The list feels more like a curated aesthetic performance than a rigorous literary inquiry, blending heavy classics with trendy bestsellers to fit a specific brand. It prioritizes the "vibe" of being well-read over a truly cohesive intellectual framework.
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My 50 Favourite Books (of all time!!)Added:
Hello, it's Ruby and today I'm going to be talking through my top 50 books of all time. Like the best 50 books I have ever read. And I do not put books in the top 50 lightly. A couple of years ago, about 6 years ago, I shared a video with my top 200 books of all time. That was even difficult to come up with to whittle it down to 200. And that was 6 years ago. I've read another six years worth of books in that time. Um, and some excellent books. And a lot of these books I've read in the last six years.
And so when I recommend these books, I do not so do so lightly. These books I think are exceptional and I'm so excited to talk about them with you. I don't have copies of all 50. Um, a few I know I have and I can't now find them on my bookshelf and a few I own on Kindle or I borrowed from the library and I never actually got copies. So, um, most of them I have, which is lovely, but not all of them. Also, initially I was thinking of doing like my top 50 books broadly, but books are so broad as a category and it was impossible to narrow it down because there are so many like children's classics I love and uh you know plays and poetry collections and YA books and so I haven't included any of that. This is only like adults fiction. So these are all classics and these are all contemporary books. I'm missing quite a few classics. So actually there are more classics here. Oh, where's my copy of Dorian Prick? Oh, I know where one is.
I'm not going to lie, my bookshelf is looking incredibly sparse behind me because obviously I have copies of a lot of my favorite books. So, for example, my very favorite book of all time is A Little Princess by Francis Hodson Bernette. And yet, technically, I'm not going to be including this on this top 50 book list because this is a children's book. So, also I'm not going to include Little Women. I'm not going to include The Secret Garden or Ann of Green Gables, even though all of these are books that I absolutely love. And maybe I will have to film a part two where I talk through my favorite children's classics because children's classics and Victorian novels are my two favorite genres of book. Anyway, going to sadly put Sarah Crew to one side. I probably won't film all of this in one take as well, just because there are quite a lot of books here. Okay, this is in no particular order because it's difficult enough to narrow it down to 50. How am I meant to actually order them from there? I'm just going to go through the pile. Um, I'm going to start with this one cuz this is the newest addition to my top 50. Um, I read The Milan the Floss by George Elliot and I adored this. I'd never read any George Elliot before, but I've been meaning to read her for ages, for years. I was given a copy of Middle March by my librarian when I was in year 9 and she said I'd love it and I kept on just waiting for the perfect time to read it.
And so I've got this copy still and I haven't read it. And having read this, I'm really excited to read Middle March.
So, The Mill on the Floss is about two siblings, Maggie and Tom, and there is a four year age gap between them. And they are as different as you could be as siblings. They are very different in their kind of character. Maggie is very like emotionled and she very much leads with passion and vitality and she has this very active imagination and so she ends up getting herself into these very like bizarre situations and she ends up with all of these stories as a result of it. Whereas Tom, her brother, is much more sensible and very very loyal, like very loyal to people. Has a really great like ethical compass, but is very like measured in his thoughts, which is different to Maggie. And um yet they're so close to siblings. And I just think it captures the sibling dynamic really well. Like my sister and I are very close, but we're also quite different.
And I just really like how this book shows how siblings can be very different and yet still be incredibly close. And the whole book is about the sibling dynamic which is quite unusual as well.
I mean not unusual for children's books like ballet shoes little women siblinghood and kind of the the the state of being a sibling is a very prominent theme in children's books but it's not one largely that I seem to see in adult books. I mean the very obvious exception is Jane Austin and the way that sisterhood is so central to Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.
I just I do really love how the bill on the floss is about being a sibling and um it's just it's very pleasant to read.
Um there are some beautiful um descriptions of the natural world. Um the very famous passage which Joe reads in the 2019 Greta Garwig adaptation of Little Women is also in this where she says we could not have loved the world so much if we had had no childhood in it. And it was so lovely to read that in context in this book. Like the narrative is really interesting actually because it's being told in retrospect and in the first half which is all about their childhood, you have this narrator who's telling you about their child, but she's clearly from the future. It's funny cuz you don't know who the narrator is, but it speckles the childhood section with nostalgia and a kind of melancholy because the narrator is herself an adult in the same way that like you as a reader is an adult. And I think it it leads to the childhood section even though it's incredibly warm and it's sweet and it's and it's calming and it's comforting, but it's also tinged with that melancholic nostalgia and I just really enjoyed that. And then the second half of the of the book is them as adults. It jumps forward quite quickly and um childhood kind of ends very abruptly and so you have this distinction between childhood and adulthood and the second act is then I don't don't want to give anything away but um you know the kind of I think the power of the second act definitely comes from because you've established this uh really wonderful kind of idyllic childhood in the first half of the book.
Um, but it's one I would highly recommend. If you want to try some George Elliot, then I would recommend this one. I would also say if you like Little Women, you will like this.
Anyway, that's the first one. Second here, I've got Picture of Dorian Gray.
Of course, this is the one that I didn't initially have on the stack, and I was like, wait, I have a copy of this. This copy was given to me for my 21st birthday by some family friends. It says it was owned by Frbell in 1915. In the 1880s, 1890s, there was the aesthetic movement in Europe. Um, mainly London and Paris and Oscar Wild was at the forefront of this. Uh, there was something called Wild Hannah. I think that's what it's called. It's like this kind of mania around Oscar Wild and what he represented. And it was decadence.
This is like the age of decadence literature at the Fintler. And the picture of Dorian Gray encapsulates like the idea of the aesthetic movement. So essentially, if you don't know the story already, basically there is this young, handsome man called Dorian Gray, and Henry is a painter who paints him.
Dorian is young and his soul is unafflicted. He hasn't done anything.
He's a young man with this with this pure, clean soul. And Henry paints him.
And essentially, the prevailing idea behind the picture of Dorian Gay is every time you do something bad, it reflects on your physical appearance and that you can tell how good somebody's character is from the way that they look. It's kind of tied up with Victorian ideas of physioamy. It's not a nice ideology by any means. I've got club thumbs. Um, but the Victorians called these murderers thumbs. So, the idea was if you were born with club thumb, it's a sign in your physiology that you're going to be a murderer, which is nonsensical, right? And I say that to demonstrate the late Victorians were very obsessed with appearance and how that maps onto character. And that's kind of the idea in the picture of Dorian Gay. So, as Dorian Greer gets older, he starts to sin. He starts to do bad things. But instead of this reflecting on his own face, the painting starts to change and the painting starts to warp and, you know, there's this kind of evil glint in the eye or kind of like the mouth starts to um turn down at the edges and this painting becomes slowly more and more repulsive. But Dorian Gay's face remains the same. It remains unchanged over the 20 years of this novel. his face remains as untarnished and as perfect as it did when he was 20 years old. There are cases where people think and say like, well, you can't possibly have done anything wrong. We have to trust you because look how clear your countenance is. Look how um untarnished your countenance is. The link then to aestheticism and this idea of the of the aesthetic movement um and the athlete is if something looks beautiful that there is a level of like morality to it because um morality and beauty can be linked in a kind of platonic way. It's just a it's such a clever premise and it gives you so much food for thought. Like I don't know. I just I I really love stories about morality like this and if you haven't read it I feel jealous. This is one of these books. All of these books. I feel jealous if you haven't read them because it means you can read it for the first time. I think I've read this one three times and I'm in well due need of like another reread because it's glorious.
Next, I've got some Dickens books here.
I have all of the Dickens in these beautiful 1930s editions. In this one, we've got two of my favorites, which are A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. Now, Charles Dickens is one of my favorite writers. When it comes to the Victorians and Victorian writers, my favorites are The Bronte's number one.
Um, but after that, Charles Dickens. I love Charles Dickens. And I think I've read seven or eight of his books now.
Yeah, I think so. But these are my favorites. So, first, A Christmas Carol, which is the one that most people have read hopefully. I love A Christmas Carol because it's a very quick one to read and it I think when you read A Christmas Carol you realize that Charles Dickens isn't the author that you expect him to be. I don't mean to speak for anyone here but I know that when I first approached Charles Dickens like before I'd read any Charles Dickens I had this impression that Charles Dickens would this incredibly dry, boring, dense writer and would be so hard to read. and I wanted to try his books, of course, because I know that he's a great writer and I know that it would be a good thing to read, but I was a little bit daunted by it. And then I read A Christmas Carol as the first one. And it's so funny and I know it's it's like conversational.
Dickens's voice is so wonderful and I love like the really elaborate descriptions that he has. They're like long trailing sentences filled with semicolons and A Christmas Carol has and those abundant descriptions that like are in his other books, but I think they're the best in A Christmas Carol.
There's this one scene. It I think it's with the ghost of Christmas present and he's describing all of the splendor of the markets. I think it's like the onions like winking friars. That's the one I remember. It's like this amazing food writing and it makes you so hungry when you're reading it. And um it just it really captures that Victorian bizarre kind of feel, but it's so fun to read. And A Christmas Carol, I know that you will know the story of this, but uh it's about a man called Ebenezer Scrooge who is haunted by three spirits on the night before Christmas. And they encourage him to change his ways and reflect on his life by taking him to the past, the present Christmas, and then future Christmases, and then what his future will look like if he doesn't change. And it's just such a wonderful story of goodwill and kinship. And it makes you want to embrace and feel the feeling of Christmas. And I always just feel so like uplifted after reading A Christmas Carol. And it's the kind of book that just makes you really want to be a good person or like reminds you this is what a good person looks like and is. Again, I really am interested in those questions of morality and I love books like that. So yeah, A Christmas Carol. If you haven't read the book, even if you know the story, the book is something else and I would highly recommend it and it's very very quick to read. The other one which is in the same volume is a tale of two cities which is actually the most purchased book of the Victorian period which is quite cool and again actually speaks to how Charles Dickens was like this people's author and he was a voice of the people. He was the first celebrity author people say when he visited America he had the equivalent of kind of like groupies and like fan girls and fanboys like coming to see him. I think there was like a case of a lock of his hair being stolen or something. He was so famous and his books were serialized and printed in periodicals and would be read by so much of the English public. And I think it speaks to how again like we have this idea about Dickens that he's this stuffy author um who's difficult to read but he was written for like the everyman as it were and he was a voice of the people and I think remembering that like makes him less daunting to approach. So a tale of two cities is about Dr. Manette who's released from the Bastil, you know, pre-French revolution and it's been 18 years that he's been in prison and his daughter has grown up in the meantime.
