long classics I want to read in my lifetime 🏛️💭

[@lucycanread]

ahhh, i want to read all of these ones too! they're called classics for a reason, i love experiencing something that a huge majority of the world's population consumed at one point in history

[@finya.reads.]

Exactly! It’s like finally understanding something that shaped and is understood by the whole world. Just reading something that was written hundreds of years ago and influenced so many people on the way is so precious 💕

[@TunaFreeDolphinMeat]

I hope you enjoy these books, and look forward to hearing your take on The Odyssey. Cheers from Australia.

[@KenCunkle]

Great list, and congrats for caring enough and for your good taste. Yes, you can read those when you're 80-something, but at least as far as War and Peace goes, you could read it in your 20s, then again every 5 or 10 years afterwards and still find a whole new world in it. So I would recommend getting to that one early. It is a great great great book. AFAIC, nobody knows human beings better than Tolstoy. It's amazing. And good luck!

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you so much! Yes, War and Peace I’m super excited about, and kinda happy that I haven’t read it yet so I can experience it for the first time. Everyone seems to love it!

[@leonkamitsis7167]

I have to say, you are a wonderful soul. My top 10 big classic books: Brothers Karamazov War and Peace Crime and Punishment Anna Karenina Les Miserables Count of Monte Cristo Jane Eyre Don Quixote In Search of Lost Time East of Eden

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you so much! Pretty similar list, but the ones you added, are also on my TBR, so I will definitely dig into these too :)

[@J-PBaser]

I don't understand everything she says, but I do understand her.

[@joelharris4399]

Ah, someone who wants to read Don Quixote! 👏👏✅ I'm currently reading it happy to say, perusing the chapters slowly, taking breaks in-between, which is what I love about the episodic format of the novel. Approaching the end of Part 1. While BookTubers do enthusiastically talk about Don Quixote battling windmills, or mistaking inns for castles in his doomed quest to right the world's wrongs as a knight errant, you will actually find those aspects of the story the least significant in the book. What Cervantes is actually getting at is a very clever, sophisticated, not to mention humorous sociological assessment of his country Spain during the Baroque era when her empire is beginning to decline after the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from the body politic and while at it, through the experimental use of fiction relives and recounts his experience as a slave in North Africa at the hands of Barbary pirates. The enjoyment of the book is greatly enhanced with supplementary materials: videos, academic essays, reviews and discussions on blogs. Be prepared to immerse in a Catholic literary tradition, there's no getting past that🙃

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you, your comment just made me so excited to finally read it! And yes, I love consuming all kinds of media alongside reading the book, to fully immerse myself. Can you recommend videos, essays or something like that?

[@joelharris4399]

@@finya.reads. My pleasure: 1. Library of Congress: Why Don Quixote is the Best Work of Fiction According to 100 Authors (KZbin) 2. Library of Congress: The Man Who Invented Fiction: Cervantes & the Modern World (KZbin) 3. Restless Classics Presents an Interactive Don Quixote (KZbin) 4. Essay discussion of the book on online literary forum> "Don Quixote: Sloppy, Inconsistent, Baffling, Perfect On the Magical Hyper-realism of a 400-Year-Old Classic by Ilan Stavans (Literary Hub)

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you so much! I will come back to these when I get to Don Quixote :)

[@joelharris4399]

@@finya.reads. I'm sure you will. Nice to meet you. First time on your channel actually.

[@finya.reads.]

You too! Yes, it’s very small and new right now, feel free to come back :)

[@davidmccalip5759]

Hello. I hope you are doing well. I just discovered your channel. I love classics. With the exception of 1Q84, I have read all the books on this list and enjoyed them all. As for War & Peace, what I did to help me understand it (especially those Russian names and their derivatives) prior to reading, was I watched the 6n part (or was it 8 part?) BBC miniseries (it had the actor who played Professor Slughorn in Harry Potter and the actress who played the niece of the Granthams in the Downton Abbey series; Lilly something or other). I found watching that BBC series first really helpful. As for The Count of Monte Cristo, I absolutely love Alexandre Dumas. He is my favorite author and TCoMC was excellent as all the Dumas books are. I hope you enjoy all these books. Have a great day!

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you so much for the comment and your insights! That just made me much more exited about all of the books, especially War and Peace. I have never heard that there was a BBC mini series, I will definitely watch that beforehand :) Cheers ☺️

[@joebagala1117]

Im reading the Count of Monte Cristo right now and Im on page 986. It's really really good! It is truly just a fun, engaging journey. Hope you enjoy once you get to it :)

[@finya.reads.]

That’s so good to here, thank you! ☺️

[@reaganwiles_art]

Suggest a Great German book to us please. I loved War and Peace, Tolstoy's prose is peak prose, like Plato's. By contrast Dostoyevsky's writing is a mess (and I love it too). Those are the only books on your list i would bother to read, maybe Dumas. Certainly. Cervantes is a bore. Homer is too *Transformers for me, too Marvel Universe, epic blah blah...😅🎉

[@finya.reads.]

