If I Wanted to Start Reading, I’d Start With These 6 Books (kind of)

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]It's a bit of a puzzle over here. I have six category of books. I do not have five. I just realized that. I even counted it out. You would think I can count. Oh my goodness.

[00:00:12]Hey. Hi. Welcome. Today I'm going to be doing this thought experiment of if I was going to start over with reading, here is where I would start. And I'm really excited to talk about this with you. I have categories of books and then book suggestions for within those categories. And I'm so curious if this question was posed to you, you personally, how would you answer this?

[00:00:40]I'm so excited to see what y'all come up with. And yeah, I'm If you're new, then know that I'm Shelly and I love to read.

[00:00:48]And this kind of question has been exciting me. Um I don't know. notes like as I'm going as I'm falling asleep at night I'm thinking about oh my goodness if I was starting over with reading where would I start this is what I would say this is what I would recommend to my younger self that kind of thing I just get all giddy about it because I love this kind of thing and that's what you should know if you don't know who I am and many of you do though so hello and I'm so grateful you're here and let's go ahead and just get into the meat of this video y'all I meant to say subscribe if you're not yet subscribed but you all know the So, I saw this video concept come up in my subscriptions feed from someone named Benjamin Leairard, I believe, and when I saw the title of his video, I was like, "Oh my goodness, that sounds so amazing." And I want to do a response.

[00:01:39]Um, so that's what this is. But I do want to I did want to give credit where credit is due to the original idea, which was Benjamin. So, thank you, Benjamin. If I was starting out and I didn't know where to start, I would want a very short focused list. So, I'm sticking with five books. But knowing myself, I wouldn't want a prescriptive list. I would want some wiggle room. I would want some choice. So, for me, in broadstrokes, I'm going to be covering five categories of books. The first being the ancients because the ancients is where everything started. So much of modern literature is based off ideas and concepts that came from the ancients.

[00:02:26]And I think that uh I have had preconceived notions uh about ancient literature that I've quickly gotten over the more I've doven in or the more I've been in the world of the ancients.

[00:02:41]meaning that they are so much more human. They are so much more easy to relate to. They are so um fun and funny and enjoyable than I had ever initially given them credit for. So, if I was going to give myself a category to check off for one of the five books, Ancients would be one of them. And so, I would start off with maybe a play, maybe something that I would feel like I can read through quickly. Um so it might be Sophocles. These are the three Thean plays. I would choose one. I would choose either Antiggony which has a very strong stubborn female character at the center or Edipus the king which personifies fate in a way that we see so much in literature moving forward. If I wasn't feeling Sophocles, then I would go with Aristophanes and then I would read Liz Earstrada, which is about women being so fed up with their men and sons at war that they take over the bank and they also um withhold certain affections and that drives everybody bananas.

[00:03:56]I maybe shouldn't have used the word bananas, but that's okay. We're going to go with it. It's funny and relatable.

[00:04:03]And this sense of humor that comes out in this play is just delightful. It's an easy play to connect with, we'll say.

[00:04:13]Let's say I was feeling more ambitious than just um a short play and I wanted to dig into some ancient literature that was much more epic, like maybe an epic poem, then I would definitely choose The Iliad by Homer. This is translated by Robert Fitzgerald. This is about war and love and suffering and jealousy and impetuousness and everything all rolled into one. But there is something so magical and incredible about the structure of the Iliad. It blew my mind when I read it. So, if I also was going to use the Iliad as one of the five books that I chose for this beginning readers project, I would also go the extra step to read a bunch of different translators and see what I liked because the most important thing is that you find a a translator that you get along with so the reading experience is enjoyable. And so just trying a bunch trying a bunch on your Kindle first chapter like just really diving into different ways the Iliad has been translated and the different styles out there for this ancient work which would be such I mean it was a fun project when I read this a few years few years back.

[00:05:24]I dove into a bunch of different translators and I learned so much from that project and I would encourage um somebody getting into reading to do the same because there's so much that you can gain from about yourself as a reader and about the way that people approach writing even when it's the exact same script. Um so I think that's it's a fascinating thing an extra layer to this project. So, we've chosen uh an ancient.

[00:05:50]And next, I would choose um some sort of memoir. There is something about the self-examination of a memoir when it's done well, when it's done right. In a way, there is something about the insight into humanity and about the insight into the self because the writer has to change the self, has to turn the self into a character. And so the writing process, the approach, the um the mindfulness that one has to have to do such a thing uh when they're producing a memoir is is fascinating. It it truly is. So you could go all the way back to yet another ancient and you could go with the origins of a memoir which would be um St. A St. Augustine confessions which I just finished and there is some debate as to whether it was St. St. Augustine or St. Augustine?

