Definitely some brilliant work! Her mid-career fiction is superb.

I hope you do make another (or several more) of these videos! Your work is always stimulating and inspiring. And I see many hefty tomes on your shelves that you’d riff on with aplomb!

Ulysses is a strange animal. But worth getting lost in for sure! Love Joyce. Maybe I’ll a do a version of this that focuses on novels. And the number of dense philosophy books is astounding.

@@brenboothjones I do think that it's a book that is worth reading and I will probably reread it more in the future. The world Joyce creates in just 800 pages often feels more vivid and adventurous than entire 10 books fantasy serieses. Not to mention how poetic and emotionally moving it is. It's just I am not smart and probably will never be smart enough to understand it properly. But I do wonder if it's ever meant to be understood🤔

@@MYMOTHERISAFISH-ci2ts you are definitely smart enough! When I am struggling with a particular text, I look up some resources (lectures, articles and other supplementary material) to guide me. There is tons of free stuff online!

Ah lovely stuff!! Great country and interesting writer. Love a fat biography!

Definitely ❤️

I’ve heard good things about that one! Underrated. Can’t wait to your read your book by the way!

How old? ‘A fine balance’ by Rohinton Mistry? ‘Half of a yellow Sun’ by chimamanda Ngozi? ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’? Or does your question relate to ‘hard books’? The Bible?

@@SuperDraax I love Half of a Yellow Sun. And I thought about doing the bible in my video but couldn’t find my copy!

Thanks so much! Congratulations to you too! Gonna check out your channel:)

Thanks so much J!! Keeping you a copy!

Thank you for the kind words, Ruben! Your perceptiveness is really astonishing! I look forward to launching this thing with you!

Thank you so much my friend!

Gosh thanks so much, Emma! I’m subscribed to your channel too. Looking forward to diving into your work.

Thank you so much!

You are the best xx

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Thank you my friend. The ephemeral nature of literary eminence is so humbling (or should be). We are all destined to obscurity and even our most cherished notions may seem quaint 100 years from now. I find a freedom in this. What do we have to lose but our lives, the very things we are guaranteed to lose. I like your use of the word “eulogy”, inflecting it with a lightness, a celebration of the momentary flash of a work of literature that will be soon forgotten. Your insights are always much appreciated.

Thank you very much. Glad to have you along for the ride.

Thank you for watching! Yes it’s a very liberating realisation that opens up a world of critical appreciation for children’s literature, genre fiction, graphic novels, pop music, blockbuster films and so on. By the same logic a very dense and abstruse work of poetry or critical theory is not good simply because it’s difficult. That being said, I’m personally quite omnivorous-I like a wide range of stuff high, middle and “low” brow. But it needs to be well-executed.

​@@brenboothjonesI agree whole-heartedly. The point of art is to convey a message or feeling, and if it is too obscure to be conveyed the artist has failed in some way. I like challenging reads, but at a certain point it isn't fun anymore.

Thank you <3

Nice to hear about your Shakespeare journey! He was so prolific that one can spend years working through all that treasure :)

I think Shakespeare's Coriolanus is an often underrated work that doesn't get as much recognition as both one of the last tragedies he's credited, but also in its brutal departure from more playful longform dialogue to shorter exchanges. Part of me wonders if it was a focus on presenting a different kind of stage play, one more immersive in its physical performances to an audience of live spectators. The Ralph Fiennes film is still a guilty pleasure, and a way better vehicle for Gerrard Butler's intensity than that 300 poopoo.

@@erickeeping8652 I love the endless nooks and crannies of Shakespeare’s oeuvre! Many lifetimes worth of reading and rereading! Haven’t seen the Fiennes adaptation! Will check it out-thanks for watching and thanks for the tip!

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Thanks so much Veronique ❤️✨

Monsieur Porp! Thanks for stopping by legend :)

Thanks so much J!

You’re so right about the access R&J gives one to a feeling of angst. I’d love to hear more about your experience teaching Shakespeare to highschoolers-I can imagine it to be a real challenge, one that I’m sure you accomplish with aplomb! What books have you most enjoyed teaching? I’m sure you will get around to A Midsummer Night’s Dream one day! I’m definitely due for a reread soon. I appreciate your thoughtful comments very much!