Maybe give The Man Outside by Wolfgang Borchert a try! It was one of the few books I had to read in german class that I actually enjoyed. It centers around a soldier that comes home after being a prisoner of war after WW2. It dives into topics like post-war trauma, alienation and guilt. It’s actually a play, but so worth it!

[@reaganwiles_art]

@@finya.reads. Thank you Fiña; I'm about 150 pges into Berlin Alexanderplatz now, a gift from a friend, a great book, by Döblin.

[@РоманПаляниця-к5э]

Thanks for the video! It is advisable to add the book "Clouds" by Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi to your list of books. It was written in 1874 and describes the difference in the worldview of Russians and Ukrainians. 150 years have passed, but modern Russian propagandists repeat word for word what is written in this book, namely: they said that there are no philosophers or intellectuals in Russia, instead there are soldiers in Russia. who will kill all European philosophers and intellectuals!!! Russians have been serial killers for centuries. I would also recommend Ivan Bagryany's book "The Garden of Gethsemane" about the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia against the Soviet repressive machine. Among modern books, it is advisable to read Oksana Zabuzhko's essay "The Longest Journey". It has been translated into English.

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you very much for the recommendations, I haven’t even heard of those books, but they sound super interesting. I will definitively read into those! 🙌

[@РоманПаляниця-к5э]

@@finya.reads. I also recommend the book "The Troubadours of the Empire. Russian Literature and Colonialism" by Eva Thompson she is an American author of Polish origin. Among Ukrainian authors, I additionally recommend books translated into English: "Mondegrin: songs about death and love" by Volodymyr Rafeenko. The author was born and studied in Donetsk, so he wrote exclusively in Russian until he left for Kyiv after his hometown was captured by pro-Russian separatists in 2014. "How the fire descendes" оne of the first poems in the collection, written on September 11, 2022 - the day a Russian missile strike caused a blackout in Kharkiv - sounds like a statement of purpose: “Remember all that vanishes, like a traveler descending a hill. / By saying this out loud, you will drive away the silence and ward off trouble". As you know, Ukrainians have a long poetic tradition, starting with Taras Shevchenko in the 19th century and ending with modern poets of the 21st century. There are still many interesting Ukrainian authors whose books I can recommend. If you are interested, I will answer.

[@РоманПаляниця-к5э]

@@finya.reads. By the way, I forgot to say that the book "Garden of Gethsemane" by Ivan Bagryany, which I mentioned in my first comment, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the untimely death of the author made it impossible. This author has many interesting books, including "Tiger Hunters", "A Man Running over the Abyss" and others. Among modern authors there are many interesting and worth reading. I have already mentioned Oksana Zabuzhko, Oleksandr Mykhed's book "Job's Call Sign" was published in English under the title Language of War, and many other authors.

[@finya.reads.]

Thank you for all the recommendations! I am definitely overwhelmed by your recs, because I haven’t heard of any of any of them, but also really intrigued. Just shows how the world focuses so much on tolstoy and dostoyevsky, that it sometimes forgets that’s there’s so much more to russian (and ukrainian) literature!

[@РоманПаляниця-к5э]

@@finya.reads. Yes, you are absolutely right: there are many works by Ukrainian authors worth reading. If translated into English, most of them could win prestigious literary awards.

[@DianaT-ph6iz]

First of all, I love your channel and this video. This is such a perfect list, and I admire your enthusiasm to get into these Russian classics, but then as I continued watching...you got to Murakami? Are you serious? You putting that trash 1Q84 in the same even video as these classics? 1Q84 is trash, sexist, pretentious, mammoth book of nothing. I wish I had my time back reading it - I don't recommend it at all. And then you mention masterpiece Orwell's 1984 in the same line as that nonsense of a book? My goodness. Murakami is also an author obsessed with female breasts for no reason, including in 1Q84. Goodness. 1Q84 is the worst book I have ever read.

[@finya.reads.]

First of all thank you for you comment and your kind words about the video and my channel! This means a lot to me 🥰 Now to 1Q84: I do acknowledge that the novel might be a bit out of place in this list, because (unlike the others) it’s much newer and not really considered a classic. I just put it in this list because it’s so long. I also didn’t compare it to Orwell’s 1984 in any way, I just pointed out the similar titles and that Murakami took the idea of a dystopian 1984 and used that for inspiration. I am totally aware of Murakamis problematic writing of women and misogynistic tendencies. I couldn’t properly enjoy Norwegian Wood because of it. Afterdark on the other hand I really liked. For me 1Q84 is so intriguing because of the sheer size and diverging opinions. I heard great things about it, but also really bad things. It’s kinda like wanting to read/watch a really controversial book/movie, only to find out what it is about it, that invokes such intense reactions. I don’t endorse nor like his misogynistic writing on women, i just wanted to make that clear. Hope this all makes sense! 💕