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I just wander along, I never really have a list, I just see a book I think well see what that is like. I read roughly 60 books a year. In saying that I have plenty of time to myself. If I had the demands of my time that you have I doubt if I would read more that 5 a year. Good luck and I hope you make your goal.

I'm reading Orbital now and it's so precious.

The staying power of the hunger games is really impressive to me

Hi FEMKE, WOW! Looks like you picked some bangers! Marquita is buddy reading Orbital with me right now over on @leafsonata. It's really good, will make you want to put an ISS tracker app on your phone and go outside at night so you can wave at Butch and Sunny as the pass over head at 17,100 mph.

Love your sweater! I am planning on reading The Grapes of Wrath this year also. Brooklyn is so good. Rebecca is also a favorite of mine.

The Catcher In The Rhye killed me, it really did to be honest! (You’l get this comment when you have read it😂)

oeh die tussentitels zijn echt cool!!

oeeeh loving the vibe!! Eileen klinkt interessant!!

Hi FEMKE, OMG! Did you watch the news this morning, Al Jazeera is reporting that there is some kind of coup or something going on in Rwanda today. Might be the perfect time to read Immaculee Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell. She's Rwandan and should count for one of your ‘every country in the world’ reads. This is a well told true story of her survival of the 1994 Tutsi genocide at the hands of the Hutu. It's a terrifying account of her and a bunch of other Tutsi women who were hidden by a local Hutu minister in his bathroom for 91 days! She was your age in 1994 and reckoned her chances would not be good with the machete wielding mob of blood crazed Hutu fighters. Her story contains two heartbreaking romances, both germaine to the story so I won't spoil it for you, but check it out.

Hi FEMKE, OMG! Did you watch the news this morning, Al Jazeera is reporting that there is some kind of coup or something going on in Rwanda today. Might be the perfect time to read Immaculee Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell. She's Rwandan and should count for one of your ‘every country in the world’ reads. This is a well told true story of her survival of the 1994 Tutsi genocide at the hands of the Hutu. It's a terrifying account of her and a bunch of other Tutsi women who were hidden by a local Hutu minister in his bathroom for 91 days! She was your age in 1994 and reckoned her chances would not be good with the machete wielding mob of blood crazed Hutu fighters. Her story contains two heartbreaking romances, both germaine to the story so I won't spoil it for you, but check it out.

Hi Femke how are you happy Monday night and happy new year to you and I hope that 2025 brings you a love and happiness

Hi! From Argentina I would recommend Borges or Cortázar from the XXth century and if you want something more recent Mariana Enriquez ❤

Hi FEMKE, WOW! What a great batch of reading plans plus University! You must like to be busy. Reading around the world 🌍 sounds like such a cool idea. I imagine it would take a good bit of research just to come up with that TBR, let alone actually obtaining the books themselves. For an old black dude who's been a voracious reader for a quarter century, you'd think I'd be well versed in my African authors, but alas sadly…I blame this mostly on my heavy duty dyslexia of course (my go to villain), I've never been able to read anything other than what I'm able to find in audiobook format, and here in the US rust belt there just isn't a lot of call for translated and audio recorded Afghan books. Too bad I bet after thousands of years of invasions and hardships Afghan writers probably have a thing or two to say. Here in the global West we tend to be singularly obtuse to the ideas and opinions of anybody else, to our perpetual shame. Have you ever read your Nigerians? Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a heavy hitter and a very good read. And I know you're not in the U.S. but perhaps you've heard that we are currently dealing with this H1-B visa thing and other immigration issues. That new book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, was excellent. It's a no holds barred look at the struggles of trying to study, work, love and just live in these United States for a Nigerian born college aged woman. Enjoy!

You may already know them but I can highly recommend 'Suite Francaise' by Irene Nemirovsky and ' After the Romanovs' by Helen Rappaport. In the past year I have thrown myself into Japanese fiction, which are a challenge but certainly give an insight into the Japanese culture and mind. Whatever you read I hope you enjoy them.