So, he reunites with his daughter Lucy.
And I love how this book is about real human connections, relationships, but with this incredibly tumultuous backdrop of the French Revolution as it kind of like as it nears and the background is filled with such poverty. Like there's this uh I think it's chapter 2. It's right at the beginning and it's one of the most haunting passages descriptions because you see this juxtaposition between the poverty on the streets of Paris and the splendor of the aristocratics. So there's this carriage that that goes through the streets and it's, you know, opulent. In my in my memory, it's gold. I don't know if it actually is gold, but the idea of it, it feels gold. It's so opulent next to these mothers who were trying desperately to soo their babies. And this image by blood and milk is merged.
It's so haunting and I think about that image often actually. Oh, I don't know.
Just this book is wonderful. It's fantastic. It's um got so much biblical imagery in as well actually. And it's a story of sacrifice and of kindness again. And it's just a book you will not regret reading. I'm only mentioning books. I'm only mentioning novels. So, I'm not actually going to talk about this. But actually, my favorite Charles Dickens is Sketches by Bos. So, it's not actually one of his novels. It's a collection of the newspaper writings that he wrote when he was just known as Bos. that was like his pseudonym. So if you do want to read some Dick and Sketches by Bos is also brilliant but it's not a book. So let's move on from that. I am actually thinking now did I put Great Expectations on this list too?
Cuz I might have done but I can't remember whether I was bold enough to include three Charles Dickens books in my top favorite fiction books. I don't think I did. But I also wouldn't be surprised if I did. No, I didn't. I thought I need to keep it down to two. But great expectations. Oh my gosh, what a book.
It makes I want to reread it already.
It's so so excellent. Like the scene at the beginning with Pip in the graveyard and just Miss Havsham as a character I love and the way that your assumptions about all of the characters are completely overturned and oh my gosh, it's brilliant. Please read Great Expectations, but I'm not including it on this list. The next book is The Go Between by LP Hartley. This is one of those classic like summer country house books, which incidentally brides revisited also comes in under this genre. The Go Between I actually studied as one of my A-level texts and we had it as a comparative text with The Great Gatsby and I love The Great Gatsby, but didn't make it into my top 50. The Goeteen, however, easily in my top 50. I think I've read this like obviously I read it during my A levels multiple times, but I've read it since as well.
Like, it's just so excellent. So, it's about this boy called Leo. I think he's 12. I think he's 12. and he goes to stay with a friend for the summer, but um the friend gets sick right at the beginning, so he's locked away in the sick room and Leo is left to explore the grounds by himself. He's completely left to his own devices. So Leo's at this very expensive public school, but he's middle class as opposed to uppass. So I I'm pretty sure he's there on a scholarship. I don't know why he he's at the school, but at the beginning he talks about how he feels like very different from the other boys because um he doesn't have the same social background and he kind of pretends that he does even though he doesn't. So he comes up with these elaborate lies about his family background, his family name, his family house so that people don't know that his family isn't actually wealthy in the way that people would expect. And so he's at this friend's house where he comes up with this this world for himself. Like he's very imaginative and so so much not kind of quite sure what's real, what's being imagined, but he comes up with this uh kind of makebelieve pretend where this is his house and he like grows to and like tries to believe that it is. But the kind of the crux of the book comes when he starts delivering notes between Marian and what's his name? Ted, I think it's Ted. Yeah, Tad.
And he starts to deliver notes between them. So Ted is a farmer who lives nearby and Marian is the friend's sister. And he's delivering the notes between them. It's a little bit like Lady Shakley's lover in terms of the like relationship dynamic between Tad and Marion. But Leo is very young. He's a kid. He doesn't quite understand what any of this is. And he doesn't understand the gravity of the endings.
And so it ends up becoming this story of like childhood innocence, but also it doesn't feel like the right word, but maybe more naivity than innocence and this kind of forceful having to grow up and having to understand something which he didn't understand before. It's a really fantastic coming of age book. I would very much recommend. And the other one here is Bright Revisited. Same kind of genre of country house summer books.
And it's again like this culture of bringing somebody back to the house for the summer. So Sebastian is this friend at Oxford. He invites Charles back to Brides Head for the summer and Charles gets this glimpse into the world of Brides Head. This is set just before the First World War. It's this very divided social structure between classes is starting to unravel a little bit or at least be questioned. And so you kind of start to see the beginnings of that. And I I think it's interesting how like, you know, we as a reader can approach it with the dramatic irony and the kind of knowledge that the first world war is about to hit and kind of what that's going to mean for the family such as this one, what it's going to mean for the young men in this book. And again, it's kind of about Charles's relationship with the family as Sebastian becomes more absent. So Sebastian struggles with addiction and he's often absent. And so you kind of see yeah like Charles interacting with this family and the illusion and the disillusionment which occurs as a result. Excellent book and very well written. I I love the writing of that.
Um next here I've got Fahrenheit 451. I read this book when I was 12 and it was the first dystopia book I read and it kind of opened up that whole genre of me. I ended up reading so much dystopia after this. So Fahrenheit 451 is so named because that's the temperature at which books burn. And this is a dystopian world where books are not allowed. Sorry, my camera has just run out, so I'm not going to be able to do anymore, but I want to quickly finish this review. I'm filming on my phone.
I'm very sorry for the sudden drop in quality. Um, but Fahrenheit 451, it's a world where there are firefighters, but their job is to burn books. And whenever a kind of note or a tip off is is sent saying that there are books somewhere, these firefighters go and they they essentially burn the place down. So, all of the books are destroyed. Um, and the book is narrated by one of these firefighters who's been taught his whole life that books are terrible things, that books need to be burnt and he's so convinced of this and um like refuses to think of it any other way. But one time when he's there when he's like burning burning a selection of books um he picks one up and he hides it and he looks at it so starts like the real narrative of this book. It's very haunting and I would very much recommend. There are two other dystopia books that I have included on this list of my top top 50.
I've read a lot of dystopia. As I say, I kind of went through a phase of reading so much dystopia obviously alongside the Hunger Games and Divergent and Slated and all of the wonderful YA dystopia there is. But they wouldn't be in this video anyway because I'm not including YA so it doesn't get too complicated.
But the other two dystopias which I love are 1984 and Never Let Me Go. 1984. I haven't actually read since I read it for the first time at 13. And I keep on wanting to. I mean, I remember it so vividly that I can't believe it's been that long since I read it. Like, I feel like especially now given the current state of the world. It feels like we're so close and we're getting so close to the world that is described in 1984.
Like, I think about it so often as a book that I can't believe it's been so long since I read it. And I definitely want to reread it. Um, as I say, given everything that's happening in the world. 1984 was written in 1948 by George Orwell and he was thinking forward to what he thought the world might look like in 1984. Um and famously the first line of this book is the clock struck 13 showing like just how different this world has become and how the structures that kind of we understand and we kind of live our lives by have been turned and have been changed and that's in the space of uh what my math is terrible. uh 36 years.
No. Oh my gosh.
Yeah. 36 years. That's in the space of 36 years that the very structures and the kind of the way that we that we time and we live our life and organize our lives has been changed. It's like a surveillance state where you have to always be mindful of what you're doing because big brother could be watching kind of in the sense of like Fuko's ponopticon uh where that's like the ideal way to maintain civility like according to Fuko and power and dynamics of power. It's a world in which your thoughts are monitored. You can be held liable for your thoughts. Famously, they have these dictionaries. This is the thing that I remember most vividly from this book. And I remember think like just thinking about this so much as this like 13-year-old having read it that they release a new dictionary every year or every few years. But the idea is that words are taken out every time. So instead of adding new words, um instead of updating the words, they're removing words. Is the more limited your vocabulary is, the less you can think about things. And um like we rely on our vocabulary in order to articulate thoughts, in order to communicate. And so if our vocabulary shrinks, we can't communicate in the same way. And by like controlling language and by changing the words that we use, we're changing the way that we think because language and thought are so closely interconnected.
That's the thing that I took away most from 1984. And increasingly with the rise of AI, that's something that I think about that I'm scared about. And so I definitely want to read 1984 again.
And the other dystopia is Never Let Me Go, which is oh my gosh, it's such a difficult one though because I know that they don't tell you the spoiler until quite far in the book. And so it's one of those books you have to be like, "Oh, trust me, it's very, very good." How do you describe it? It's set in a boarding school narrated by this girl called Kathy. And she's thinking about her time at this school and like the strange things that happened at this school. It kind of follows through from childhood into early adulthood and it's a story about what it means to be human essentially, but I cannot tell you any more than that because I would be giving spoilers. So, I'm very sorry. You're just going to have to trust me that it's very good and it's in my top 50. So, hopefully that is testament that it's a good book. Anyway, I'm going to stop filming now because my camera is charging and I don't want to film the whole thing on my phone because I'm sorry the quality is terrible on here. I will do the rest of these classics.
