that, considering that she isn't (openly) neurodivergent, hasn't been diagnosed as autistic and seemingly doesn't interact with any autistic people, so is in no position to gauge how well or badly it represents autism. She also reads practically zero books for herself, so has no means of knowing how well austism is represented elsewhere in fiction. But I'm sure a promo blurb for the book told her that was the case and she parrotted it.
'One' by Sarah Crossan (434 pages). The longest book here, but written in sparse, free-verse style with lots of blank space, so fairly easy to rush through. Hilariously, she notes that it's VARRY MAMARABLE, but apparently forgot everything she read since she barely has anything to say. But the cover told her that it was very sad, so she makes a laughable attempt to fake a teary sniffle, fails miserably and just says that she "HOIGHLY RACKOMMANDS" it - her predictable go-to line for reviewing books she blatantly hasn't read.
This library book is heavily soiled with dirty stains and water damage. Ruby keeps rubbing the book all over her face and her mouth. Remember when she kept trying to insist that she was a germaphobe? Hmm.
'Gooseberries' by Anton Chekhov (three story collection, 64 pages). She says she's really looking forward to reading 'The Kiss' from this collection. But then she reveals that she literally had no idea what it was about. Why she was looking forward to a short story she'd never heard of by an author she never read is a mystery, but she's disappointed to find that it's a military narrative.
This whole segment is just her skimming through looking for passages that mention nature, because she loves reading aloud lines that sounds profound out-of-context or contain nature descriptions in her cringingly fake head-shaking, brow-waggling Hermoine "acting" style. She has absolutely
nothing to say about any of the stories.
She claims to read 2 out of 3 of them and just marks the whole book completed. She claims she "LOVES CHACKOFF" but offers no explanation for why she bailed on finishing just one more very short story to wrap this book up. She also insists that she's read lots of Chekhov before, then literally cannot name a single piece of writing by him and has to slap a random book cover on-screen in editing to try to back up her claim.
'Heaven is for Real' by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent (163 pages). Ruby says she's been desperate to read this since she was 16 but couldn't track down a copy. Ruby was born rich and internet retail has existed for her entire life. I'm not sure why she feels the need to qualify all her book picks with stories like this, but liars gonna lie.
She claims at the beginning of this book that she's finally committing to reading the books she's always wanted to read - her "forever TBR". But since she has no genuine interest in reading, there's nothing on that list, so she apparently feels the need to lie to make sure that every book she grabbed at random simply because it was incredibly short has some invented autobiographical importance.
Unsurprisingly, she has nothing to say about this book, either. She literally just says "it's a little bit heavy-handed" in her weird, smug "acting" voice that she does whenever she's rattling off something someone else said. No other detail is offered, so no doubt she glanced at a review online and called it a day without reading the book.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (144 pages). Ruby throws a late-game curveball by ditching the book she planned to read - Saturday by Ian McEwan (288 pages) - and subs in Orbital instead. Neither of these books seem like something in Ruby's wheelhouse (Orbital presumably features zero young girl astronauts getting bullied in space schools), but only one of them is a book her mother had literally just finished reading.
Ruby can't pass up the chance at getting a substitute Blakeney to recite the plot and some opinions to her and, unsurprisingly, she just parrots some things her mum said, but (big shock) has nothing of substance of her own to say. She puts on her 'fwail widdle choyld' voice to go on a tangent about global warming and how the big bullies have ruined the planet for people like her, when she takes a blowtorch to the environment at any opportunity.
All her dishonesty tells are out in full force, especially when she's trying to protest that she loves reading, loves readathons, is a naturally fast reader and always engages fully with books she reads in readathons and retains all detail (while struggling to provide any real detail or substantial thoughts about any of the books she claims to have read literally on this day).
The lie-squint, the "JANUINELY...", the stitled "acting" voice that comes out when she's trying to pass someone else's thoughts off as her own, the umming her way through trying to remember Googled details about things she hasn't read - they're all heavily accounted for.
Even if you believe that she read these books fully, it's a damning indictment of her 'reading is a numbers game and I need the high score' approach to reading that she supposedly read six books and can't conjure up a single thought about most of the books on the very day she finished them. And her insistence that readathons are not about reading as many books as possible while she's literally cheating her way to a higher number just makes her seem all the more disingenuous.
Be more interested to see her *actual* thoughts about the books, or even an overall page count (YA books sure, middle grade/children's maybe not)
autistic people are just as capable as the rest of us
