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Category: Book Recommendations
Tags: BooksInternationalReadingRecommendationsStudents
Entities: AshitiBarbara KingsolverBrit BennettGabriella GarciaJennyKLiveLynnOf Woman and SaltParagonSmall WondersThe Vanishing Half
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hello everybody thank you for tuning in to klive today we're talking about books
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hello again my name is ashiti and if you're joining us for the first time klive is an interactive series where we guide you through your journey to canada as an international student we talk about international student life admissions and much more we also of course will be
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talking about the kl test so if you're interested in studying in canada please subscribe to our channel and click on the bell icon to be notified as soon as we have a new episode today's episode is on a lighter note we thought we'd recommend some books since summer is approaching i have the
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pleasure of welcoming two of my co-workers here today jenny and lynn jenny and lynn are both part of our book club here at paragon and have some great recommendations for you today let's go say hello to them
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[Music] hi hi jenny hi lynn how are you doing good good how are you i'm doing well lynn how are you doing i'm good how are you
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i'm doing great uh thank you for asking so um i was just talking to our viewers and i was telling them how we're gonna be talking about books today um so i'm gonna start jenny with you um kind of like go into the questions and i wanna i'm very curious to see
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what book you have for us today so what's your pick for today well my pick for today um is actually a novel called uh the vanishing half i don't know if you can see it there we go i'm vanishing half by brit bennett
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um i really um enjoyed this book when i read it last uh at the end of last year when it first kind of became a big book of the year and i really thought that it would be a good book to read in the summer um although i read it in the winter i
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think it's a still great book to read in summer so yeah that's what i'm suggesting for today i haven't read the book but i really like the cover at the moment it looks very interesting oh my god you have to show us your account i'm so sorry i knew he was gonna do this
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you have to show us yeah he just likes to come when i'm doing meetings um so excuse yourself thank you but he's just gonna join us here and there so please excuse him um but yeah uh so this book is actually
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about an identical twin sister um in a very remote small town um in u.s and it's a mainly a black community and they are black women but they are very light-skinned um their family is very like like known for
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light-skinned um black person and um they kind of you know uh try to figure out their life as they um grew up and uh they decided to move away to a bigger city um to move away from the town and uh
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they kind of start living in the light in the city and then one of the sisters um called stella she decides to leave her sister behind and just start her own life by herself but as a white person
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so she basically kind of creates a new persona that she's a white woman and lives her life as a white woman and then the story kind of moves ahead to the time where they are both moms each of the sisters have a daughter
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and then their life kind of as a mom and then we also get introduced to daughters um as well so there are story lines in the book so um kind of story unfolds from there um big event is that the um sorry the the one sister just kind of
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decides to you know forget the past and leave you know leave everything behind and start her new life as a different person persona and that's um where kind of everything goes interesting so yeah uh that's very interesting i'm really
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curious i actually want to read that myself i'm curious to know if you had like a specific chapter or like a part of the book that was really intriguing to you yeah um so what i really loved about this book particularly was the character
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development and like i said there will there are four main characters so the twin sisters and then their daughters and in the book you get introduced their story as the main character in that chapter or in that storyline
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and you kind of like see how their life changes and how their decision making um is with different situations that they have over time and one of my favorite character is actually
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one of the daughters jude um and i think because her story is so interesting itself but also she we we get to inter we get to see her from when she was a child to when she becomes a university student
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like a woman an adult um so in this book throughout the book you can kind of see how she grows up as becoming an adult and kind of you know having her mom and having her aunt and that connection as a family
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and so i thought that that was the most um kind of interesting part of the story um her story is that was my favorite part thank you for sharing uh lynn i know you have like another book for us but i'm curious if you've read this book also yes i have actually read the book as
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well and thoroughly enjoyed it um it's not the book that i'm gonna recommend but um it is definitely a very interesting novel discusses quite a lot of contemporary and like current topics as well even though it is
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a fiction it does discuss a fair amount of topics that are mainstream right now yeah that's a good point um so johnny why do you think this would be a great
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read for the people who are watching us today um so i you know when i was asked to join the um the live i really thought about what the book would be the best like to pick and obviously and um the reason why i
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thought of this book would be a good pick is because of um you know when you're reading a book in a second language um you you sometimes have to think while you're reading the book and i was an international student myself in the university and i always had
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struggles finding a novel or a book that i was able to like invest myself into because i was overthinking it too much i was trying to understand every single word i was trying to understand what the sentence structure is actually you know trying to say and that
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really made it difficult for me to fall in love with an english written book so when i read this book i realized that this book kind of is written in a very simple way if if that makes sense so like the author writes the sentences in a simple structure she