These aren't all of them, but the rest of the classics and then we'll move on to the contemporaries later. So, thank you for watching so far. Okay, I'm back and my camera does have a little bit more charge. So, the next book here is Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
This is a copy I actually borrowed from an English teacher and then he left and I couldn't find it just before he left and so he said, "That's okay. Keep it and then one day you'll return it to me." Which is very lovely. It's a very nice thing to say. I've always felt bad though that I've kept it. It's got his annotations in from when he read it as well. So, Winesburg, Ohio, it's kind of a selection of short stories, but they're all connected. And so, I think of it as kind of coming under like 50 favorite novels, even though really I think technically it's short stories, but they're all set in this town in Ohio called We Winesburg. And each chapter, each story follows a different character. And kind of you see how their lives do interact and overlap. And there are characters who want to leave. There are characters who are staying. Like I can't really remember specifics about what happens in this. It's more about the atmosphere which is conjured than the actual like plot. At least from my memory.
But there's this wonderful part at the beginning about the grotesque. But the writing is just fantastic. Um so yeah the the first book is called the book of the grotesque and it says the writer an old man with a white mustache had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on level with the window. Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter who would who had been a soldier in the Civil War came to the writer's room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked. I love how the book is filled with such detail and all of the characters feel incredibly real and it's very vivid. The writing and yeah, so that is one of my all-time favorites. Um, next is Rebecca.
Of course, I was going to say Rebecca. I think I recommend Rebecca. Rebecca is one of the ones I recommend most frequently on my channel because there are so many things and places and experiences which remind me of this book. And again, it's one of those books I just I wish I could read it again for the first time. And I wish I could read it not knowing what would happen because I remember the experience of reading it for the first time and it was one of the most like glorious like first reading experience ever of a book. Rebecca isn't about Rebecca at all. So Rebecca is the title but it's actually about the new Mrs. Dwinter. She's a young woman early 20s and she meets Mr. Dwinter in Italy and they get married very quickly. They spend their honeymoon in Europe and then they go back to his house Manderly. Um, and Mrs. Dwinter has to settle into her new life as like lady of this house. But everything is clouded by and kind of hung with the memory of Rebecca who was Mr. Dwinter's first wife who died. So Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, for example, was incredibly close with Rebecca and constantly brings her up and Mrs. Winter just feels like constantly the expectation of Rebecca like around her. And so it's a story of jealousy and envy and it's kind of that jealousy is so intense. Oh my gosh, I've never read a book which conjures jealousy so extremely I guess. Um but also it's like the writing is just beautiful and the descriptions are stunning and I guess because the setting is also gorgeous.
It's like this beautiful old country house which is gothic and remote and it's got this skeleton scarf and it's right on the coast and so Mrs. Winter will walk down to the coast and she goes to this small beach cottage and looks out over the water where Rebecca drowned. It's such a wonderful book and it starts with the iconic first line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Mandly again." Of course, Dick Mockingbird.
Obviously, how could you not include this in your top 50 books if you've read it? Oh my gosh, this coffee has been so well loved. I'm not sure if you can you can tell. I actually at school, I did a speech on my very final day of school because I was head headgirl and traditionally the head girl will give a speech on the very last day of term and my speech was about a killer mocking bird. Like I kind of used that as like an extended metaphor underneath and Boo Radley as a character like as the kind of uh like yeah this extended metaphor through the speech. And so this book is very important to me and I wonder if is it annotated? No, I never annotated it, which is funny, but I do have my ex Librus at the front. With a lot of these classics, I think the story is often known in pop culture and kind of known as general knowledge, even if you haven't read the book. This is set in the deep south in the 1930s in Alabama.
It's about Scout, who I think she's five or six at the beginning of the book because she's just starting school. And we see the whole of this story, this small town from the perspective of this child, this child who has so much innocence and kind of looks at the world with untainted, untarnished eyes. And this is deep south 1930s. And so this small town is filled with with racism.
And this girl like Scout, she can't understand it. And like so much of the narrative, especially at the beginning, she's there as an unreliable narrator who just can't grasp what what's happening. And her father Atacus, who's just fantastic, just such a wonderful character and her brother Jem like well Atacus is a lawyer. And essentially the climax of this book, the crux of the plot is when Tom Robinson, a black man, is accused of sexually assaulting a white girl. So Atakus Finch, Scout's father, is the lawyer who is defending Tom Robinson. And the case exposes so much of the racism which exists within this this town and Scout again doesn't understand it. And so we kind of we see this court case and we see the prejudice, the discrimination of the town folk through Scout's eyes. And there's this wonderful moment. Oh my gosh. Like I think the most powerful moments in any book that I've read is when a group of white towns folk go to the prison where Tom Robinson is and they've come with malicious intent and Scout recognizes one of the men as the father of one of the boys in her class and she says you know how are you Mr. Cunningham and it immediately humanizes him and like this whole book is about that and the idea of just everyone being human and everyone being the same at like how cool, you know, it's the famous line in this book is you can't judge somebody until you've walked around in their shoes for a little while. It's an amazing book. If you haven't read it, please please read it. It's one I think about so much. Again, a lot of these books I think about a lot, but this one I think about a lot. Um, next is Frost in May by Antonia White. I think this is a slightly lesserk known classic. I think it was published by Verago Classics a while back. And it's basically set in a convent school. It's this young girl who isn't originally Catholic, but she converts to Catholicism and then goes to this convent school when she's nine. And and even though it's fiction, I feel like I learned a lot about convent schools from this. And from reading this, I went on to do a lot of research about convent schools because I don't know there's like a hierarchy within the convent about people kind of not respecting her faith as highly as like people who've been born Catholic, which I thought was very interesting and kind of not something I'd ever thought about in convent schools. But also because it starts when she's nine and then it follows her all the way until she leaves school. You see slowly how she starts to think about her faith more, how she becomes more critical of her faith, how her thinking starts to mature and she philosophizes. And so a lot of this is very reflective and it's coming of age story but like a religious coming of age story and very unique for that reason. I really enjoy books about uh Christianity and I'm very interested in the impact that Christianity has on politics and culture and so this book is one that really kind of spoke to those interests and the writing again was just excellent and I want to read it again I think. Um, next I got Crime and Punishment by Dosstoki.
DSTski is one of my favorite writers again with Dickens and Bronte. I love DSTski. Everything I've read by him is just fantastic because he's so again sorry about how Frosty May was philosophical, but Dsttovski, he's a philosopher and his books can feel like kind of a treaties on philosophy or like an idea in philosophy. Like in brothers carols for example this the scene where Ivan and one of the other brothers are just going back and forth about the existence of God and whether he can exist and it becomes this dialogue which is like a socratic dialogue about a philosophical idea or a moral idea and so it's I don't know I I I just think it's so cool how doki's books they use fiction to make philosophy more accessible and to kind of make it something that you can engage with because you're engaging with it through characters and real situations and you're engaging with ethics through that lens. And I just think it's very clever and yes, so I was I was really torn. I was going to put Brothers Caramance off on this list and I think if it was my top 75 books, it definitely definitely would have been in there. And maybe it actually is because it's difficult to judge and oh, I don't know. Now I kind of want to put Brothers Caramots up on this list. When I was writing, I didn't.
I put Crime and Punishment though, which um was the best book I read in 2024.
Again, like with Dickens, I kind of went into this with some assumption as to how dense and difficult it would be. I think this book is one that people often cite when they're trying to like talk about stuffy classics. They go, "Oh, I'm going to read Crime and Punishment." And the assumption is that it is something which is quite stuffy, at least in the way that I heard people talking about it when I was younger. And then I read it and it's like the furthest thing from stuffy that you could possibly envision.
It's so diabolical as a book and it's all over the place. It's chaotic and it is about a man who at the very beginning of the book murders this woman and is immediately thrown into throws of guilt and panic about being caught. And through the whole of this book, you just see his mind changing so rapidly. Like from page to page, his thought process will change completely. And it's just it it's fascinating to read. Completely fascinating. It's very raw. It kind of it feels like a stream of consciousness the whole way through. And I've just read nothing else like it. It's one that I just I know won't read the same if I ever reread this. and I've been thinking about rereading it, but this to me feels like one that you read once and then that's the time you've read it and you're not going to kind of get that experience again. When I read this, I read it very very slowly. Like often I can race through books a little bit just because I'm enjoying them and you don't want to put them down. With this one, I intentionally took it so slowly and I really wanted to savor it because I was loving it so much and I kind of got that impression a little bit through that it wasn't one that you could reread and kind of have that same effect. So, if you are going to read this one, I would really recommend carving out the time like doing it at a point where you really can dedicate that time to this book and sit down with it properly. I really enjoyed reading this one in the mornings for example. Like I'd go to a coffee shop in Oxford and I'd read it for half an hour every morning and I'd annotate it. This one's filled with like not loads of annotations bits. There are passages that I've underlined. So for reference in terms of like the writing and how raw it is here. A strange thought came to his head. Perhaps all his clothes were covered in blood.
Perhaps there were stains all over them and he simply did not see, did not notice them because his reason was failing, going to pieces, his mind darkening. Suddenly he remembered that there was also blood on the purse. bar, so there must be blood inside the pocket as well because the purse was still wet when I put it there in my pocket. He instantly turned the pocket out and sure enough there were traces, stains on the lining, but you get a sense there of how much his mind is flitting like it's happening in real time and it's it's very dramatic as well. Obviously, like the story line itself is very dramatic.
