The Ten Biggest Books I'm Going to Read this Year

[@brenboothjones]

Would love to hear which books you’re eyeballing for the rest of the year! And how do you fit big books into your life?

[@willwhitman717]

@@brenboothjones I usually just read them. Idk

[@tigaha]

I loved the digression about the polyester blanket 😄

[@brenboothjones]

I’m always happy to entertain 😃

[@lindaabraham8715]

For 2025, I would be pleased to read the trilogy by Vasily Grossman: "Stalingrad," "Life and Fate," and "Everything Flows."

[@bradykelso8682]

The Capote biography is a wild ride.

[@brenboothjones]

Ah I was hoping someone would respond about that book. Nice one. Capote is a stellar writer and I know a little about the messiness of his personal life. Can’t wait to get into the bio. Thanks for whetting my appetite for that book even more!

[@bradykelso8682]

@ Such a memorable biography! You will find yourself talking out loud as you read it. Cheers. Great channel!

[@eliFreakland]

My goal is to finally read the Brothers Karamazov and The Master and the Margarita this year!

[@karenbird6727]

I've been working my way through Montaigne's essays, Clarissa by Richardson, Journey to the West, translated by Anthony C. Yu. Honestly, I believe I will make progress on them, but I doubt I will finish all three of these.

[@bradykelso8682]

Love the Grossman trilogy! Cheers!

[@Noortjestortelder]

i like it when you talk about big books!

[@brenboothjones]

🤍

[@donaldmartineau8176]

Reading Brothers Karamazov AGAIN! World Crisis by Winston Churchill. William Manchester/Reid vol 3 Churchill biography. Martin China spent & Little Doctor & Romney and Son by Dickens. St. Ignatius Bible by Curtis Mitch/Scott Hahn

[@LuisCampos-h5u]

Great channel and lovely insights!

[@brenboothjones]

Thank you so much :)

[@fernandamurari8577]

Hi there! You have a respectful TBR there! I hope you manage to get through all of them! I myself hope to finish the complete essays of Montaigne and that is it!

[@brenboothjones]

Hello! Thank you! Ah I love Montaigne. A true pioneer of the modern essay and a thinker capable of the most unflinching introspection and scrutiny of the self. Enjoy!

[@Fernie4243]

The big books on my tbr for this year are: Barnaby Ridge (Dickens), Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens), Don Quixote (Cervantes), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Way We Live Now (Trollope) and the Republic of Plato with lots of smaller books to break it up. I'm not sure I can make it through them all. Some will be quicker reads than others. I'm excited for this reading year!

[@brenboothjones]

Lovely stuff. I find Dickens and Tolstoy very enjoyable and immersive. Cervantes is breezy in pace but a bit garrulous and overheated for my taste. I really struggled with the Republic. Found it rather tedious. I hope you have a splendid reading year, Fernie! :)

[@Fernie4243]

@brenboothjones I've started The Republic a couple of times. I'm determined to follow through. I forgot a book. It wasn't on my reading plan but my husband put it on my pile. It was mentioned in another book and I said I should read it "sometime". That is The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith). What's another 1,000 pages. 😂 With the exception of the first few chapters of Republic, these are all first time reads for me. I'm on a journey.

[@amalamati]

I started my year reading Victor Hugo's mammoth novel Les Misérables which I finished yesterday and absolutely loved. My plan is to continue my project of getting through the complete Dickens, so I have Our Mutual Friend and Dombey and Sons on my reading list for 2025. Also, continuing with my reading of the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Solenoide boy Cartarescu is also on the list as well as Vivir Abajo bu Gustavo Faverón. So that's a flavour of my reading year ahead. Happy reading for 2025

[@RyanLisbon]

You're going to become addicted to Underworld - enjoy! Am finally reading Infinite Jest and am excited to have Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in one book.

[@brenboothjones]

Thank you! I’m a big admirer of DFW but I really struggled with Durrell. Need to give him another try!

[@darkiv.]

What’s your favourite SA bookstore ?