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chooses simple words um so the actual reading experience is not too difficult to understand um and so you get to actually experience the story you get to actually understand what's going on and understand um what the author's trying
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to uh tell you trying to like take you into a journey um without having to struggle on like oh what is this word what does this word mean what what is this um sentence trying to say when you're reading for pleasure you
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don't want anything that's going to make you feel like you're not um you know understanding it correctly and you don't want to struggle while you're reading a book if you want to enjoy the book and that's why i thought this book was really good because you can understand the book easily but the story
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itself is complex enough that you have to think you have to really connect the dots you have to puzzle things together to understand what's going to happen next and it really makes you think a lot while you're reading it like like lin said there's a lot of interesting subjects um interesting
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uh points that you can discuss with your friends even um with the book but the way she wrote is so easy to understand that it didn't make me feel like i'm reading a book in english i was reading it as thinking like it was like my language almost because it was
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so easy to read um and another thing is the her style of writing is so vivid so that um you can imagine it so easily and her like when she describes the scene
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you almost feel like you're watching a movie while you're reading the book um so you're you're able to picture a situation you're able to picture the background of it um or what the scene is about like what's happening really easily and that really kept me interested in
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the book as well because you're able to in that use your imagination to understand the book story wow um i think i really like what the way you kind of explained it because this was what was going through my head because when you were talking about the
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book itself the synopsis uh i was like i hope this book is like you know the topic is so complex i hope this book itself the literature is easy to grasp but that's exactly what you said so i'm glad um so for those of you who are watching um even if you
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think that you're not that fluent in english i'm pretty sure this book will be a great read um i'm gonna switch to lynn uh lynn what book do you have for us today um i actually have a non-fiction to recommend
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um it's called small wonders essays written by barbara kingsolver it is a collection of essays i use air quotes because they're more like short stories rather than what
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you would imagine an academic essay would look like um so there's a series of 23 essays uh it was published in 2002 i believe and right after sort of as a reaction to the 9 11 event but
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instead of focusing on the tragedy and the grief um she sort of take a different approach and kind of use that sort of experience to question the american way of life um why is
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violence so predominant why is what is the necessity of war pretty much actually question certain things and decisions that we make as humans individuals but also as like countries so she actually explores quite like a
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big topic and another big subject in all of her essays is actually environmentalism so um pretty much questioning and like asking people to sort of be
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conscious about the environment and questioning how our consumption sort of affects the earth um as a whole so yeah i'm currently working through it so what's your favorite essay i believe
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it's a little close to last or the last chapter essay um it's called god's wife's measuring spoons i don't want to spoil the short story because they are actually really really short and if i like say it then the whole story will be spoiled
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but the sort of main message is sort of telling people to pick and choose who you wish to surround yourself with right um we often especially with like
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media and publicity we we often get caught up in worrying about like oh what that person is going to think of me if i do this or what that other person's going to think of me and so that that sort of story um she went on to sort of focusing on
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why are we so fixated on worrying about other people's perception of us there's a paragraph in there um that is quite interesting talks about how like others can sort of see your front and your back so like you're
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the outside of you but you as yourself you live inside so you've got to make peace with yourself that's you can't please everybody and um she also emphasized sort of this idea of you got to live with hope
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like be hopeful you look through the lens of hope and you surround yourself with people who support you and try and be a better person by living following the values that you believe in and that's sort of that's sort of the general theme of most
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of her essays is circling around the idea of hope in reaction to a tragedy rather than focusing on grief which is why i find like her essay is quite an interesting take to an event that is
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so tragic right it was like a tragic event but she sort of looked at it from a different lens look at it as a way to sort of move forward from there you said that this book was
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non-fiction i'm trying to understand what like is it just the 911 part of it that's non-fiction or is she like like is she a survivor is is there some connection in that way it is a non-fiction because all of the stories in the 23 essays are all either
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about her own life her real life her family her children their essays where she'll talk about like her vegetable garden where she like grew vegetables which is um like which is what she was referring to was like god's measuring spoon it's like her gourds
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that she grew in like her garden so that she can become self-sufficient and not rely on like giant grocery stores or international shipments of food so that part is where all the non-fiction is and a lot of times she will discuss
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um historical figures famous authors walt whitman's work or um martin luther king or like you know actual real real-life people and if it's not her own story she would talk about things that she read on the newspaper
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or in the media and then she'll sort of relay that into her story and sort of elaborate on how what she thinks of the story itself understood thank you for clarifying that um so would you say that this is almost
