What a perfect time to come across your video, it's dark & cloudy where I live right now and I've been curled up with Wuthering Heights ! I loved Jude The Obscure. I look forward to catching up on more of your videos
Congrats on 1K subscribers! 🎉 I read Frankenstein last year and I loved both of your reading vlogs about it, this October I'm rereading The Metamorphosis by Kafka
Hi @angirlgarrido, hope you're 'enjoying' The Metamorphosis! I've found Kafka to weird to like, but he certainly dredges up truth in a way that might make any Old Testament prophet proud. When you're braced for more Kafkaesque whak-a-dooness I'm sure you'll find his The Trial to live up to all the hype, no disappointments! I hope you 'enjoy'!
Great list! Yess Wuthering Heights is truly autumn!! Frankenstein - another favourite! Dorian Grey - yessss! Oh my goodness - I detest Jude! 😂😂 I'm glad you love it - I really really disliked it! 🤭🤭🤭 But I'm so happy I gave Thomas Hardy another go - read Tess in September and adored it!! Northanger Abbey yessss! So fun.
Thank you for the recommendations! I’ve been curious about Thomas Hardy for a long time but have yet to read one of his works! I’ll have to bump him up on my list :) I would recommend Wilkie Collins for some more great spooky season reads. I’ve read The Moonstone and The Two Destinies and loved them both!
I hope you’ll love Hardy as much as I do when you get around to reading something of his! I’ve recently finished Jezebel’s Daughter by Wilkie Collins and loved it. Can’t wait to read some more of his books :)
Hi KB, I just finished Jezebel and loved it. Everyone seems to be saying Moonstone is even better, guess I'll put it on my TBR list. I haven't read my Hardy cannon in 20 years, but as I recall they ALL have at least one scene that is exceptionally well written and all but maybe Far From the Madding Crowd (this is his book that brought us one my most oft quoted lines, the one about "the fate of dogs and other philosophers who carry an idea to is logical conclusion."...BRILLIANT!) have some pretty macabre elements, Jude probably is the worst offender. That said, as I mentioned in a previous post, Jude really is the patron saint of all of us who wished we could have been FEMKE, but instead ended up being Septimus Warren Smith...spoiler alert!...he totally doesn't end up owning a house at Purley and a motor car! (GOD bless Virginia Woolf). I say try out a Hardy, makes no difference which one, all are good. Enjoy the read!
Hi FEMKE, great pics for fall! Wurthering Heights is my favorite Bronte book, that’s a high bar, can anybody think of another batch of siblings who contributed more to their craft? If you like the W.H. vibe try Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca…The Modern Prometheus works on so many levels! Beau of the Fifth Colunm was always fond of reminding us that Frankenstein was not the name of the monster, the doctor was the monster…Dorian has always been one of my 80/20 classics, I find myself referring to just 20% of my classics 80% of the time, Gray is definitely one of the 20%...I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Hardy in general and Jude in particular. Jude is in many ways the patron saint of all of us Septimus Smith types (“...half educated, self-educated men whose education is all learned from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day's work, on the advice of well known authors consulted by letter.” -Mrs. D., V.W. Still there’s things I don’t care for about The Obscure, the Father Time murder/suicide thing, just too weird for me. Maybe the same as my basic beef with Dostoevsky’s Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, I was a prison guard for three decades and never met either one of them in any of my cell blocks, just not how REAL villains act…I’ve read a bunch of Jane Austen (for a dude) but never Northanger Abbey, guess I’ll have to test drive it, she’s to great opening lines what Joyce is to great closing ones, I’m thinking of course of Pride and The Dead… Villette, can’t wait to read this one too! I’ve read a ton of the Bronte sisters (their mother must have been proud) but never met this title, bet I’ll love it! Thanks for the fall haul! P.S. what was your other pic? You said at the beginning of the video you had 5 plus 2, did I miss one? Keep up the good work, we’re all counting on you!
@@dougirvin2413 It is indeed really difficult to top Wuthering Heights! Thank you for the effort you put into writing this comment and sharing your opinions on these books! You are right, I forgot one of the books I wanted to mention (sadly!)… That book was ‘Jezebel’s Daughter’ by Wilkie Collins, a recent read that I loved soooo much!
@@femsfablesIn the immortal words of Charlie Brown…”Awwwwwww!” I’ve had Wilkie Collins come across my radar before, but for some reason never tried him out. So I started your Jezebel this AM. I can tell this title is going to be triggering. It looks to be only 10 hrs or so (I’m SUPER dyslexic, only recorded books for me) but I should be through it in a couple days. Thanks again for the recommendations!