Hi FEMKE, did you say Eileen? OMG! Each of these 260 pages should be individually stamped with a ‘dude warning’.🤣 I suppose in the spirit of Anne of Green Gables “there's something in it for everyone” - FEMKE on the propriety of reading LMM out of demographic. However if you've got a Y chromosome you need to think twice about one. It's not dude incomprehensible, like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan door stoppers. It's more like the intense discomfort a dude experiences as he tries to wrap his brain around all that blood soaked homosexual self mutilation of A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) without any literary lubricant like Melville provides in the 94th chapter of his White Whale. If you will permit me, a few of the reviewers I watched pointed out that this piece has serious pacing issues, but I disagree. I think a writer as skilled as Ottessea Moshfegh did this to the reader on purpose. I'm convinced she was attempting to replicate a literary device employed by…you guessed it…James Joyce in the Sandymount Strand chapter of Ulysses, where words are used to try to make the reader feel as though they are actually slogging along the bottomless sands of an endless beach with Leopold Bloom. I fancy myself too much of a gentleman to try to torture out this simile any further, but I expect if you have finished Eileen you can connect the dots easy enough for yourself. At least that’s what this dude took away from this menstruous alcoholic lesbian literary workout. P .S. are you aware that Billy Pilgrim’s wife, Valencia Merble, dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in Vonegut’s Slaughter House Five?

Not to worry, your exams are more important than us. I hope they went well and I am sure you did well. We are in the middle of a storm here in the UK, not that I am bothered, staying in and keeping my nose in a book. Good to see you back.

Hi FEMKE, good to see you back, I hope you did well on your exams…the old preacher used to say we do it backwards in school. In school they always want to teach you a bunch of lessons then give you a test to see what you learned. But in real life it's the other way around. Life sends you a test first, and the test teaches you a lesson! Is that your cute little red dog 🐕? Eileen sounds intriguing, just added it to my TBR. Many thanks!

i also have a cozy reading sweater ☺️ i really need to read the anne of green gables series this year, its been on my tbr for so long.

Waiting for a new video! Come back! 😀

As I was listening to you talking about your reading tastes, I was struck by a thought. Have you read "Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis? I can't be sure, of course, but it might be to your liking. Also, for MG fantasy, have you read "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents" by Terry Pratchett?

Happy New Year FEMKE 🎊

Merry Christmas FEMKE 🎄

wth 59 boeken is craaaazzzy!! you go girl

Hi FEMKE, old luddite here, got a chuckle out of all those GoodReads stats and graphs! If my old worn out reading note book could do stats and make graphs I expect it would tell me that I'm CRAZY! 😂 Merry Christmas 🎄.

You've read some great books and done well with a busy uni schedule. ❤📚👍

I think you did great!! All of my reading stopped during uni unless it was school related.

Congratulations. Bearing in mind Uni, etc you have done remarkably well. Happy holidays.

"Foster" is a master piece

Reading Joseph Conrad "Under Western Eyes." Joyce had not yet become incomprehensible at that point of "Portrait of the Artist-" so it's readable. Just wait till you get to "Finnegan's Wake." 😁😸 Speaking of incomprehensible good luck with Becket as well! I have Woolf's I think second novel "Night and Day" here that I have to get to. I had never realized that the character Anne was an employee at the farm, I thought she was a brat who lived there with her (wealthy) family LOL 😸😁 thanks for enlightening me Merry Christmas 👍