Anyway, that definitely my top 50. And then I've got two Bronte books. As I say, I love like honestly I love everything by the Bronte's, but these are the two that I put in my top 50 books. My very favorite Bronte novel ever is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. I think this is vastly underrated and I also am very aware like it's kind of like a joke among people who love the Bronte's that it's incredibly pretentious to say that Am Bronte is your favorite and I'm very aware of that since I've heard that. And I've also heard it pretentious to say that your favorite Bronte book isn't Jana or Weathering Heights. But just genuinely this is the best one and I just wish more people would read it.
It's about this mysterious woman who turns up in this village. Her name is Helen and she appears with her young child and the narrator of the book is this man called I forgotten his name. Do we even know what his name is? And the narrator of this man, uh, it kind of starts with him observing this woman and he doesn't know who she is. And everyone in the village is talking about her and starting to, I guess, like gossip about who she might be and why she's come here and why she's by herself and why she's staying in Wildfell Hall, which is this kind of large property at the edge of the village. And this man starts to befriend her. And essentially, she gives him her diary. and her diary tells him exactly like what's happened and what she's escaped from and she's escaped from this abusive marriage. I just I love the atmosphere of this book and like with Wthering Heights and Jana it's like set on the moors in this village.
So the landscape in which it's set is lovely but I love the structure of it and I think the structure more than anything is what really attracts me to this book because it's like very layered. So the man who's narrating it is actually writing a letter and then he encloses the diary in his letter. And so the diary is essentially sandwiched between this man's narrative. And so even though she was trying to escape from this abusive husband, instead her deepest and most private thoughts get sandwiched between this man's letter and she's still kind of like contained within this male narrative. I really like clever structuring and I think symbolically that's very interesting. I spoke about this book at length in a book review video once in 2021. I will leave that link down below because I just read it and so it was very very fresh and sometimes when you're talking about a book a while after reading it is obviously not that fresh and so yeah but I just to really stress this I think is the best Bronte book. But the other Bronte book, which is in my top 50, is Janeire, which I do prefer to Weathering Heights, though I do like Weathering Heights. I do have a beautiful copy of this as well, but I don't know where I've put it. It's not in my bookshelf.
As you can see, I have switched back to my phone. I'm so sorry. I've now run out of storage on my camera, and I'm about to go into London, so I might pick up a SD card while I'm in London. Um, and then I can film the rest tomorrow. But Jana, this I think it's the last classic. Is it? It can't be. So Jana starts with her as a child. So that means it's a Victorian buildings Roman novel which is basically like where you follow the character through their life.
Especially when I was younger. I loved buildings Roman novels because it means that you get the child section. And when you're reading, especially at like 12, 13, 14, 15, I feel like that's always the most interesting part. Part of me thinks that's what attracted me so much to Victorian novels when I was that age because they're the only classics that kind of involve childhood and child experience. And when you're 12, 13, 14, you are a child. That just occurred to me. Anyway, Jana starts where she's living with her aunt and her cousins because she's not the child because she's the niece. Instead, um, she's mistreated within this house. And there's this famous scene at the beginning where she's locked in the red room and she sees these things that aren't there. She becomes so incredibly terrified. It's such a vivid description as well. Oh my gosh, when you when you read it, it's so vivid. She's then sent away to school and she has again like a really horrendous time at school. She makes friends with this lovely girl, but that doesn't end well. At the end of her schooling, she becomes a governness and she goes away to this remote house in the middle of nowhere. There's a child there that she's there to look after, but she doesn't know anything about the family and everything's very clouded in mystery, which is always great in a Bronte novel. Like, there's always a mystery. You never know what's quite happening. There are definitely themes across the Bronte novels. And Jer is ultimately about her relationship with Mr. Rochester who is her boss and you know how their relationship progresses.
I'm not usually someone who loves a romance story. Um but I love the romance story in Janeire because of Jane as a character. Um I just I love her as a character. Um she's frequently described as plain. You know that's constantly what Bronte is using to describe her.
but she always acknowledges her worth and she sees that worth and she refuses to be taken advantage of and she's headstrong in that capacity and there's a moment at the end there's something at the end that kind of then make me go I don't really like Jane as much but for the most part of the book I absolutely adore her I think Jana is great because of her as a character you love Jane and so you have to love the whole story anyway yes that's Jana I think that's all of the classics but I'm just going to quickly consult my list to make sure okay ignore me I was wrong I've got five other classics which I haven't talked about yet, but I'm going to have to do that tomorrow because I need to go up to London. And also, I'm out of space on my SD card, so I can't even film. Hello.
It's the next day and I am going to talk through some more of the classics. I'm not going to finish the video now only because it's such a long video that I don't want my reviews to kind of peter off and so I'm going to film it in chunks. Um, so I'm sorry for the outfit change and inevitably the one that is to come. And I'm sorry that I still haven't got my voice back as well. It's very frustrating and I was going to wait until my voice is back to normal, but also I am really excited to share this video and it's one I've been meaning to share for ages and it's such a joy and such a delight to be able to talk about your favorite books. Okay, so the next book on this list is Frankenstein by Mary Shel. I couldn't not include this book. I again did this one for my coursework at Alevel. I compared Frankenstein and book six of Paradise Lost. I just think this book is extraordinary. Again, like with Ted Wildfell Hall, I really enjoy the structure of it and I like the fact that it's a layered narrative. I always find it so interesting when authors are able to do that and um it's one of my favorite parts of like early to mid 19th century writing. Frankenstein, of course, is pre Victorian. Mary Shel wrote this in 1818 and when she was just 17 years old, which is incredible. I'm sure you know the story of Frankenstein.
So Frankenstein is about Dr. Frankenstein who is a very ambitious scientist who is also very isolated and has this like the troubled past of the mad scientist which is quite common in pop culture. It kind of stems from Frankenstein. So Dr. Frankenstein becomes obsessed with this idea that you can bring dead things to life and it speaks to a contemporary fascination in the early 19th century which Mary Shel was aware of. She was living in London.
She knew about this. You know things like rigger mortise uh where the body keeps on moving after death. And aside from that, this is, you know, the enlightenment, end of the enlightenment.
And so these questions of how science and religion go hand in hand are again very much at the forefront. And that is the theme which is prevailing here. It kind of begins with uh the line from paradise lost. As a quote, did I request thee maker from my clay to mold me man?
Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me? which famously Adam says in Paradise Lost and Victor Frankenstein in this book takes on that role of maker of creator of God as he brings the creature, the monster to life. The book is told through three different people's perspectives. You have Walton who is an explorer and he's on an Arctic expedition and he's writing these letters home to his sister and he describes this figure that he sees on the land and bringing this scientist on board, Victor Frankenstein. And then we hear the monster, the creature, tell his story. It's fantastic. I love the writing. I love the atmosphere of this book. Again, it raises so many questions. Like, it's it's fabulous. And another book that I'm just jealous if you haven't read yet. Okay, the next book is The Talented Mr. Ripley. I don't have a copy of this book. My dad has a copy though, but I don't know where it is. I read this only about like 8 months ago, and it was incredible. I loved the film. I actually watched the film before reading the book. I didn't even realize there was a book when I watched it. I love the film of The Taunted Mr. Ripley, but the book is so much better because you really get to experience the mind of Tom Ripley and the way that his thought process works, which is honestly kind of terrifying. He thinks of people as cogs in the plans that he's able to make kind of how are people able to benefit him?
How is he able to use people to his own benefit? And it's really frightening, honestly. like you're reading it and it kind of it makes you very uneasy, makes you very uncomfortable. But I do love books where you really don't like the narrator. I always find them so so interesting and it's just really fascinating to get in their headsp space. So it's about Tom Ripley who is based in New York and he's very scrappy as a character and very like entrepreneurial and trying to make money from all of these little places and he can't remember exactly how, but he breaks into this party and he gets talking with this wealthy man who owns this business. He's kind of hoping that he might be able to get a job through him. And he lies and says that he's friends with this man's son. The father essentially says, "Oh, he's he's in Europe. Like, I can't get him to come back from Italy because you're his friend. Can I pay for you to go to Italy and to try and convince him and to try and tell him to come back?" And so Tom Ripley goes, "Yes, of course." You know, a full passage trip to Italy paid for.
Um, yes, I will say, "Of course." and he goes to Italy and he tries to convince this person he does not know that they are friends and um tries to convince him to come back. But as he's there, he becomes obsessed with this man. The book is a story of obsession, of lying, of deceit set within this beautiful Italian village and the descriptions of of this village are very vivid. It's a wonderful place for it to be set. It's fantastic and I would say it's an excellent summer read. I read it in the heat and it was the perfect time to read it. Okay, next book is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I've read two books by Italo Calvino and I really want to read more now. I also read If No Winter Snider Traveler. So, Invisible Cities is it's very unique in the narrative style. It's this traveler who is speaking to a king to this emperor and he's talking through all of the trips he's taken to various cities and he describes all of them and each chapter is a different city. All of these cities are incredibly different.
They are unique. They're interesting.
And none of them are given names. And so you're invited into these cities with no prior expectations or thoughts. You know, if somebody says Paris, instantly you're approaching it with all of these preconceptions about Paris, but this book means that you don't do that. And I also love the way that it thinks about time and youth and aging. I found that really powerful because in one of the chapters in one of the cities, this man is he's much older and he's revisiting a city that he visited as a young man and he sees all of these young men walking around and it kind of takes him back to that moment when he was that age and he reflects on youth and he reflects on the passing of youth and the transiencece of youth and I found that very moving and that's kind of the part that sticks out the most and I don't want to spoil it because there is something at the end which kind of brings the whole of this book together and becomes this beautiful circular thing but I won't spoil it and also don't look on good readads because I'm pretty sure it's on good readads where it actually does spoil it in the overview and so I would recommend not looking at anything else I was lucky enough not to have any spoilers and it was wonderful for preserving the reading experience of that the next one is the portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce I read this last year and I adored bought it. I've spoken about this at length. I've done, I think, two or three very long reviews about this because it just kept on coming up in videos. It was relevant. I definitely will be repeating myself and I might keep this review a little shorter. It's a building's Roman novel. However, it's also not a building's Roman novel. And of course, like you'd expect that from James Joyce, like he's not going to fit to a standard structure. It's not typical. Like James Joyce's writing is never predictable, I suppose. So, it's a buildings Roman novel in the sense that we start with the protagonist, what's his name? Steven Dless. We start with him as a child and we go right through his youth. So, I think it ends when he's about 25. It's all done chronologically.
