Ten hard books I will read, but you don't have to
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- Опубликовано: 11 дек 2024
- In this video I'm sharing with my booktube friends my version of a video I've seen on youtube. This is my "hard books I'll read but you don't have to" entry into the fun.
Books mentioned:
Complete William Shakespeare
Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
War and Peace by Tolstoy Maude and Pevear translations
With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Security Analysis By Benjamin Graham David Dodd
All the volumes of Winston Churchill's Second World War Memoirs
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
Odyssey, Illiad, Paradise Lost, Dantes Inferno
thank you for reading these so i dont have too, the look pretty big and seem to lack pictures
oh wait i did read the odysee
You mean the comic book version set in space with art by Christian ward?
They only have no pictures until the moment you get ahold of them and start penciling dicks and balls in the margins.
I have never seen anyone else who has With Fire and Sword. I read it in the 90s. Got the other two but haven’t read them.
Ha. Well, my understanding is that the translations are questionable. My excuse is my wife is Polish.
Good day, Chris. Whenever see on booktube those titles about hard books I don't watch them. I think Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses will be on the list and, of course, Willy. I think you are in good company with Bloom. I have many of his books. He is also good on the Romantics and Blake. Whenever I do tackle books like Macbeth or Hamlet I go all in, like yourself.. Before I watched youtube, which is when I started my comic channel (before then I never did), I looked through my own library which at the time was extensive and see what I had on Shakespeare (or Dante, Milton, Homer) and what I didn't I"d go to the use bookstores (the new bookstores typically had limited variety and only that which was in print). I had a knowledge of the reliable critics and scholars so it was just matter of narrowing down what I bought and brought home. Lincoln's favorite plays were Macbeth and Hamlet. He often quoted from them during the Civil War.
I spent a summer reading The Divine Comedy, using the Mandelbaum and Ciardi translations. Like you I alternated at times between the two or re-read the passages. All three books must be read, not just the Inferno. There are some beautiful passages in Purgatory, especially in the Mandelbaum translation, which is very sensual.
I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Wings of Desire to see Homer as a character. He is the old man living in the library. I enjoy the Odyssey and the Iliad. And I also recommend The Aeneid by Virgil. I own the one translated by Daniel Day Lewis's father, C. Day Lewis. I revisit it more than I do Homer. I read it after the Divine Comedy.
Taylor Branch's books are now classics. I think you can find the complete Churchill at used bookstores. For many years I'd see them for cheap, sometimes for $20 for all six volumes or in the dollar sections for individual volumes. It's interesting how American politicians, especially Republicans, sometimes mention Churchill more than they do American leaders. So it was refreshing when I saw Chris Hitchens on Firling Line saying negative things about Churchill. Up until then I never heard anyone on television say a bad thing about him. It was the first time I'd seen and heard Hitchens. After that I went searching for his books. I'll be revisiting Ana Karenina soon. Avoided War and Peace. I'm reading Tolstoy's other books, likely won't get to that tome for many years. Presently re-reading Moby Dick and Hadrian's Memoirs. I'm also reading Spanish language books that haven't been translated into English like Fugaz by Leila Sucari and Le Perdida Del Reino by Jose Bianco. I tried reading 2666 when it was released in English but I couldn't get through his writing style. I did enjoy The Kindly Ones, though. Great book selections. Best to you, M.
@LibroParadiso-ep4zt war and peace is only ~200k more words or so. 😅. It really is quite good, the length allows many characrers (and their individual relationships) bloom. I like Harold Bloom okay but he's just very famous, I often catch him playing word soup type games, citing questionably contextual passages to make his points, which are often muddled. But then, on the other side, he casts such a wide net and can tie the entire western canon together in a manner others would have to stretch to do.
@LibroParadiso-ep4zt We will see how the Shakespeare thing goes. It's nice to be able to leisurely listen to podcasts or search out Tempest specific essays or performances. Perhaps a full year per play is too long, but on the other hand I'm sure my interest will wax and wane.
@LibroParadiso-ep4zt Joyce would definitely be on the list if I had near term plans to read him. I still have to make room for all my pulpy science fiction and other less literate ephemera.
My first interaction with Hitchens was either his words on Churchill or Mother Theresa, certainly those new atheist talks years later kept him on my radar. There is no doubt there's a type of Churchill cult, especially among nationalist brits, but that doesn't mean WC wasn't an important force, and one much like Hitchens, with great oratory and writing skill. As much as I love Hitchens and his writing, in hindsight he was wrong as often as he was right. To me it's about his conviction and the beautiful way he expressed it. Vidal is very similar when it comes to his expression, but he has the benefit of having been mostly right. 😄😄
I'd love to hear more about history related books you're reading
It's a recent occurrence that I realized autobiographies and first-hand accounts are more entertaining. Encyclopedic facts are easier to come by nowadays.
That's not to say I don't have a big stack of typical history books to read, but more and more the memoirs and older books they cite are becoming more appealing.
@@ChaosandComics I like memoirs also, at least of historical moment. there’s an extra couple layers to them…including motivations for writing them…
McBeth and the Tempest are two of my favorites. But I suppose I've only read or seen about 12-15 of his plays.
@sleepyreader666 i don't think I've done much more. It wasn't English class that made me click with Shakespeare though. It was a high school drama class that made us memorize Shakespeare monologues for finals. So much of the seed of my knowledge comes from two semesters of watching people workshop individual sections of many plays and watching these evolve through the months.
It's difficult for me to even think that I might read a script beginning to end the same way I'd read a book. Also a Shakespeare professor named Emma Smith opened me up to this idea of gaps existing within each play as it's read that allows the director to have their own strong influence on the production.
So anyway, it's the many layers to enjoy and think about Shakespeare's work that make it so intriguing to me. Even then I tend to forget about him for awhile and then reawaken quite often. 😆 lol
Damn that play **** is classy as ****
Now I feel like I have to read them too.
Bayard Rustin.. late last year Netflix had a great movie about him
Oh I gotta get on that.
War and peace is actually quite an easy book to read imo, extremely entertaining, except the second epilogue lol.
I find that to be true through about 600 pages.
your 1k giveaway should be a bookmark 🎉🎉🎉🎉.. I depend on you to read X-men for me.. I heard the Krakoa era’s over, but waiting on the official word..
You'll never see a sub celebration from me lol. Dude, X-men have been out of krakoa for almost 6 months lol.