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like a motivational book i would say so yes um it's it's definitely a positive spin on a lot of things she definitely has like a very hopeful tone in all of her essays she would question
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like there is the aspect of being critical in terms of analyzing some of the stories like she'll talk about war and she'll be critical about it and she'll talk about like why why is violence sort of always the first choice as a retaliation right it hurts
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to see tragic events happen but almost immediately we react with the same violence back so that's that part she would like be critical about but she'd usually find a way to transition
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into sort of either suggesting an alternative to solve an issue or sort of talk to us like go through her thought process pretty much help us go through her thought process of how to look at
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a certain event from a different angle either as a mother a woman or like through her children right she teaches her children the same way of like being conscious about the environment and then how like her children keeps chickens as pets and then start like
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cooking eggs from the same chicken that she grew so it's that sort of um spin on things that we kind of sometimes forget that there are different ways to look at it it's not always just like oh if we don't fight then we'll get
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bullied type thing you know it's it's not always like there are only two options she sort of takes us away from it and be like okay let's look at it from maybe a slightly different point of view and see a more peaceful resolution to some of the things that we see or
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some of the problems that the world have right now that's interesting something that you said kind of like piqued my interest it used to be that so i am also an international student and migrant like uh jenny um it
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used to be that back home we'd have all we all had our own garden like whether you were like living in the city whether you were living the suburbs whether you were living in the village you always had like i remember my grandmom she had like banana trees she had like coconut trees like within a
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city like she'd get her mail delivered and stuff and there was like a supermarket right next door but she had a huge tree um it's almost unbelievable to me now when i think of it like where am i gonna have any kind of plantation where i'm living at the moment and then i'll actually need a lot of
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area to grow plants at the moment but for her she was she had so much fruit and vegetables growing around her that she was pretty much self-sufficient on her own something that all of my i think all of my relatives used to practice before that's interesting
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yeah i think there's a phrase in here that says um think globally but act locally so it's sort of like you think about the environment you think about the earth as a whole and to help it you kind of
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create your own garden you support local businesses you support local farmers so that you reduce the amount of shipments of we don't need bananas all the way across the ocean right we don't need to have like all
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these huge ships to just travel half the a way to get to us when we could just plant it in our backyard or start a farm full of bananas right so that's i think that really stuck with me as well it's like she has quite a number of
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quotes that would really stick to your mind and like make you think is that one of her quotes think globally act i mean i've heard that so many times i i'm really i can't remember exactly if it was like in a review or if it was like but it was somewhat
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um related to this book in a way okay no that's that's fine i was just curious jenny have you read that book no um actually i'm trying to get into non-fiction myself um it is definitely a you know an area that
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that i haven't feel like felt that comfortable enough to dive into yeah yeah me too yeah but it sounds like it's a very um you know interesting read um just based on like how lynn explained so i would definitely
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pick it up um and read it i'm i'm trying to branch out of my comfort zone which is novels so yeah that's a great pick thank you so much for the recommendation uh yeah thanks both of you um i'm just
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curious to know lynn why do you think that this would be a great read for our audience i know that non-fictions are a tough sell in general um but the essays are like i said more like short stories you you're not gonna see
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like numbers or statistics or anything very dry and boring they're actually like literally short stories about her life and then she goes on to like talk about her thought process so they're not at
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all like dry or boring so just want to put it out there if anyone is like feeling a bit hesitant about trying nonfiction um and they are very short they're usually only like 20 30 pages long for each of the essay and and the flow
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is very nice so you you actually don't feel that you're actually reading all that much simply because of how the way she tells her story and the way she tells what she thinks and the other reason is that if you actually want to increase your
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sort of vocabulary range this might be an actual a good book for that there are quite a number of like complex words and complex sentence structures um in this book but because they are condensed into
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short stories you don't have to even read them in chronological order or like anything they're not following any order they're stand alone sort of stories so you can just like one day be like i feel like reading a 20 page text and you can just pick it
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up and choose a chapter and that's sort of where you wouldn't feel this sort of overwhelmed need to finish i don't know 200 pages of complex words when you're just focusing on this 20 page and you can take your time and sort of go through see
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like try and join her in the critical thinking process as well while you're learning no i think we have a good mix of options here today one is a more simpler kind of literature one is a little more like a little more complex but
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both have like really good uh storylines so i think for those of you watching these are really good examples for you to kind of grab if you're looking to read during the summer i'm curious to know jenny do you have any other are you reading something else do you want to
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recommend something else to uh our viewers today um yeah i mean i tried to stay within kind of novel side um but i just recently finished a book called