[00:06:45]And I even talked to an Augustine scholar and he told me the answer and now I can't remember. So I read this with um my husband and several other people who were interested in read reading this which included somebody who has their PhD in confessions in particular. So lots of great discussions around this.

[00:07:05]But one of the most fascinating aspects of this book is that um now I don't know whether to say augustine or Augustine. I should just choose Elaine and go with it. So Augustine what's amazing about him is that he examines his him himself with such scrutiny with such intensity and which such modernness that it is awe inspiring and it is like Augustine does meditate on like why do we sin? If we are creatures just made for the purpose of pleasing God, then why is there sin in this world? And and is that is you know what where does sin come from? And um and you know he even dives into philosophical ideas that are so far beyond his years like time and um how time works and space even and creation.

[00:07:58]But the most important and the most interesting part at least in my opinion is his self-examination.

[00:08:05]It is just mindblowingly good. It is mind-blowingly good. It is so interesting. Um, and if I were if I were to teach this like for a high school, I would actually choose the more biographical elements of the memoir and maybe sections of the more philosophical pieces. But overall, it's just a mind-boggling read. Maybe you're like, Shelly, I cannot do two ancients on the list. And it's okay. I got you. So instead of maybe um confessions, let's do something very slim, very little. And it is Ellie Vitzel's night. Um Vitzel is a survivor of the World War II concentration camps. um um he was uh placed in in one of them with his father and the way that he writes about his experience, but the way that he examines humanity through this experience is so beautifully rendered. It is so thoughtprovoking. It is so like heartfelt but in a way that is thoughtful that has truly changed the way that I think about humanity and the way that we can either cling to our humanity or to throw it aside. And there is just so much thought and thought-provoking um moments in this book. It is read in high schools, studied in high schools, or at least it was. And I can see why because it is such a powerful small read. So maybe um Val perhaps has less examination of the self as he does about just the human experience. And um it's it's so good. It is so so good. Okay. So let's say those two don't appeal to you. So I have a third memoir and it is Mouse by Art Spiegelman. So in these two novels or not novels, they're graphic novels. In these two books, um, Art Spiegelman, who is an artist and writer, wrote down his father's experience living through the Nazi concentration camps and being a Jew. Um, there's this whole, especially the first book, there's this depiction of Jews being mice and the Germans being cats and the way that his father and mother flee, you know, they they were truly being chased by German soldiers, German police. um in order to be placed into concentration camps. And the depiction works so well, the creativity.

[00:10:34]Um but there's also this metanowness uh especially when you get into the second book because Art Spiegelman really struggles to connect with his father to understand his father's story to do it right through this medium. And so there is this examination of Art Spiegelman thinking of himself and and the way he's rendering this book as he's rendering the book. Um and so there's this really this really interesting meta layer to it, but also this um layer of a father and a son struggling to understand one another. there is this moment of survivors guilt um not moment but there's this theme of survivors guilt and the way that the experience of the concentration camps um have affected his their their entire lives um even though art himself was born after the after those years um and it is just it's a really fascinating it's just a really fascinating memoir to get into again that is doing something ever so slightly different with examining the self, examining an experience, trying to render an experience in a truthful way, but how to do that in such a medium as graphic novels. Oh my goodness, I cannot believe that I have six books. I have six categories of books, not five. I'm still baffled that I have six six items, not five. Oh my gosh. Okay, so um uh next on the list, if we were going to go down this checklist, so we have an ancient, we have a memoir. Now, let's do an essay. So, what's so great about an essay is that so much complex um unfolding thought, a singular idea being unfolded in front of you, looked at in many different facets, in many different ways, are boiled down and put into a singular essay, which I think is amazing. And so you could do something like James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time or Tanahesy Coats's Between the World and Me um which are about essentially the black experience in America and what that is like. Or you could do something like Susan Sags regarding the pain of others which is about war photography and diving into what war photography actually is. or you could do one of the essays that really changed the way that I thought and the way that I interact with the world and it is a room of one's own by Virginia Wolf. This is a phenomenal piece of literature, originally a speech that was turned into an essay about what it means to be a female writer and what it would be like if women had a little finance of their own and a space of their own to do the writing that they are intended to do.

[00:13:21]and the like Virginia Wolf brilliantly points out the inequalities of um between the sexes essentially and the way that women have been denied access both financially, intellectually, and with space. And it is an it is an enormously amazing essay that deserves every single accolade it's ever gotten.

