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Happy birthday mate. It made me genuinely happy to see you sufficiently presented for this new chapter of your life.

Welcome to the Dirty Thirty - Happy Reading! 😎📚👍

I am envious! My family have known of my love of books for years but have never gifted me with a book. The one exception is my sister-in-law who gave me one book a few years ago. That’s it! You have very thoughtful friends and a wonderful family. Good for you!

Happy belated birthday! I was about to ask about that gorgeous box set behind you when I reached the end of the video 😅. How wonderful is to get books on your birthday! They are my favourite present to receive and to offer to my loved ones (not the biggest surprise for someone who's watching booktube, right? 😂).

If you like disturbing stories then you might like Shirley Jackson. She's my favorite American author. My favorite novel is We Have Always Lived in the Castle. My favorite short story is The Lottery.

I read The Trial halfway and closed to never open it again. The Trial is an artistic expression of drepression. Anytime I find myself drawn to Kafka I start to suspect depression is around the corner. Time to touch grass.

Romantic Outlaws is excellent!

What a delightful post. Thank you, and a very happy birthday wish.

Happy Birthday! Louis Couperus sounds really interesting, I think I will try Footsteps of Fate (in English or German, my Dutch is practically non-existent).

Same! I'm also 30. The other day I was at work and one of my customers said "you don't look old enough to have a job." Happy late birthday btw!

Loved the quiet, gentle nature of Housekeeper 💗

I think at your age, & the fact that you are still in that “university” mindset, you will enjoy Winter’s Night. Especially if you have people you can debate meaning and technique with!

Eco’s works were too overly sexualized for my sensibilities 😂

I hope you love To Kill a Mockingbird 💕

I hope you love To Kill a Mockingbird 💕

I have Devotions on my shelf TBR also.

My friend just read Outlaws and it is on track to be one of her favorites of 2024!

Marita’s book sounds fascinating- but I don’t read Dutch 😔

Happy birthday! Some great sounding books there. 🎂☕📚

Happy 30th birthday ! I am 36 I still get people thinking am in my 20s haha I have romantic laws in paperback still to read .❤

Hello Celine! Happy Birthday and I hope all is well with you. I loved Eco's The Name of the Rose. It is one of my favorite books. I also read his The Prague Cemetery but I did not think it was as good as The Name of the Rose. I recently purchased Baudolino on the recommendation of the Booktuber Tristan and hope to get at it in the not too distant future as Tristan made it sound so interesting. I look forward to your next video. Have a great day! 🙂

Should poetry be accessible? Depends who you ask really. If you take that question up with the late Geoffrey Hill, he would say that the language of poetry should strive to capture the complexity of life because life is difficult. If you ask the late Mary Oliver, she might say, "Oh well, I want my poems to reach as many people as humanly possible. I want to be a people's poet." It does raise some questions about reader expectations. Readers should know not all poems are going to be escapist in sensibility, let alone intelligible, and others frankly do require a great deal of archival work to simply tease out their hidden meanings. You taste in literature profoundly demonstrates how no one can escape the pervasive influence of the Greco-Roman culture, the bedrock of the West. And least I forget, Happy Belated Birthday Celine🎂🍭🥂🍾 May your days ahead be long and fruitful 🙏

If you enjoy To Kill A Mockingbird (and I suspect you will!) then by all means try Harper Lee's very belated sequel Go Set A Watchman which shares the same Deep South setting and some of the key figures from the original novel.

Belated birthday wishes! Have a great time reading and in general wish you a very good year ahead.

Happy Birthday and welcome to the 30s! :)

What a great birthday haul! I especially like how many genres are represented here. And yeah, you will probably like the Calvino a lot if you enjoy those kind of narrative tricks, atleast I really did.

There's a study of memory loss which used a spiral maze and a mirror - very difficult. Nonetheless, the subjects with limited short-term memory improved across a few weeks of observation. A very nice haul: Congratulations and many happy returns! btw: I found Castor's Jean d'Arc on Audible, which I downloaded to my library. I hope to finish it this Summer. Thx

What 5 books did you find most overrated? (Others recommended or love them but you just didn't.) Name several (or one) authors everyone but you loves, or that you feel like you're supposed to love but just can't get into, or dislike?