However, in a building's Roman novel, you expect for the character's voice to predictably change and to change with the experience. But in a portrait of the artist of a young man, his voice is never kind of consistent. So suddenly, even though he's a teenager, he swings back to speaking like he did as a child.
And there isn't consistency. And I really like that because I think sometimes the buildings Roman novel can feel too simplistic. And it's often put next to like womenist narratives and notions of women's time as proposed by Christover which is kind of the idea that time is layered on top of each other. It's something which cat's eye by Margaret Atwood starts with um the first line is time is not a line but a dimension like the dimensions of space.
If you can move through space you can move through time also and if you knew enough and could move faster than the speed of light then you could go back in time and be in two places at once. And she talks about time as layers, a series of liquid transparencies, one on top of the other. So you can look down through time as as opposed to back along it. And that's the conception of time that we see in portrait. It's a story of guilt.
Uh we kind of see as he becomes a teenager, him grappling with guilt, grappling with shame, and he's within a Catholic school as well, which very much informs that. I think it's fantastic and I definitely want to go back and reread this at some point. I would highly recommend it. It's also It's not that long. A lot of this is notes in this edition. It's actually quite a quick read. I'm going to end this vlog of filming here. I know it's not very long, but my throat is actually really hurting. I feel like my voice is also going to be very annoying and I'm going to hate listening back to it so much.
So, I will film again when hopefully my voice is just a tiny bit less cranky.
Okay, the next book on the list is Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin. If you told me 5 years ago that a Jane Austin book would be in my top 50 books, I wouldn't have believed you because I have adamantly said since I started my channel that I was not a big Jane Austin fan and I didn't like Jane Austin. She's always been my least favorite classical writer. I've never understood why people like her books. Essentially, I have had to say that I was wrong and that I just did not kind of get it. I don't think I was I wasn't reading them like comedies.
I wasn't picking up on the humor when I read them before, but since being my 20ies, I've really grown to love Jane Austin, and I find that she's hilarious.
But as a teenager and younger, I just didn't get it. So, Sense and Sensibility is my favorite of the Jane Austin books.
Controversial opinion, I feel like most people say Pride and Prejudice or Emma or sometimes Persuasion, but I loved Sense and Sensibility. And maybe it's also because it was the first Jane Austin, which I surprised myself by really loving. So, Sense and Sensibility is about three sisters, but mainly the two elder sisters, Elellanena and Marian, they are both incredibly different. You know, before talking about how the siblings in Mill on the Floss are very different. Sense and sensibilities, Elellanena and Marian are very much the same. Marian is passionate and she always leads with emotion and she speaks her mind and she's bold and she can be reckless as well. And then you've got Elellanena who is much more steadfast and sensible. And Elellanena is realistic and loyal and she kind of always looks at the whole entire picture. And that's kind of where the title of sense and sensibility comes from. It's the two sisters where Elellanena is sense and Marian is sensibility and like she's a hopeless romantic. And the book starts where the three sisters and their mother are kicked out of their home. And that's because women couldn't inherit property.
Prevailing theme in Pride and Prejudice as well. But because women can't inherit property, it means that the sisters have to move and they move into this small cottage. And well, it's not actually that small, but it's small compared to where they were living before. And it's a romance and you kind of have these complicated love triangles between Marian's suitors and Elellanena's suitors. And it's just a very pleasant book and I really loved Elanar as a character a lot. I thought she was wonderful and I felt very sorry for her because she's always trying to be the sensible one and sometimes that goes against her own interests. As a character, she was very complete and she's a character I think about a lot.
The next one for classics is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I read this years ago, I think about a decade ago now, and I still think about it. Crucially, I'm talking about Invisible Man as opposed to The Invisible Man. I didn't actually like The Invisible Man by HD Wells, which is the story of the actual Invisible Man, like the man who brews this concoction, which turns him invisible. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is instead like metaphorical invisibility and it's a story about racism in I think it's the 1960s.
Okay, I'm wrong. I think it's set in the 1940s or the '50s, but it was published in 1952, so sometime in the mid- 20th century. And the protagonist is never named. We never know what his name is.
We know that he is a black man. That's all we know about him. And the book starts where he's in the deep south and then he moves to Harlem in New York. And by putting these two like very distinct areas of the United States side by side, Ralph Ellison kind of shows the breadth of racism in America in the midentth century and it's really powerful. There are some really kind of shocking moments from this book. There's one right near the beginning which I think about often.
It's so barbaric. And if you read the book, it's sometime before chapter 3, but if you read this book, you'll know instantly what I'm thinking of when you get to this part. It's a harrowing book, but it's also deeply philosophical. And the narrator himself reflects on this idea of invisibility. Like, he says, "I'm not actually invisible. Let me find the beginning." I have a copy of this book, but I don't know where I put it because it's not on my bookshelf. Maybe I lent it to somebody. So, it starts, I'm an invisible man. No, I'm not a spook like those who haunted Edgar and Poe. Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I'm a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I'm invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodyless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows. It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination. indeed any everything and anything except me. The book is about this metaphorical invisibility of self. It's about celypism. It's about the sense of ego which prevails and kind of in an individualistic society as you can probably tell even from the prologue. The narrator's voice is wonderful. It's friendly and it's funny as well. I would highly recommend Invisible Man. I really, really did love it and I think I'm due a reread. Then the final of the classics, which I've written down, and then I will film all of the non-classics tomorrow, is Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. This is my favorite of the Thomas Hardy books. I've only read three Thomas Hardies, actually, though. And Jude the Obscure is about a man who lives in a rural community. As with many Thomas Hardy books, of course, the rural is at the heart of the writing. Um, like Thomas Hardy is known for his rural landscapes, for his nature writing, for this kind of green backdrop. And Jude the Obscure is a man called Jude who grows up in this rural farming community, but he hears about Oxford, but it's not called Oxford. It's called, I think it's called Oxminster. That's it. Chminster. That's what it's called. And he dreams of going to university at Chrysminster. He dreams of being given this shot at education.
And so he teaches himself Latin and Greeks. Of course, at the time, if you want to apply to Oxford or Cambridge, you actually need to know Latin and Greek, and he does everything he possibly can to escape from this working-class community and become a scholar. Thing after thing after thing gets in his way, and it's such a tragic story, and it's such a complex story as well. Like I obviously I don't want to give anything away, but it's filled with turns and plot twists and but it's complex cuz I say you feel so sorry for Jude, but also there are moments when you don't. He's a very good man. Like he's a very good person. I also personally really liked it for the commentary on religion. And so if you're interested in Victorian conceptions of organized religion, then you might enjoy this book, too. Anyway, those are all of the classics on my top 50 books and then I'm going to do all of the other ones tomorrow. Again, I'm hoping that my voice is going to be better by tomorrow when I film that. Thank you for watching so far. Sorry I keep on rambling. All right, next I'm going to talk through the contemporary books. Um, my voice is still somewhat gone, which is a little bit disappointing. Um, okay. So, first is The Great Godden by Meoff. I read this in 2020 and have been wanting to reread it since. Every single summer since I've been like, I really want to reread this. It's set in either Cornwall or Devon and it's this second home which this family has and every year they go down and they meet with all of their cousins and aunts and uncles and everyone lives together in this big house and the pace of life slows. It's incredibly idyllic, but there are these tensions which are underlying within the family and as you're reading, you don't really know what they are. Like there are but you know that all of these secrets are present. In a sundrrenched house by the sea, a family of teenage brothers and sisters and older cousins fill the golden days with wine and games and planning a wedding. And the godens irresistible charming kit and sirly silent Hugo. Suddenly there's a serpent in paradise and the consequences will be devastating. Um it's the writing of this and the atmosphere of this which made it one of my favorites and I can't wait to return to it this year. It's one I would very much recommend. Next is Lani by Max Porter. Max Porter is one of my favorite writers. Um like living writers. Most of my favorite writers of Victorian. Um and his writing is so experimental. Like it's very different from anything else I've read. Like just to give you a sense, this is what one of the pages looks like. Like all of these uh sentences which are in odd shapes kind of moving around the page. The book is about a very sensitive, intelligent young boy and he's kind of at the center of the whole book and this little boy goes missing and the book is about the kind of impact that this has on the small village in which he lives. The book is very much about the village dynamic and that's what the blur kind of covers. You know, this village belongs to the people who live in it and those who lived in it hundreds of years ago.
And it goes between Lanni, who's the boy who goes missing, um the villagers and uh like his parents and them being kind of worried and the policeman being worried and then dead Papa Toothwart who is a kind of spirit who used to live in the village and his sections are just filled with the things that he hears and the things that he's listening in on. And so you hear all of these tiny snippets from conversation like Rottweiler pups 50p each or a strip for two pound. Yes, I'm threatening you son. All wild things fear the smell of human beings. And it all kind of fits together into this weird tapestry. Um it's such an interesting read and I've read everything that uh Max Porter has written. Um but Lanni is by far my favorite and the one that made it into the top 50 books. Next, we've got one of my favorite authors, Lemony Snickicket, Poison for Breakfast. This has got the exact tone of his children's books and of the series Unfortunate Events books.