[00:13:46]It deserves to be read today. There's more non-fiction on this list than I thought. Maybe it's better that I had sex so I could evenly balance things out. So, my next category is going to be the biography. [laughter] The biography. I think that learning about people in different times and spaces than our own is just incredible.

[00:14:09]Um, I think it just adds so much to a reading experience. And so, I have three biographies. I think that if I were giving this advice to to to you all to somebody out there of of a more like um even playing field, I would say choose a biography of someone that you're interested in and choose like do some reading about the biographer and how wellreceived and well- reggarded they are. There are some really great biographies out there and then there are some really boring and dry biographies out there. And so you kind of want to do at least a little bit of research as to um who is, you know, an entertaining biographer versus somebody who might be a perhaps more scholarly. Like you might get more out of an a work, but you're going to be reading more academically dry um or more academically leaning pros. Um so it just it just depends, right? So I just do a just a hint of research. If you are like I really want to read a biography of Napoleon, then you know might it might do you a little bit of good to kind of research out there like what which ones are um most highly regarded? How much academic language is in it? Uh how entertaining is it? Does it move right along or do I need to know something um about Napoleon before diving in? Uh so kind of parsing a little bit of that out. But if I was just doing biography, I would say that I have Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. Uh just a really imaginative uh biography about a phenomenally brilliant woman that had two very famous romantic relationships. The like fiction could never in some of these scenes.

[00:15:55]Some of these scenes I was like, I cannot believe that even happened. um because they're just so spectacularly dramatic and completely out of nowhere.

[00:16:05]It's almost unbelievable and yet believable. I also have um Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins. Jenkins is an extremely brilliant author. She somehow puts an entire biography of a very wellknown or a man maybe less wellknown than I think um I think she's well known in my soul but like this amazing life of Elizabeth who fought her way to the throne who maintained her leadership never ever taking a spouse because she wanted to be queen and she never wanted to be subservient to anybody else while on the throne and she just was able to keep a lot of peace piece after a time of a lot of turmoil in England. And Jenkins writes it with just um wit with um every like no sentence is out of place. It's so sharply done. You're in the presence of somebody who is just a a great mind and um makes great company for reading. And then finally, uh, one of the biographies that really kind of swept me away when I read this about five years ago now at this point, and it's Katherine the Great by Robert K. Massie, who um, just does this a just a wonderful and entertaining job about yet another female leader um, in Russia and again had to claw her way to the throne. And then while there she makes such brilliant and interesting um political decisions for her country and just really led on the throne with a lot of grace. Uh there are a lot of romantic entanglements that are super interesting that helped influence the way she uh the way she ruled, the way she governed. And also Massie just does a great job laying out what Russia was like at this time.

[00:17:56]And so I have just um this this book has definitely a very special place in my heart. So the biography here we go. All right. Our fifth category second to last is going to be a Victorian or a regent.

[00:18:10]Something from the Victorian period or something from the Regency period.

[00:18:13]Basically um basically a Bronte or an Austin um a Jane Austin that is. So I I mean I did not limit it just to that. I just think that this time period u really for the world but especially for England there was a lot of wonderful literature being produced and so if you could choose something um from this time period to put on this beginner's list I think you will really really enjoy it even if it even if it's a classic that you just haven't gotten to yet like like this one Pride and Prejudice when I first read this I liked it but I didn't love it and I've returned to it again and again understanding its brilliance more and more and how just masterful Austin is. I feel kind of I feel kind of like a layman saying that I didn't get it when I first read it, but now I get it. [laughter] But it's okay. That's my story. So, um so I just Jane Austin's writing is so clever. It's so witty. It's so interesting. Um really the book that made me fall in love with Austin though which is again a book I read on my first year of book and it was persuasion and this is a second chance romance that has a very emotional moment in the book and I think that's what really got me because um though I think that Pride and Prejudice is a better book and more witty there is less emotion put into this book. It is really more about the terms of phrase, the way Austin writes, the way that she builds out characters.

[00:19:45]I mean, it's all just genius. This is a better book. Though, I think that I needed something to help me emotionally connect with. And for that persuasion in a certain letter was what really did it for me in um in in Austin's works. And I've just gone on to continue to enjoy her more and more. Or maybe you want to start off with somewhat something more like truly character focused. And for that we have Janeire by Charlotte Bronte. I love this. You follow Jane through her childhood and early 20s. She is a phenomenally deep uh smart in incredibly thoughtful character. It's truly about her journey and the way that she finds love, the way that she internalizes some of that love, the choices that she makes. It is about her inner life and her character. And I love that about this book. I've loved it since I've I've read it. It was my introduction to the Victorians in which I was like, "This is incredible." Like, this is true and wonderful literature.