[@RodencyRoyalist]

I am planning to be in the company of Williams G (ass & addis) this year. My foray into even more EXPERIMENTAL literature is somewhat limited at my blooming age. But sometime this year, I hope to set an incursion into the work of those two. And Pynchon, in a similar vein. Perhaps even Cărtărescu's entry into this big and bent trend will be considered. I am reading Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' right now. Utterly transfixing and fast-placed. This book is truly dense and detail-orientated, but relatively conventional in narrative form. Not like those aforementioned four. "Woof woof", my Literadar moans, when I sit and ponder on the prospect of their work. It is relentlessly exciting to relate the feeling of anticipation to yourself unendingly.

[@markspano3468]

Last year, I read Inside Out, the new Isherwood biography. I recommend it. I’ve read a massive biography of Toscanini. I recommend it also. A survey of Italian film, a great many other film books including one on the studio system in Hollywood, The Genius of The System. I usually read a long book straight through, then read short books in between. I generally have at least two short books going at once. I haven’t planned out my reading for the year since grad school which was a very long time ago. If I created an agenda for some number of giant books over a year, it might frighten me too much. So I choose based on my mood at a given time. I’m at a point in my life where I may pick and choose.

[@brenboothjones]

Ooh that Isherwood bio sounds very interesting! Thanks for the recommendation!

[@jeffpowanda8821]

Reading it Inside Out now. Sorry, I'm only a 100 pages in, which is the most uninteresting part of any biography, even a good one.

[@celinaishikawa13]

can never plan ahead any readings; the mood I’m in will decide the next book between ones that are a long time on my shelves and a recent buying…

[@brenboothjones]

@@celinaishikawa13 I feel you. I constantly make reading plans but they often change on a whim or I’m whipped along a chain of association and serendipity. Especially with shorter books. It’s the craggy mountainous tomes that I plan into my life with more steadfastness.

[@jryan217]

Completely agree on rotating between books. I usually have a book of short stories, a big fantasy book, a nonfiction of some sort- maybe essays, a classic or current fiction, a graphic novel or manga, and finally a memoir or autobiography (usually that one I will do on audible, especially if read by the author. I can't do other books on audio since I will realize I have not been paying attention and missed most of what I listened to! But memoirs I will listen to while driving or cleaning or before I fall asleep and want to have my eyes closed.) I need to be able to pick what I am in the mood to read, so I have to have multiple books going as long as I don't have anything similar to confuse the plots. Right now I am reading (Fantasy) Empire of the Damned by Jay Kristoff, (Non-fiction Essays)A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel, (Non-Fiction) Chaos: A Very Short Introduction by Leonard Smith (I love this series A Very Short Introduction. About 600 books on everything you can think of), (Contemporary Fiction) Winter by Ali Smith, (Classic) The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, (Manga) Vinland Saga Book 5 by Makoto Yakimura, (Memoir/Autobio on Audible) Face It by Debbie Harry.

[@brenboothjones]

I love the Oxford Very Short Introduction series. Might do a video on them sometime. Sounds like we approach our reading in a similar way. I too enjoy a good audiobook cleaning session :D

[@suzannebousquet2710]

Regarding big tomes, I plan on reading Anna Karenina, A Little Life , East of Eden and It.

[@brenboothjones]

Anna Karenina is spellbinding and orchestral! Also a big fan of Steinbeck. Haven’t read A Little Life but there seems to be a lot of fanfare around it! Happy reading :)

[@novelideea]

I have a Wilde collection I plan on reading the majority of this year. Not rushing through it, so we'll see how far I get. I'm reading a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses that is 600+, so not as beefy as some. I am also rereading Edwin Drood and then reading The D Case (700ish), & Nicholas and Alexandra. That is all I'm sure of. I may begin Proust's 2nd volume of In Search of Lost Time.

[@brenboothjones]

Haven’t heard of the D Case! Gonna look it up :)

[@novelideea]

@ it sounds like a lot of fun - if it’s done well.

[@gmcenroe]

I finished reading Vollman's The Dying Grass in December. I did take a break around pg 750 for 3 months, then went back to finish it. I am now half way through Infinite Jest. I read ~75 pages per day since I have a lot of time to read. Next books I will reach Pynchon' Mason and Dixon; Gravity's Rainbow, then Don Quixote; The Iliad; War and Peace. I read easier books while I read the large books. Infinite Jest with its Tennis theme got me reading Andre Agassi's biography Open, just finished that tonight. The list goes on. Underworld and Europe looks interesting. Will reread Le Carre's Russia House.