Um, but it's more philosophical and in the story, the narrator wakes up and he's given this note which says, "You have had poison for breakfast." For breakfast, he has the same thing every morning, which is tea with honey, a piece of toast with cheese, one sliced pear, and an egg. perfectly prepared and he knows that there is poison somewhere in his breakfast. So, he goes through each of these, the tea, the honey, the toast, the cheese, and tries to work out where the poison could be. And it's very reflective. It's witty. It's funny, and it's kind of it is that kind of signature voice that you'll remember from the series Unfortunate Events books. Um, this I think is my favorite Lemony Stick It can very much be enjoyed by adults. The Binding was the best book I read in 2022.
Was it one of the best books I read in 2022? The book itself is beautiful and as the name suggests, it's about book binding. This is a world in which books are banned. Like, think Fahrenheit 451 again, but different. It's more of a kind of instead of being dystopian, it's almost like a it's it feels historical and it feels like it's Victorian, but it's a different Victorian universe in the same way as like Babel is Victorian, but it's also not Victorian. So books, actually I say they're not allowed, but they are allowed. They're just very controversial and they work like there is a kind of magic behind books. There is this dark secret behind books and how they work. And we don't know what that is at the beginning, but kind of slowly it's hinted to us. And we start to kind of uncover what books mean in this world. And EMTT is a farmer who is enlisted and invited to become an apprentice to a bookbinder. And so he goes to this book binder and he learns the craft. And through doing so, he becomes involved in the kind of secret world of books and how they work. and it's wonderful. Honestly, the writing, Bridget Collins's writing is incredible and um so atmospheric. Next, The Midnight Library by Matt Hey. Um which is just it's very heartwarming and it's very life affirming. So Norah is experiencing depression and she attempts to take her own life. And when she dies, she wakes up in this library. is filled with green books and the shelves go on for as far as the eye can see. And as she pulls them down, like each one of these books shows a different way that her life would have gone. So it kind of works on parallel universe theory. Um like every time you make a choice, your life splinters off in a different direction, but if you made another choice right in that moment, then your life would have looked different. And so, um, Norah has all these ideas of like, I would have been happier if I'd trained to become an Olympic swimmer. I would have been happier if I'd become geographer. I think like that's one of them. She's able to go into these worlds and she's able to experience the world um, and like the universe and the life she would have had if she'd made that earlier decision. And it's such a great premise, like such a clever premise. and the writing lives up to the premise, which is always the kind of fear with a book that has such a good hook and such a great premise. Um, but Matt Hag's writing is, as I say, it's like tender and it's sensitive and life affirming. That really is the word for describing this book. Yellow Face, on the other hand, is not life affirming by any means. I love RF Kuang. Um, I've read Babel, Catabasis, The Poppy War, and Yellow Face. And it's funny with RF Kong because she's one of my favorite writers, and I think she's so good at what she does, and her books are so clever, and I love the world building. I think the characters feel very real.
Yeah, all of her books are very very uncomfortable and they're very uncomfortable to sit in and to read like the racism and the colonial in Babel or the blatant sexism in Catabasis. And in Catabasis, the way that the characters are prepared to do these really awful things in the name of success and personal gain. Like that's the same thing in Yellowface. Um it's very uncomfortable. Um, and it's like, oh my gosh, it it like your stomach is just constantly dropping emotionally. It's just so intense. Uh, the book is narrated by a very, I was going to say morally ambiguous, but like a very immoral character. Basically, she is friends with this very, very good author called Athena. Right at the beginning of the book, Athena dies, and she finds a manuscript that Athena was working on.
Um, and it's basically finished. Uh, like she finds it in the typewriter finished. And June decides that she's going to edit this book and publish it as her own. And so she does. And the book has huge success because Athena Lou is a very good writer. And um, June takes all of that credit for herself and she never credits Athena. And the whole time you see June trying to justify to herself that what she's done is okay and trying to justify that it was fine for her to steal this work because she did all of the editing and she did all of the extra work and like Athena had just done the bare bones of it. So the book's about racism in publishing. It's about plagiarism. And I love what it says on the back. It says this is one hell of a story. It's just not hers to tell. Next, The Invisible Life of Adi Laroo, which was just a joy from start to end.
Honestly, like this was my favorite book of 2023. Um, I've dipped into it since.
It's a book I think about often. I just like the premise is amazing, but the writing lives up to the premise. Again, the writing lives up to the premise, which is an extraordinary thing to have an amazing plot, amazing idea, and amazing writing. So, we open in 16th century France, and it's Addy Laroo's wedding day, and she does not want to marry this man. She wants to see the world, and she's too young, and she doesn't want to be tied down to somebody, but this is what's been agreed for her. this is what's been planned for her. And so she goes out into the forest and she prays. She prays to these dark spirits that she's been told she shouldn't pray to. And she says, "Please, anything. I will give anything in exchange for not marrying. I want to see the world. I want to enjoy my youth." And this spirit comes to her, FA comes to her, I think it's FA, and makes a deal with her and says, "You can live forever. You can be immortal. You will never age. But every time that someone stops looking at you, every time somebody turns away, they'll forget you existed. So, you're going to pass through life, but you're never going to be remembered. Um, and Addy says, "Yes, please. I want that. Please." Because, um, she wants that freedom. She wants the freedom that that would give her.
Um, and FA essentially says, "As soon as you've decided you've had enough, then I will take your soul." And that's the bargain that they make. And so the book cuts between modernday New York and 16th century France. Um, and Addy has seen the last 400 years of time pass. And so she's she's gone through the World War, she's gone through the French Revolution. She's seen governments rise and fall. And it's this wonderful like macro perspective on history of like kind of recent Western history. And I just think it's so cool to see it through this person's eyes.
And the book really reflects on and thinks about like the idea of the muse and um how a muse will be remembered through art and what it means for art to remember something. Um I think uh Boulder's painter of modern life essay is a lovely one to read alongside this.
Um, but also even though we see the macro scale of history, we also see Addie as a person and we see her exchanges with real people. Um, and especially with Foust. Um, which I mean it's not like it's kind of almost a love story between her and FA, I guess, like they have a very strange relationship.
Um, but it's excellent this book. I would highly recommend it and I just think about this all the time and I want to reread it.
Um, this is actually a proof. Uh, this is Lady McBthad by Isabelle Schula. I adored this. It's incredible. Like, honestly, looking at this now, I'm like, I need to reread it. So, this is about Lady McBth's backstory, and it starts when she's a young girl, and we kind of see her childhood, and then we see her being betrothed to King Duncan, and um we get all of these kind of small glimpses and hints uh as to things that she then says later in the play. So, it kind of creates this context for Lady McBth for the play. I love McBth. is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and obviously Lady McBth is a hugely fascinating character and so it's incredible to kind of spend this time with her as a character. Um, but I also love how it doesn't feel sensationalist like there are dramatic moments but it doesn't feel sensationalist or like things are being done for the sake of being done. And I also love the voice of this a lot. It's very lyrical and some parts almost feel like spells, but it speaks to early Scottish mythology and uh that early history and then that kind of comes about in the writing itself.
Okay, we're down to the last stack of books. Um I've actually got two Ian Muran books and he's the only modern writer who has two books on this list.
So the first is The Children Act. This was the best book I read in 2019. And um I read it after watching the film actually. I think a lot of the time I will choose favorite books based on the writing and how much I like the kind of crafting of sentences. But I've got to say for both of the Ian Mchuan books, obviously I like his writing cuz I like his books, but I think I like Ian Mchuan's books more for the character building, the themes and the plot. Um, I think I love the way that Ian Mchuan crafts characters and his descriptions are so vivid. Like he uses the most incredible vocabulary. Uh, like very specific vocabulary. And in this book, for example, like he'll use specific legal vocabulary because the narrator is a judge. The book is narrated by Fiona, who is a judge in London. And there is a court case where a young boy who's 17 needs a blood transfusion and is told that he won't survive if he doesn't have this blood transfusion. But he and his family are Jehovah's Witnesses. And Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in blood transfusions. So the parents are adamant that they don't want their son to have this blood transfusion, but the hospital is insisting that they do. So the hospital takes the parents to court.
Um, and because the boy is 17, he can't legally make the decision himself. um and he doesn't have medical autonomy.
And so the book is about Fiona trying to make a decision and kind of going to meet the boy and trying to understand and like figure out what the best decision is. And it's such like a morally complex case. And I just really enjoyed the debate and also the kind of way that the legal understanding of the child plays into this. He's 17, but if it were four months later, he'd be able to make the decision himself. Um, it's a very good book. I really liked this.