​@@brenboothjones I love showing students surprising uses of perspective and form in literature, starting with the second-person stream-of-consciousness of the story "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, or the unreliable surreal narration of the collection A Music Behind the Wall by Anna Maria Ortese, then, of course, the self-restricted writing of the Oulipo writers, such as the works of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, alongside the magical realism and abstract toying of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, and Jorge Luis Borges. The point is to expand their thinking of what literature is (so often students arrive thinking every story must follow the same structure and adhere to the same emotional beats). Just think how fun it is for me when I bring in Shakespeare-the seemingly oldest and stalest writer in their eyes-and show how he plays with and snaps and extends his literary voice like all the rest. Students tend to catch the rebellion in literature, the battlecry to be heard. I love that.

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Thank you so much! Have already dropped part 1 and 2 on my channel. I hope you like them :)

Thank you so much! Good to have you along for the journey. Everyman’s Library is a FANTASTIC imprint. Really love their stuff.

Thank you so much Lily! Happy to have you along for the journey:)

Ah nice! To the Lighthouse is a wonderful place to start.

Hah! Indeed. Literature has saved me from myself many times over.

Ah thank you so much!

Your comments are always treasure-laden. I love the way you describe the doubleness of rereading cherished childhood books. I’m sometimes almost scared to revisit truly beloved childhood texts-like I don’t want to taint that halcyon glow or something, which probably sounds ridiculous. Louise Glück’s oft quoted line comes to mind: “We glimpse the world once, in childhood; the rest is memory” (might be paraphrasing slightly). Maybe literature augments that remembered glimpse, channels it through the cold flame of metaphor and the contours of syntax to provide that ineffable sublimity we crave. As to unsympathetic characters. I’m trying to think of a truly malevolent character that I like. Truly misanthropic….okay I mean Satan in Paradise Lost is pretty likeable. “Me miserable!” he howls and one feels some of that chilling desolation. Who are some of your monstrous favourites? Thank you for stirring such interesting discussion.

​@@brenboothjones In the category of monstrous faves I think now of the narrator of Butterfly Stories by Vollmann or of Humbert Humbert from Lolita by Nabokov: they both disgust me and yet I am riveted by the pathetic horror of their addictions. They are molded by fixation, motivated by their own clever self-justifications, and thus cast and constrained by inertia-all too human and all too common. I try not to separate myself from monsters. I see them as metaphors for who I could be if not so lucky. I am lucky to be where I am and who I am now, and yet there is so much of both I could not have chosen: no choice of parents or disposition or pressures or desires. I want what I want prior to thought, and to think a thought otherwise is to want to think otherwise; here I loop in on myself and to the luck of being myself. I am lucky my desires fit ethically with others. I appreciate text that toys with the psychological horror of being otherwise. Always, always I feel deep sympathy for monsters (and I've known monsters in life and seen them grow, rationally, into horrors, including toward me, and I have felt that rational tug in response to external stimulus, toward self-preservation and thus other-alienation; I've seen myself, my young self, with bitterness and violence at the margins of my self-definition; it is so close to who I could have been and yet I escaped by sheer momentum beyond me). That has never escaped me, that feeling of heartache and sympathy for the unlucky, including for their victims-one can feel sympathy and pain for both.

Well said, my friend! Planning a Nabokov video soon. Would love to hear more of your thoughts about him.

Thank you so much! Yes, planning to discuss all the books in my collection in due course.

Thank you so much!

There is indeed ❤️

Ah that’s very kind of you! Feel free to read along :)

Thank you! Having fun with it

Gosh, thank you very much for the thoughtful and encouraging comment! I think I’ll probably do a full video dedicated to Greene at some point. I find so much of what he says unforgettable. For example: “No individual escapes a private agony”. I’m paraphrasing slightly but that line is burned into my psyche. Among many others. The narrator of The Quiet American says, “Nobody envies the dead”. Also really stuck with me. There are a few Greene books on the 1000 list-England Made Me, for example. I agree about his complex characterisations. A bit like Vonnegut in his ability to entangle protagonist and reader alike in moral ambivalence and subtle complicities. Thanks for your feedback and good to have you along for the journey!