I obsessively (some would say) track my books, which includes counting them. My books spreadsheet contains 3,656 books which includes owned books, read books, and got-rid-of books. I own 1,928 books today (spread over two locations). I acquire them much faster than I can read them. I read around 120-140 a year. I try to get rid of books but it can be hard.

Your right it has been 4 months since you posted your last video. During that time you got new glasses. I like them, but I also liked your previous glasses as well also. Now as a former optician usually unless you lost or broke your previous glasses the only reason for getting new glasses is a change in prescription. So I'm going to assume that you didn't loose or break your glasses and you had a slight change in your prescription. Were things at a distance becoming a little blurry even with your glasses on or were you simply due to get your eyes checked and you weren't having any issues with your eyesight at all? I can see by looking at your glasses, and through them, that your nearsighted or what you may call it shortsighted. So you really shouldn't need your glasses for reading. now there of course there is no harm in wearing your glasses to read if your more comfortable wearing them. But I do have a suggestion for you. By wearing them to rad your forcing your eyes to become fully adjusted to the prescription in your glasses. So to keep your eyesight from worsening for near things, such as reading, you should try wearing a weaker pair of glasses for reading. Your eye can even tell you which pair of previous glasses are most comfortable for reading simply by trying all of them that you have. Now it's possible that you may only have a couple pairs if you only started wearing glasses a few years ago. When did you get your first glasses and when did you start wearing them fulltime? How did you feel about getting glasses? Young attractive women, which you are certainly in that group, often aren't all that happy about getting glasses.

Thanks for all the amazing book suggestions. I think that I might have to pick up the first two you mentioned. Quick question, though… wasn’t Mary I the first Queen Regnant, not Elizabeth I? If I misunderstood you, sorry about that.

Joan of Arc's current reputation in the English speaking world was apparently established by Mark Twain. He wrote an account of her life under a different pseudonym, in a different than usual tone. Apparently, WASP Americans knew nothing about her until his work came out.

“Medieval Women” sounds like it would be a good place for me to start for me! Thank you for the video. I have just discovered your channel from Justin @triumphalreads. Happy reading!

Of course I love Joan, and Julian of Norwich & Margery Kempe. I recently read about Barbara of Cilli by Daniela Dvořáková (academic text) that was the first I had read of her.

Love Marie de France's poems (lais). I look forward to reading about her.

Helen Castor is really good for medieval history. I'll have to check out the Leyser book sometime. I recently read Medieval Women by Frances and Joseph Gies. An even older worl but I've liked everything so far that I've read by them. I'd recommend on this topic Empress Matilda as a subject and Hanley's biography in particular. Awesome video!

Thank you for the book recommendation. I will definitely check out the societal history one. 🎉

Hildegard of Bingen 😊

Well yes, you gotta dress for the part as a "Medieval woman." Regale us with tales of HER / STORY 🤓

Nice selection, congratulations! My favorite medieval figure/author/saint is Thomas Aquinas who was studied by Umberto Eco. Have you ever read any of the two?

Is that woman in white by wilkie collins right behind you on (my) left? I have the exact same copy, i bought it in turkey

Are your books all in English?

Off the top of my head I'd say weirdness is a typical quality of dichotomy, since without the weirdness it would difficult to distinguish between the two categories, no?

Q&A questions...what are your earliest reading memories? Classics or contemporary fiction (if you really had to choose?) Books/authors that you have always meant to read but have thus far felt too intimidated to start? Proust and Joyce would be at the top of my list! Physical books; ebooks; audio books...compare and contrast. Literary tropes/themes/cliches that make you want to tear out your hair?

For the forthcoming Q&A...desert island books perhaps? The 10 books that you simply couldn't live without!

As Groucho Marx once said..."Outside of a dog a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read!"

I guessed 700! Think I deserve a silver medal! Great video (as always).