Maybe Woolf just isn't your vibe, but I hope you try To The Lighthouse eventually...

I buy a lot of older books and trying to separate real books from instant books is a real trial. I do buy on Ebay if I can see real photo of the book.

If our rights are stripped akin to the HMTs, there will be violinz, a lot of it.

If you do re read The Handmaids Tale, consider read the follow up: the Testament

My "finally got around to reading it" book was Lonesome Dove. I loved it, highly recommended!

i'm going to convince people i'm smart by listening to you talk about reading 12 classic books. thanks.

I love Virginia, but Orlando is not her best. Mrs. Dalloway or Waves are WAY better and let me add that Im surprised you didn't like Age of Innocence, maybe it's about pace as well? Because yes, I guess it's a story about terrible people. Makes me think of Laclos and his Dangerous Liaisons. I wonder if you'd like that. From classics, I'd recommend Waves, Frankenstein, Solaris, shorts stories by Marquez, don Quijote, Wuthering Heights, in cold blood, A clockwork orange, the count of monte Cristo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Metamorphosis.

As far as I know, Of Mice and Men is the only book in this list that got a Bugs/Daffy cartoon based on it (The Abominable Snow Rabbit.)

Virginia Wolfe is so good! Please read her short story “the mark on the wall” and maybe if you have time “To the lighthouse” I think you’d like those better than the ones you read

I'm currently reading The Word for World is Forest (about 2/3 of the way in) so I stopped your video there since I don't want any spoilers (even minor ones). This far into the novella, I will say that it is making me so angry! I love it and I hate it. I'll come back and watch your take after I finish reading it. I'm reading Le Guin's Hainish Cycle books in published order and they have all been very good...you can definitely see her growth as a writer...but this novella just pressed a lot of buttons for me. It really isn't the usual "escapist" sci-fi I tend to prefer, but I think it is an extraordinary work.

You don’t need to read classic books to convince people you are smart. That’s what the glasses are for :)

More likeable on average might be "Three Men in a Boat", "The Wind in the Willows", and "Cold Comfort Farm".

Thanks

Bonfire for the Vanities

I have a few recommendations for you: 1. Hospital Station by James White.And the entire series that follows. The variety of alien species and creativity on display is impressive. 2. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl. This one is hard for me to explain without spoiling it. Basically for the first manned mission to Mars they decide to turn one of the crew members into cyborg. And there are at least two great plot twists by the end of the book. 3. Startide Rising by David Brin. It's a second book in the series, but it's my favorite. Human starship is stuck on a weird planet. They need to repair it, hide from various space-faring aliens hunting them, and because of human curiosity they are also figuring out why this planet is so weird. And there are dolphins. 4. Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. It starts like fantasy, but it's SF. And damn good one at that. Also those old books have chapters ending on cliffhanger because they were first published in newspapers. After the story was ended, it was printed again as a book...

I loved radio dramas growing up (70s/80s) and there was a radio drama adaptation of this book. Mostly I remember the young monk getting killed by the bandits. Having read it as a novel as an adult, I mostly remember the ending of the wild large-scale perspectives of civilizations rising, nuking themselves, gradually rebuilding back into civilization again, nuking themselves again, over and over and over for thousands and thousands of years. Absolutely wild.

Well done. Thank you. You might enjoy The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. Semi-creepy.

I've tried to read Mark Twain and his dialect puts me off. I love Dickens who uses dialect but does it better. I've read Mark Twain's autobiographical writings. There is a 3 vol version that can be gotten cheaply. Read bits and pieces from it. Read 'Grapes of Wrath' next.

TBH I don't know most of these. Never felt much of an urge to read Woolf. I think you are right about Twain, he was a grand old buffer but with the exception maybe of 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' (which, come on, you've got to read just for the title) and the first part of Huck Finn, he kind of misses fire. Steinbeck was another author who seemed to have more misses than hits but I highly recommend 'Cannery Row,' it is a jewel of a book, note-perfect.

You should read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It a fun light hearted western about a young man who joins a group of friends and adventurers. They travel through Mexico and southern Texas learning about the people, cultures and animals. The young man is mentored by a kindly biologist named The Doctor while he endeavors on the noble task of cataloging all the indigenous animals and people. It’s also a fun read because McCarthy doesn’t use normal punctuation. Hope you enjoy this light summer read!!!

If you loved Dispair, I would recommend Pale Fire. It's Nabokov weirdness in the best way.

i read Kindred a couple months ago, it was indeed an awesome book I wouldn't even call it a sci-fi book tho, tbh.