[00:20:53]And then finally, I have Anthony Trrollop's The Way We Live Now. I think that Trollup just isn't as wellknown as some of his contemporaries, which is so sad. Uh though, if you know, you know.

[00:21:05]Trolup is what I imagine to be. And he writes in this way too, like the warmest, kindest, most generous soul that ever did walk this earth. There's something so compassionate and um charming about his writing. Uh and he builds out these um like these really interesting plots, these different sagas where everybody has their own internal struggles and they're trying to figure themselves out while dealing with um certain factors. I mean, I guess that's like every book, but you know what I mean. in this we have essentially like new money coming to this community and the way that that messes people up.

[00:21:49]Meanwhile, there are many many um eligible bachelors and bacheloretses and we're all wondering who's going to get together with whom? And you know who has a relationship with whom? Is it secret?

[00:22:01]Is it public? All of that is uh out there. And there are some bad matches.

[00:22:07]There's some matches that you're like don't you dare get together with him.

[00:22:11]that is an awful person for you. Uh, and there are some really interesting matches and um, sort of from top to b from top to bottom, from end to out, first to last page, all of it is so entertaining and just written by somebody who I feel like really cares about their readers. Like cares about not offending you, um, your intellect or just pulling something out of a hat that doesn't make sense. like you you're with somebody who wants to show you a good time and really respects you as a reader. That's hard to say about writers. And finally, I would say that I would choose a book that is a world unto itself. Um, a book that is large and sprawling, that gives you the experience of truly being lost in its pages, that builds a whole entire universe in inside of itself, inside of the book. And I mean a mammoth, like I mean a big book, right? Like it's a big chunky book um that offers so much. I think that there is something about that um which is why certain big books have been talked about for centuries, for decades, for for years. And so for that, I would say in like connected to my Victorian moment, I would say George Elliot's Middle March is like that. It's about a place and the people in that place and their struggles and just I mean oh it's so good. Like it's so good. It's so masterfully done.

[00:23:38]But it is an entire world unto itself.

[00:23:41]Um these characters feel real. Their struggles feel real. They're um [clears throat] the interiority of certain characters have got me where I live. Like h I live for this kind of literature. I also have uh Michael Siobhan's or Shavenans. Siobhan Siobhan.

[00:23:59]Uh I really should learn how to say that. Um The Amazing Adventures of Cavalere and Clay, which is about a uh about two nerds. Two nerds growing up in New York. One of which is from Prague.

[00:24:13]He barely escaped with his life um because the Germans were invading and he needed to get out. Um, and so you have you have these two cousins and they decide to take on the comic book industry and it is so good. It is so good. Um, because at times they create this comic called The Escapist, which is right here, The Mask. And at times I was like, is this a real comic? I mean, I'm no comic afficionado, but it seemed so real to me that I was like, is this a real comic? Okay. I thought that it might be because it was so detailed and so well done. Um, and it takes you through their journey and so good. All right. And my final book, sort of like for the big chunky world building, it is The Beasting. This is much smaller in scale than the previous two books because it is really about the world of a certain family and the way that they are disconnected.

[00:25:15]And it is it we have four characters and you get the interiority of them like no other. It's so good. It is about the financial crash in Ireland and this family that once had access to at least um comfortable wealth is now struggling under the pressure of ai financial strain and what that's doing to each and every one of them. So, you have the mother, father, a teenage daughter, like she's in her older teens, and then a younger kid. Um and and each of them have their own struggles and frustrations and anxieties and and the way that they feel so isolated and alone in their situations, but it's like I don't know there Paul like Paul Murray does this thing where even though they feel alone like you feel alone with them in their isolation and it is like the the compassion that comes out of the reader in this experience is incredible.

[00:26:11]So such a good book. I loved it. so much. But yeah, those are my categories.

[00:26:16]Those are my categories. I would be like, you know, this is what you should start with if you didn't know where to start. Um, I would love to know what you would put on your list. I know that I don't have certain books. Uh, like there's no fantasy, there's, uh, you know, very little poetry. I have an an epic poem. Um, there is no science fiction. There's a lot of sort of categories that I didn't put in because I put in what I felt was the most important. Um, but yeah, I would love to know like how you would categorize it.

[00:26:48]Maybe you would put in a romance. Maybe you would put in a fantasy. Maybe you're like, you cannot have some sort of beginning reading guide without this without this book or this category of book. Um, so I'm I'm totally open to hearing what you have to say and what you come up with. So yeah, that's it.

[00:27:06]Anyways, thank you so much for watching.

[00:27:08]Thanks for being here. I [music] just Y'all are great. Y'all are great. And I hope to see you all in my next one. Bye.