The other Ian Mchuan book, which I don't have cuz I only have it on Kindle, is Atonement. And this is one of my favorite films and one of my favorite books, and again, this has a very morally ambiguous narrator. And intentionally, I don't say immoral this time. I say morally ambiguous. Um, because Bri is 13. And again kind of with these like the themes of the children act about how childhood feeds into responsibility and uh decision-m she's 13 and she has very like and you don't like her and you don't like the things she does and they have massive huge ramifications because of these kind of childish prejudices that she has. But equally at the same time, she's 13. And so the the book is asking you to like consider and make a decision as to how guilty she is and whether she needs to atone and what that should look like. I think that moral question is very interesting. Um so the book is set at the turn of the century. Um it's just before the first world war. I think it's like 1910. And it's said in a grand stately home. This is another of those books like The Go Between and Brides Head Revisited, which is like country house summer sort of vibes. Um, and the whole of the first part of the book is set on one single day in the summer where 13-year-old Bry delivers a letter from Robbie, um, who lives on the estate and kind of I think he work he works for the family, but also he's been raised almost like a son to the to their father and delivers a note from him to her sister. Um, but it's very explicit. And so Bri sees this note and she comes up with this kind of fanciful story of what it means and thinks of it as a threat. And that then informs the way that she looks at the whole evening and the way that she interacts with the evening. And it's all based on the fact that she didn't understand what this was. And it's based on this lack of understanding. And I also really like how the idea of storytelling comes into all of this cuz Briany is trying to be a writer. Starts with her writing this play. Um, and then the second half of the book is set during the war and we see more from Robbie who is now a soldier and Bry who's working as an auxiliary nurse. I think it's a fascinating book because you see the impact of like one tiny decision and how these really tiny eventualities can have such a massive massive impact and effect and it's just a very good book. Yeah, it's a very good book. Um, next here is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Saffron Foer. So, this is about Oscar Shell whose father dies in 9/11. And he finds this key after his father's death um in a vase and he doesn't know what lock this key opens. And so, he goes on this journey around New York to try and figure out where this key came from. All he knows about it is black. It says on a on a little kind of a little word on it saying black. And so the book is him going around New York meeting all of these different people trying to understand and trying to make sense of something that doesn't make any sense.
Um the film is my favorite film ever, like my top film of all time. I prefer the film actually to the book, but I do love the book too. And I especially love the narrative style and the way it's narrated because it's unlike anything else I've read. This is narrated by a young boy who it never says that he does have autism, but it's implied that he has autism. And um Saffron Ver kind of tries to show this through the narration style. And this is where this becomes one of my favorite books because it's visual as well. Like it's filled with kind of pictures. He's circled all of these different words. There's this page which is just filled with numbers.
And it's so unlike anything I've ever read. And um Oscar as a character is just like you just want to give him a hug. Like just yeah would recommend.
Next is Me and Emma which I've put on here even though I haven't read it since I was 13. Um and I've put it here because when I did read it I said this is the best book ever. I've never read anything so wonderful. This is incredible. And so it feels wrong for me not to include this book. Um, but I actually do genuinely need to reread this and I will. It's one of those books I can't really say much about because of spoilers. Elizabeth Flock is able to create space very vividly and convincingly. There's not much I can say about it apart from please, please read this. I'm going to read you the blur of this one. In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other 8-year-old, playing make believe, dreading school, dreaming of far away places. But even her naively hopeful mind can't shut out the terrible realities of home or help her to protect her younger sister, Emma. As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunken stepfather, Richard. Abuse their mama can't seem to stop. After the sister's plans to run away from their impoverished North Carolina home unravel, Car's world soon takes a shocking turn with devastating results.
This next book is actually my favorite of all of the books here on this list of the top 50. um which is saying something again. Um other than a little princess, this is my favorite book of all time.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. I've read it multiple times. It's filled with annotations and dog ears. I've even done some annotations in invisible ink. In this copy, I've got this little thing on the front.
Cats Eye is about Elaine Rzley who up until the beginning of this book has spent the whole of her childhood traveling around with her parents because her father is an entomologist.
And so she spent the whole of her life kind of camping and um sleeping in different hotels from night to night as her father collects caterpillar species and different bugs and studies them. Um but at the beginning of the book he gets a position as a professor and so they all move to this uh town in Canada so that he can teach at the university. And so Elaine's whole world completely changes as you can imagine and she's sent to school for the very first time.
Um and at school she meets a girl called Cordelia who becomes her best friend but the friendship is unusual. Um it's very controlling and very kind of unbalanced. And we as a reader know that Elaine is being bullied by Cordelia, but Elaine can't see that because Cordelia is her best friend and she cares about her so much. And it cuts between Elaine as a child and Elaine revisiting this town, I think it's Toronto, as an adult, um, as an artist and she's displaying in a gallery in Toronto. And when she's back, she finds all of these memories returning and um she kind of looks back on these childhood experiences for the first time. And the book kind of more than anything is like thinking about time and the way that memory exists for us and the way that she says that you don't look back a long time, but down through it like a series of liquid transparencies, one on top of another.
Sometimes they come to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing.
nothing goes away. And so the idea is that we're built up of all of our past experiences and even if we don't remember something, it's still there and it's still kind of like it's just been built on top of. And I really like that conception of time. Um it's also very just very emotional. So yes, Cassie, my top favorite book, the number one that I would recommend. Next is The Secret History by Donna Tart. Of course, this was going to make the list. Um this was the other top book of 2022. Um, oh my gosh, when I read this, I couldn't believe I hadn't read it. It's the ultimate dark academia book. It's the one that's always cited as the dark academia book. Is also, and this isn't an original thought, I've seen and read a lot around this. It is funny that The Secret History is at the heart of the dark academia aesthetic, internet aesthetic, when the whole book is a criticism of aesthetics and a whole crit and is a criticism of kind of these false presentations of self. It's so clever. Like the book is so clever. The writing is so clever. It's so perfectly mapped out and thought out. And um I love all the the little illusions. It's incredibly detailed. The world is so vivid. The characters are vivid and it's oh my gosh it's just glorious. Like really do read this. Again, so much food for thought. It's about a young man called Richard who starts a new university. It's a small college in New England. Richard is from California.
He's not from a welloff family and he doesn't want people to know this when he arrives. He's kind of he's very withdrawn and kind of comes across as very mysterious and attracts the attention of this small group of scholars who exclusively study ancient Greek and Richard is fascinated by this group but they become fascinated by him and so he finds himself being enveloped into this group and kind of starting to understand this secret society for one of a better word. The next is Aphilia Swam by Kelly Swain, which every time I talk about I feel bad because it's not easily accessible. Um, if you want to read this book, you have to email Blackwells directly and ask if you can buy a copy because they only stock it in the Blackwells Oxford store, which is so sad because this book is just extraordinary. Um, as the name suggests, this is about Aphilia from Hamlet, but instead of drowning, Aphilia swims. Aphilia swam and this is what happens after Aphilia swam after she didn't drown. So it's set in the 16th century and Aphilia floats downstream where she is found by a nunnery. She's found by uh the sisters of a nunnery and Lady Grace specifically takes her in and under her wing. And when Aphilia is shown to possess this knowledge for boty, this kind of intuitive knowledge for boty, Lady Grace kind of takes her on a bit like an apprentice. And it's not a particularly dramatic book at all. Like it doesn't lead with plot. It leads with the seasons. Um, but it's lyrical and it's beautiful and it's sensitive. It's tender. And um I love the fact also Lady Grace is based on a real 16th century botist, Lady Grace Mild, who is one of my favorite historical figures. And um it's very cool to see her kind of brought to life in this book. Um it's also set near Oxford and so there is some of the book that takes place in Oxford and it's printed on this beautiful Venetian paper with these lovely illustrations too. So it's just it's a lovely book to hold.
Um, next, Call Me By Your Name by Andrea Esman. I really loved this book and I loved it. I preferred it to the film as well. Again, for the writing more than anything and the way that it captures summer. It's funny because I'm realizing that a lot of my favorite books on here are set in the summer, even though summer is my least favorite season. And reading books like this kind of make me like summer a little bit better, at least when I'm reading it. Um, so maybe that's why I keep on picking them up.
This is a love story set somewhere in northern Italy where a young boy falls in love with a visitor to the house, like an older visitor to the house. And so it's a story of burgeoning love and uh IO kind of falling deeply in love with Oliver. I've put this on, but now I'm suddenly like this is this is wrong to include. I'd put perks of being a Wallflower, but actually I think this counts as YA. Still, I will say this is one of my favorites. Perks of Being a Wallflower is a coming of age book about Charlie, who's 14, he's starting high school.
Charlie is a freshman, and while he's not the biggest geek in school, he is by no means popular, shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years, yet socially awkward. He is a Wallflower caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it. The the the whole book is told through letters to a friend, dear friend, and then they all end with love always, Charlie. And I really love the aistoy format for this.
Um, it takes place over the course of his first year at high school and it's a great book because you love Charlie so much as a character. Like you just want the absolute best for him and he's so endearing and he's so lovely and he's such a good friend. Next I got Little by Edward Kerry and uh this is the real life story of Madame Two Swords in London but it's fictionalized. It's not like a history. It's it's not an actual proper history. Um, and there are elements of this which are so absurd and which are kind of intentionally satirical, but as a result, it's very funny and bizarre whilst also be being grounded in history. And I like the fact that you never actually quite know what's real and what's not. And I think it's like the little illustrations are wonderful, but there's something about them being wax models. Like it's uh this the main character is an expert in making models out of wax. And there's something in the image of that something absurd in the image of that actually uh which is just very appealing and lovely to read about. The book is a buildong's roman. So it starts when uh the main character is born chapter one in which I am born and in which I describe my mother and father and then we see the leadup to the French revolution. We see the French revolution and we see the aftermath of the French Revolution. So it's such a historically significant period and it's fascinating to see the juxosition between the beginning and the end of that. I loved this book and I would love to read some more of Edward K's work. The next book is History of the Rain. This is set in Ireland and it's about a young woman whose father has recently died and she's making her way through all of the books in his library um in an effort to get to know him and to understand him. And the whole premise behind this book is that we can understand people and we can connect with people by reading the same books as them, by kind of sharing in that intimate shared experience of of reading the same things. Um, and at the same time, she's also trying to publish something that her father wrote and she's desperately like sending sending it off from from the local post office.