Hi FEMKE, WOW! Great bookshelf review. Beautifully organized, especially your Wordsworths. Love your copy of Anna K.! I was just looking through mine a few days ago for a Levin quote about teaching serfs to read. Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is basically just a whole lot more of the same, for better or worse. Another great Gulag story is Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes, Epistolary January is just around the corner, this is a great true love story and letters. I just heard that right after Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote The Little Prince he died in a plane crash just like the one in the book! The Doctor's Wife is a very enjoyable little story and Isabel Gilbert is a wonderful bookish heroine. I'm not a Dostoyevsky completest…I doubt if even Fyodor read everything Dostoyevsky wrote 🤣 but I've read a bunch and Demons is my least favorite and his most difficult. If you're not already a big fan girl, I wouldn't start with that one. A long long time ago and in a galaxy far far away I was a minister and one of the favorite topics for sermons used to be ‘worship’. Chapter 7, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in that copy of The Wind in the Willows on your children's shelf is the best treatise I've ever read on the subject. Last week you said you’d never read Harry Potter and I recommended The Prisoner of Azkaban as the only one that seemed to have much real wisdom for the adult reader. Well I've never read L.M. Montgomery. So in the spirit of Septimus Warren Smith consulting famous authors (BookTubers) by letter (God bless Virginia Woolf!) which Anne book should an old black dude read after guarding convicts for 3 decades in maximum security prisons…or should I just skip Anne? BTW want to watch the most entertaining 1 minute and 22 seconds ever on YT, go check out the 2025 TBR from Col Mustard in the Library, so clever!

Hi FEMKE, Harry Potter 🤣 LOL! I read the first 3 at the urging of a reading buddy many years ago and they were OK running to fair for what they were, would have been better if they were shorter and had a LOT less ‘Quidditch’ in them. I'm not a YA expert by any means but as the genre goes I preferred Narnia (C.S. Lewis) and His Dark Materials (Phillip Pullman). What I did love about Harry Potter was J.K. Rowling’s idea of the demonic guards in The Prisoner of Azkaban. Their job was to suck out the souls of the inmates in their charge. I'm a retired prison guard myself and I gotta say…yeah…that was pretty much my job alright! Reminds me of Jezebel’s Daughter. I doubt that either Rowling or Collins were ever guards in a maximum security prison for 28 years, but the nuance they worked into their books was almost a little too good.

Hi FEMKE, thanks for the top 10 list. I've been a long time lover of Jude the Obscure, I agree it's a little over the top, the whole Father Time thing is kinda weird, but the underlying idea of “we are too many” is profound…I’ve been an antinatalist my whole life. Have you ever tackled any Flannery O'Conner? The Lame Shall Enter First is a great, super creepy adjunct to Jude. I definitely will be reading The Woodlanders. BTW getting out of an unhappy marriage is still not easy, your best is to just not marry the wrong person, twice, ask me why I know! 😭 I was a DJ🕺🎶 in 1986, can't wait to read Mayflies. Many Thanks.

En EINDELIJK HARRY POTTER!! En haha bullied!! Overdrijver!! 😙

loveeee de vibe!!

Mooie mok voor je thee!

Mayflies was indeed a touching trip down memory lane for me with the second half relating to ageing and dealing with life’s challenges and visions on one’s life and moral insights! Thank you for recommending this book ❤

Foster's definitely my favourite by Claire Keegan!

There is a film of Foster called The Quiet Girl.

❤📚📚❤️ I read The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy this year and loved it! Jezebel's Daughter and Foster are on my list.😊 Persuasion is the only one I haven't read and I'll be reading it for Jane Austen January.

I'm like you....i much rather have a whole reading session vs a few pages here and there. I've been trying to train myself to read a few pages here and there, but I've found I'll catch up on email or current events while waiting and save my reading time for a long session. I think bookmarks are pretty but i don't use them too often.

Hi FEMKE, loving your Bookmas! Nice thing about audiobooks is that you can listen when you're doing other things like driving or splitting firewood. But they are difficult to annotate. I just snap screenshots when I come to something I want to highlight so I know the time stamp.

🥰❤️

Anne is the best!!!

Hi FEMKE, your little furry buddy is so cute, my dachshunds want to know how many languages he speaks. I think that's what they asked?

I loved the Anne series! Your Mom sure made Christmas special! ❤️🎄 I love Yogi teas. I use the quotes on the string for the junk journals I make.😊