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of woman and salt by gabriella garcia um it's a wreath like a new book i i remember it was just published like couple months ago i really i think and it's one of the uh the books that we chose at my book club at work um that we all
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read together and uh i just finished that like couple days ago and that's a really interesting book as well it's about um immigrants uh family of an immigrant um but you also it's kind of a
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similar in terms of like the weight structure i guess with this book that each chapter is about different characters um in that family um but then a lot different from this book is that that book is really sounding more like a short story
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of that person's life in that character's life in that chapter whereas this book is those stories all connect to one big main storyline where everything kind of intertwines and like um you know you kind of get to experience what's going to happen
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altogether whereas that book is more about individual characters storyline within the same family and how they're affecting each other's life um with different timelines so i would say that book is interesting as well to read
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and there are a lot of different um aspects that you can also discuss from that book with your friends if you would read it with your friend um there are some like currently related um topics i guess um that you can discuss for sure so that i would recommend that book too
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thank you um are you enjoying your time at the book club yeah i thought that uh maybe um if i want to read more books maybe my colleagues would like to do the same thing and um sure enough i had a few interests so we started the book club
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uh i would say september or october of last year and um then we are currently you know uh going through i think fifth book together um so it's it's going well and it's really actually really fun i would recommend
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our audience to think about you know sharing a book with a friend like read it at the same time because when you read a book together and you get to discuss it it's a lot more fun because you actually get to talk about the book with someone who actually read the book at
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the same time and it's you know it's a different experience that i think it's very um exciting and interesting as well for our audience so i would recommend that too thank you for the recommendation jenny when this book club
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um topic was i found it in my inbox i was very interested but i don't know lately i've just not been able to hold on a book like i'll read a couple pages and my mind will immediately wander and i have to do something else or i'll think about something else i've not
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i used to read so much as a kid i'll probably join because it sounds really interesting it's it's right up my alley anytime you anytime you'll want to join or you're welcome thank you um lin i want to know your thoughts about the book club oh i love it uh one of the og members
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here i've been with the book club since it started yeah and i've read i think i've read all the books and now you're like yeah i've been keeping up um so yeah it's definitely i
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before joining the book club i kept getting like books as like presents from like people and like i was like i need to read this because somebody gave it to me and now it's almost like a requirement that i have to read but i was struggling same thing as you
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were saying a swati look it's sometimes it's just tough life happens and then now you're like oh yeah i can't spend like 30 minutes to read this ah but it helps when there is like sort of a group of people as a motivation to
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not just it's fun to discuss but it's also really motivating to know that other people are also trying to find time and read um and if you catch up you'll get to like talk about it it's almost like trying to watch a movie together but not
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together everyone has different pace obviously and everyone has different you know time that they choose to read a book so some people read it every day but some people you know choose to read it in the weekend on the weekend when they have like time to sit down and do it and so whenever we kind of check in with
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each other um someone would say i finished in like one sitting and would be like whoa and uh you know i sometimes struggle to keep up because um sometimes i need more time to really focus on the book um like you know as an international
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student i always had a little bit more encouragement i would say to read a book so um this was definitely it and that really helped me to like keep it going and i knew that oh someone else is almost finished i should be also finishing soon like we should discuss it all together i shouldn't
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miss out on this so then i kept motivating myself to do it so i i think that that's why i really enjoy it too um because i get the motivation from other people and yeah it's amazing it's great thank you so that's interesting i mean if you are
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even for people who are watching if you aren't somebody who usually reads books but you want to get into it because you want to develop your english language or you just want to read i think joining a book club might be a great way to start um yeah i think that's a good idea i like that um but thank you jenny and
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lynn for joining us and sharing your book recommendations uh i'm very happy to have you guys here thank you so much for having me yeah same thing thank you thank you goodbye bye so that was our episode if you have any questions please comment below and we can address it
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on our next episode we also provide kill test lessons on a separate playlist it's called ko prep with brandy and we drop a lesson every week please to check it out uh we also have some exciting news for you kale is now available online to be taken at home
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if you are in japan mexico brazil colombia canada or usa you can take the kl test online at home it's a wonderful opportunity to start your journey to canada right at home please also note that if
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you are an international student living abroad or in canada you may be eligible for the kl scholarship if you took the kale test in any of our available locations on or after july 2020 or if you're planning to take one soon please do check us out i will link
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our scholarship page below if you have any questions about your eligibility or the deadline please let me know in the comments below until then please stay safe and have a nice weekend
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