It's the "It's fine"/this-is-<not>-fine scene, it seems. Theonomic ascendency, misogynist-fascist affronts on bodily autonomy, systemic child abuse, genocide, 6th mass extinction event, climate catastrophes, unsustainable production/consumption models, totalized devaluation of human subjectivity via machine automation, collapse of fragile systems with no back-up's (hospitals hacked, grids going down, etc), increased mass violence, increased homelessness, increased suicide rates (including among young people, in particular Indigenous young people), and a failure to even address the continuity not only of genocides in general, but the longest still-on-going genocide in human history (against First Nations peoples)...also space debris... It's fine.

Thanks for telling us about this--I had no idea. When I buy books these days (as opposed to using my local library), I have been buying used books through Amazon, which are not coming from Amazon, and so far, those have all been real used books, not reprints by Amazon. But honestly, I mostly use the library.

Beautiful, smart, hot 🔥 girl, all the best!

I don't know that you would enjoy reading his stuff, but David Weber does a lot of military sci fi like the Honor Harrington series where communication delays are a thing. The interesting thing in this regard is how he takes a lot of inspiration from Earth navies and merchant shipping, so this communication delays seem reminiscent of delays in the age of sailing ships.

I never get tired of recommending 'Fiasco', by Lem. It's like 'Eden' on steroids.

You seem dumb, which is refreshing until it becomes boring so I stopped watching after 10 minutes. You should become a screenwriter.

It is curious that you said that you not that interested in the series - yet "The Word for World Is Forest" IS part of the loosely connected series called "Hainish Cycle".

I finished Master and Margarita today and was just as underwhelmed. The story is disconnected, the characters shallow, and no amount of gimmicks could make me care about either. In that regard the style reminded me of Douglas Adams. But a novel with very similar topics that I can recommend is The Wandering Jew by Stefan Heym.

Eucharist -- Pronounced -- You-Cha-Rist.

"Dystopian" describes all the Russian literature I've read, and none of them were sci-fi 😅

Omg I don’t watch or read anything with kids either! When I tell people that they don’t get it.

Dragon Riders Of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey. First sci-fi book I ever read more than once. Fantastic story.

You should, if you haven't already, read the novella "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. Please, god, don't watch the movie, please god, don't watch Omega Man. It's the first modern zombie book. George Romero, director of Night Of The Living Dead, has said something along the lines of, "Without Matheson's work, none of this would be possible". It honestly is a good read.

I loved True Grit too. I would recommend Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh.

Russians lovr master and margarita. To really appreciate it you neef yo understand the context in which it was written. Some translations have a commentary qt the end to help the reader understand the references. The story itself is fine, but its what Bulgakov writes between the lines that is really special.

LOL… yea… obviously Avatar and Dances with Wolves… it’s honestly so overused… all I can guess is that she just liked the writing style… and as a book could go deeper than films typically can. In the end, *all* of these kinds of stories are merely anti-western works… and for this reason leave me disappointed….

If you want some Steinbeck that is actually short, sweet, and uplifting, I really recommend Cannery Row. I love his books and just how he sees humanity, but they're usually not light, fun reading. Cannery Row still has his sense of humanity, but feels a lot more optimistic and is something that never fails to get me feeling better about life.

If you're super into dry and detailed, and you haven't read it yet, try reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

The Culture series. Banks.

OH don't even think of leaving a bad review !

The fact you’ve read Woolf and made it through is an achievement on its own…ANYWAY there’s this book series called…Harry Potter

Kindred was great. The tv show was good too, but cancelled after one season which was about a third of the way through the book. If you read Butler's Patternist series I recommend reading them in order of publication. I read them in chronological order, which lead to it having an anti-climatic finale. Pattern Master is not a bad story, but it doesn't exactly follow on from what came better. Better to start with that then go back in time to see how the world got that way.

Grapes of Wrath is incredible and Cannery Row is also great

If you read the Day of The Triffids then you must watch the movie.

That's not what capitalism does, tho - they want you to be a wage slave, not a breeding slave, because the direct slavery part of capitalism already failed. I know I'm not explaining it completely, but take what you can get from my comment.

Haven't done Of Mice and Men, but I loved The Grapes of Wrath. I loved Grendel! I wouldn't have thought it a classic. You're the first other person I know who has read it.

I stopped watching after the second instance where the presenter complained about chapters ended in cliffhangers and expressed complete ignorance of how those books were originally published chapter by chapter in serial form in newspapers and that the cliffhangers were to get readers to come back for the next installment. I was offended that she thought the books should be rewritten for modern readers. If she is going to read stuff from well over 100 years ago and has an issue with how it is written, maybe she should spend five minutes on Wikipedia doing some research before making a video about it. I hope you spend time fact-checking yourself before doing videos on scientific topics.

Hooting and hollering at seeing Grendel show up in the good category (same cover as the one I found in a used book store back during undergrad, too). Reread it recently and the beautiful parts held up.