[@brenboothjones]

Vollman is a fascinating figure. Have you seen the video on his work by To Readers It May Concern? Ruben has read everything Vollman’s published and speaks authoritatively on him.

[@gmcenroe]

@@brenboothjones Yes I subscribe to his channel, he talked about it in his 10 hard books video, but I first learned of Vollman from the Leaf by Leaf channel on youtube. He does great book reviews but some are incredibly long so I have not watched the long ones.

[@brenboothjones]

@ Leaf by Leaf is great. I wish he’d do more bookshelf tours of his magnificent and burgeoning personal library!

[@ianp9086]

I don’t think I can manage more than about three really big books is a year - I approach them by doing ten pages a day with the rest of my reading carrying on alongside. Wishfully thinking this year they are Perec’s Life a Users Manual, Bolano’s 2666 and maybe Underworld or the Books of Jacob.

[@TheLinguistsLibrary]

My Allen Ginsburg collected poems has a red cover, yours is much prettier. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the Salengir and Capote's bios

[@brenboothjones]

The Salinger bio is conspicuously large considering the paucity of available biographical material from his life. I read a quirky but excellent Salinger biography last year by the delightful Ian Hamilton and his book (In Search of JD Salinger) set the bar high. We’ll see :)

[@oblomovtheunknown]

Regarding Oscar Wilde I prefer to read the selections or insist on a separation of powers so to speak. It is great to have a book of poetry or his selected plays to carry in the pocket or bag. With GBS I collected the vintage Shaw which were easy to read and more pleasurable than the thumping big books. On long novels, Cervantes anticipated Netflix. His works were episodic. Dickens and other Victorians wrote triple deckers but their works were serialised. I think the episode, serialisation and of course chapters help you to break up your reading programme. I find non fiction much easier to read as often you get an idea of what reward you are looking for. Biographies are really easy to read unless they are themselves works of art. In reading Oscar Wilde's children's fiction I think illustrations are SO important and greatly enhance the reading as they do with all works in this genre. You can also turn reading a hefty novel into a labour of love and go down so many avenues of delight such as discovering places or the originals of characters, the history etc etc. Andrei Bely's Petersburg is all about a city as is Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz - and what about John Dos Passos's USA!

[@brenboothjones]

Very well said!

[@aadamtx]

If you enjoy UNDERWORLD, then you may try Mark Helprin's novels WINTER'S TALE or perhaps A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR. He doesn't get as much attention as his contemporaries, but he's a fine writer. Looking over the other TBR in the comments, I've already read almost all of them - all of Dickens, almost all of Trollope, the Alexandria Quartet, ANNA KARENINA, WAR AND PEACE, DON QUIXOTE, 2666, Perec, most of Dostoevski, A SUITABLE BOY, all of Gaddis. Loved Diarmaid MacCullouch's CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST 3000 YEARS and THE REFORMATION. Maybe 2025 is the year for THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and/or LES MISERABLES. A LITTLE LIFE is already on my TBR list, along with Grossman's LIFE AND FATE and William Shirer's RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH.

[@garybrowser6885]

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin - the whole backstory of its genesis made this an essential 2025 read for me

[@brenboothjones]

Ah wonderful. Benjamin is such a fascinating figure. Brilliant thinker and such a devastating early end to his life.

[@hopscotchoblivion7564]

Leviticus is a filter so push through that.

[@naomi9354]

i'm currently in the middle of a suitable boy by vikram seth, which is quite big. i'm really enjoying it but lately, i've begun to employ your technique of reading shorter books at the same time for variety. i'm also across the halfway mark and i'll be proud of myself when i complete it because i am usually kind of chicken when it comes to big books 😅

[@brenboothjones]

Good for you! It’s going to feel phenomenal when you finish it and swing that brick up into your bookcase :D I haven’t read that one but my mom really liked it.

[@arekkrolak6320]

Nice, but first get a microphone stand :)

[@willwhitman717]

Booktube is asinine. Talking about reading books you haven't read yet is so self-indulgent

[@brenboothjones]

Then log off and take a walk outside. It might lift your spirits.

[@willwhitman717]

@brenboothjones I'll bring some really incredibly long books with me so people can watch me with my incredibly long books and my lofty goals.

[@PakSuyono-c4f]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground. This is crazy reading.🥸

[@brenboothjones]

It’s a feverish and disturbing novella, to be sure!