And I love all the workings of this small village and the relationships between the villages and the family dynamics at play. And it's it's very domestic and uh very kind of intimate in terms of these interactions. And then you've got the very separate and personal and individual state of grief that the young woman is in um and as she reads these books. It truly is a beautiful book. The next book here is The Kiterunner, which is another of those books that you just think about so often. And contextually, Afghanistan's monarchy has just fallen. Um, we're seeing the rise of the Taliban and, um, the book follows Amir, who was a young boy, and seeing that disparity between the two, seeing the, you know, the innocence of this child and seeing the again like the domestic family interactions when this is the background, it's very jarring. And even though this is the context, the main like heart of the book is about this boy's relationship with his father um and the love between the two of them.
And and one of the really key themes of this book is the idea of stealing and the idea that stealing is the only crime that actually exists, which is something that Amir's father says and how all crimes can be can be brought back to stealing and to theft. But the main part of this book is when something terrible happens to a friend of Amir's and he doesn't do anything to stop it and it's the impact that that decision and that lack of action has on the rest of Amir's life. Um the next book I've written down here is Ellen Olphant is completely fine. This is about a young woman who becomes obsessed with this singer and she is convinced that they are meant to be together and so she does all of these things like try and uh further this relationship and make and make it into something and it's a very simp like the plot is very simple but you read it because oh my gosh Elena is just such a lovely person and such a lovely character. I just love the way her brain works um so much. Uh and she's such like just a cool person and such a cool character. And I remember reading this when I was 17 and just adoring her as a character. Never have read any anyone like her before in a book, but you also feel so sorry for her. She's also had this very traumatic past. I've also written down The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. This book is hilarious. It's so funny. It's by the same author as the 100-year-old man who disappeared. Um, who just kind of walked out of the hospital where he's staying. And, um, the girl who saved the king of Sweden is just as kind of like strange, absurd.
It's like this big kind of adventure narrative where you're not expecting anything and everything's so unexpected.
You don't know what's happening and I just love it. So, it follows Nbeco who is a young girl. I think she's 10 and she lives in the slums of Suetto and one day she decides she's just going to leave. So she does and she gets run over by an engineer who then hires her to be a cleaner for this uh like top secret nuclear facility and just things like that keep on happening. Like just all of these very bizarre occurrences and um like everything kind of makes sense logically in the plot of things but it also doesn't. And um I just love Nco so much as a character. Um like she's a massive reader. She's very clever like very quickwitted. Um, and she is she is like in my top favorite book characters I've read. I really just really like her. Um, and then the final book which I just realized maybe should have gone under classics is the Belgar by Sylvia Pla. Famously, this is Pla's only novel and it's heartbreaking heartbreaking book. It's about this young girl who age 19 received this scholarship to go to New York and to work on a magazine. like she's hired as a magazine intern and she lives this incredibly opulent and luxurious life for this time that she's in New York, but while she's there, she grows incredibly depressed. And there's this famous scene where she throws her clothes out the window of this New York apartment. She's just throwing them out, watching them fall, watching them float through the air. And when she returns home, she ends up being sent to a mental institution. And it's this it's completely harrowing because you know that Sylvia Pla experienced something so similar and when you look into her life like there are so many things that map on directly into this book you see the treatment that was given to people who were mentally unwell in the mid-century and it's harrowing. It's terrible. Like electric shock therapy for example we see the main character in this go through. But it's um an introspective, deeply sad, moving, philosophical book.
And I've read it a few times. I do very much like this. Um and it is one of my favorites. And I think that's all top 50. I might have miscounted and accidentally missed something on the list. So if I have, I might end up jumping in with another book. Now, indeed, I am four books short of 50. I don't know how that happened. It was only on editing that I realized I was four books short. I knew it would happen though. I made the prediction and I was correct. Now, when I was filming the contemporary books, I actually decided whilst filming to take off two of those contemporary books from my top favorites. And that's because as I was filming, I realized that even though I love these books, they're not in my top 50. And I feel like my standards for the classics versus the contemporaries were skewed and were different. And that was in the interest of trying to make it even when I don't necessarily have to make it even. That's why I made such a significant mess up of uh numbers of books. Now the first one which I did end up adding when I took away one of those contemporaries was uh the brothers caramel by dsttovski. Um it is just one of the most incredible books ever written. I think it it like like with crime crime and punishment and as I was saying before Dvski's work is just it's its philosophy and it studies and it considers philosophical debates through uh conversations and dialogue between two characters and the wonderful thing about the brothers Karamatzoff is that all of the characters are so different.
So essentially it's about the Caramatov brothers and their father dies and um the three sons are put on trial for his murder and the whole book is trying to figure out who killed the father and who had the reasoning to kill the father.
And the reason that these uh philosophical dialogues and conversations are able to come about is because the three sons represent vastly different ideologies and ways of approaching the world and finding meaning in life. So Aloia is the very kind-hearted and morally good brother. Um he's a priest and he approaches the whole of the world with this open heart and with this honesty and with this trust and um he's incredibly endearing as a character too.
Um but he bases all of his decisions in in God and in religion. Then you've got Ivan who is kind of I mean he's very very intelligent and he's very cynical as a result of his intelligence. He kind he almost represents like an early existentialism and um is very critical of organized religion. He doesn't believe in God. He's an atheist. And then the final brother is Dimmitri who is my least favorite of the brothers. He he's a henist essentially. And so you have these very different worldviews all uh being brought together in like the conversations that they have as brothers. And it's fascinating because unless they were brothers, these men might not necessarily be talking and they wouldn't be brought into conversation. But they're having to consider like these very like these huge themes of family and death and inheritance and um ancestry and legacy. um and having to discuss all of these together with these very different worldviews. The absolute best, I think, are between Aloisha and Ivan. Their conversations are the most interesting. And um there are also so many fascinating like kind of uh subplots and substories where the characters are telling stories of other characters or of themselves. And um it's like it's just it's such a morally amb it's such a morally ambiguous book and the book is constantly asking you to question any kind of absolute ideas of morality that you might hold and uh question your own worldview and it's just a fantastic book. Uh again as with crime and punishment I think it's one that you need to spend a lot of time pondering over. Um but it's the last of Dusk Dorovski's novels. He spent the last two years of his life writing it and um it's considered his magnumopus work. The next of the classics is the green gauge summer by rumagen and again this is a summer narrative. They are this this is definitely a theme. Um it's about a mother single mother who uh goes to Italy for the summer with her six children. I think she has many many children and um they spend the and when they arrive there the mother grows sick and so the children are left to fend for themselves essentially. I'm jumping in because I just explained this so poorly.
It's actually not Italy, it's France and there are only four children but in my memory it was so many. The reason that I love this book so much is how much changes over the course of just one summer. So Joss is the oldest of the siblings and she has to look after the children while the mother is sick. And over the course of this summer, she goes from being one of the children to taking on the role of an adult. And um so you see her growing up over the course of this one summer. And I think it's fascinating that when the mother does recover, she essentially meets a different person, like a a daughter who feels very very different. Um I remember loving this book. It's been a long time since I read it, but I would uh still consider it in my top 50. Next on this list is On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Wang. I can't believe I forgot to talk about this one when I was doing contemporary. Um this is it reads more like poetry than it does pros. Uh and Ocean Point is a poet. Uh Time is a mother is one of his uh poetry collections which I loved. um his just his writing is just so it's so tender and it's lyrical and it's beautiful.
Like every single line is crafted so perfectly and um uh the prem the premise of the book is it's a letter to his mother about his sexuality and about his childhood, but it's written to a mother who cannot read. And so he's sharing this and it's kind of it's written to be shared but also tinged with this like awareness that it won't actually be read. And um again in terms of liking books for this for the structure and for the for narrative choices. Um I I I I love the format of the book so much. Um but the writing itself is just so beautiful and it it flits between times and moments um like so quickly. It's kind of it feels more like somebody sat thinking. Um not but it also doesn't feel like stream of consciousness. Um because the moments are too pure and too like vivid for it to be for it to be stream of consciousness. Um it's like somebody sat with their thoughts kind of feeling these im like kind of feeling the images like come in one after another but then moving between times and spaces. And I know I'm not describing this very well and it doesn't make any sense at all, but it is it's just it is a beautiful piece of work.
And um I haven't read Emperor of Gladness yet, but I cannot wait to read Emperor of Gladness. And if you've read it, please do tell me what you thought about it because I'm so excited to try it. And then the final book is We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriber.
It's about a teenage school shooter and it's narrated by his mother. And at the very beginning of the book, we learn what's happened. And then the book switches between the present moment and the past and his childhood and I guess the signs. But also the book is very much about the relationship with his mother and um the complexities and like kind of strangeness of the relationship. It's a truly harrowing book like completely and utterly. And I think it weirdly like I read it when I was 16 or 17. the same age that Kevin is, I think, in the book. And I found it I found it very disturbing then, but like I know that if I read it again now, it would be so much more disturbing. Um, and I don't know if I could go back and reread it. Like I a part of me really wants to cuz I remember just thinking it was one of the greatest books. um like in terms of how in terms of like the crafting of like the mother's narratorial voice and um the completeness of the backstory of Kevin and kind of the completeness of him as a as a character and how much it makes you think and how uh I guess I guess if if literature is the creation of emotion like how it it it does conjure emotion and it really makes you feel. Um, but also like but also the premise and like the idea of it. It's so awful that I I want to reread it, but I also don't know if I can. Anyway, thank you so much for watching this video. I know it's incredibly long, but I wanted to give a full review of these books because it's a video that I've been meaning to film for such a long time and people are always asking me, "What are your favorite books?" And so, I wanted to make a video where I could direct people um and say like, "These are my favorite books." And I will talk about them at length. Um, so if you manage to actually watch the whole thing, I am very impressed. Like very impressed. Um, and do let me know in the comment section as well what maybe your top five favorite books are. It's very difficult to narrow it down. Very difficult. Anyway, thank you so much for watching and I hope you have more than just a productive
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