@@femsfablesHi FEMKE, alright I got through Jezebelle PTL! I made a bunch of notes (I usually don’t do that!) so if you’re interested in a more nuanced discussion I’d be happy to meet you on a live stream or comments after your own review video, if you want to make one. I said before Jezebel would be “triggering” and O boy was I right. I’m a retired prison guard and spent fully 7yrs of my career working in maximum security psyk including with the SMPU (Self-Mutilator Prevention Unit)...yeah I’ve seen some s**t! So I was fascinated by the early introduction of the Jack Straw character in this novel, elements of which did not disappoint! I totally know Jack Straw, quite a few as a matter of fact. I always love it when an author is able to capture some small, fine point of an esoteric topic that I happen to know something about. I’m an old guy (obviously!) and not a Harry Potter fan, but one of my reading buddies some years back was and she ‘made’ me read the first few books in the series, and I was struck by her depiction of the guards in her Prisoner of Azkaban. J.K.R. imagined their primary job was to suck the souls out of the incarcerated wizards…I thought ‘damn, that’s my job!’ She wasn’t far from the truth! Similarly Wilkie really nails some little known aspects of RTP (Residential Treatment Programs) aka prison psky wards. Like the custom made restraints (absolutely true!), and the Warden of the institution calling for the two day-shift regular guards by name (we were called RUO’s, Regular Unit Officers and made a few dollars more than the CO’s, Corrections Officers…but we were assigned to the cell blocks every day, usually the same block, so you got to know the prisoners in your block pretty well.) I totally knew Jack Straw! did I mention that already?!? LOL! His real name was Spanky McDonald, a bit of a legend in the Michigan Dept. of Corrections! He became the most expensive self-mutilator the State ever housed, he was famous for his belly cutting (did I say I’ve seen some s**t?!?). Spanky couldn’t read or write so when he’d get letters from his mother he’d ask me or one of the other RUOs to read them aloud to him. By way of his own letters back to his mom he’d (wait for it, this may make you cry!) carefully trace out his own hand on a blank sheet of paper and mail it home…I’m not making this stuff up…triggering! Spanky is dead now, but just like with Mrs. Wagner…he’ll be back! As for the rest of this little Victorian jewel…well I happen to have a soft spot for the genre so maybe my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. You see my mother read aloud to my sister and I when we were kids and over the course of a year or so she read us all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, to this day The Hound of the Baskervilles is my go-to. So Doyle was kind of my gate-way drug into serious literature, they don’t get anymore Victorian than Sir Arthur! That said, my only critiques of Jezebel are superficial and maybe due to my own rush to get through the title so I could discuss it with you. On the whole I found Collins to be a solid good read (I concur with it’s 3.8 out of 5 score). Incidentally other readers do not cite this as his best work, like I said I’ve never met him until now, have you read other Wilkie’s, which one is your favorite? I thought Collins was going to do more in the direction of his early feminism than he did with this novel. He starts out with the whole “hire more female clerks at the firm” thing but then kind of only makes it an afterthought. Seems like he might have contrived a female narrator instead of David, the story could have lent itself to that, especially since he didn’t pursue the plot line of a 3rd wheel relationship between David and Minna when anybody could see they should totally have fallen in love after their first meeting in the post office scene. Come on Wilkie, where’s your imagination guy?!? Of course he did bring us basically strong female protagonists, a real innovation for the Victorian mind I’d say! My beloved Sir A.C.D. only has one woman who jumps out of 1321 pages of Holmes, in his Irene Adler of A Scandal in Bohemia. Mostly female characters of this era are expected to just go to parties, gossip, drink tea, chase boys, and faint. I know I’m being too judgemental on this one point but I always hate it when an author with a readership shys away from a full throated commitment to some progressive idea in which they clearly believe, I’m still mad a William Faulkner for not coming right out and saying “hey Southern bigots are stupid” when he had a platform to do it, instead he dances around with hundreds of circuitous pages of Henry Sutpen and Quentin Compson ‘representing’ the antebellum South and acting like a**holes. Come on man! just say it!! GOD help me, surely this has done me more good in the writing then it will you in the reading. Like I said, if you want to discuss Jezebel’s Daughter or any other classic work please “Just Send Me Word”-Orlando Figes. (WOW! there’s another one for you, but I’ll shut up now!) Take care FEMKE and “Keep up the good work, we’re all counting on you!”---Airplane, circa 1980AD
@dougirvin2413 Woah thank you for this incredible comment! I wish I could answer to everything you said, but that would take me quite some time.. I haven’t read anything else by Wilkie Collins but after my experience with this book I know I have to! I do agree that it would have been interesting to read more of the feminist side of the story that was introduced at the start. And yes… a little love affair between David and Minna was looming and it would’ve been great to see that happen. I’ll discuss this book a bit more in depth in my wrap up at the end of the month :)
@@femsfables It came as a surprise to me, just picked up the book by chance, and at worst expected to find it a little bit boring. At that point I had to put the book down and it took me months to pick it up again...
I understand! I was already familiar with Hardy’s novels so I knew they could be quite violent and triggering sometimes, but this one was on a whole other level…
Hi Mike, surprised no one else put Hawthorne out there, seems an obvious choice! Problem I had with Seven Gables was that I'd read Scarlet Letter first, loved it and expected Gables to be Hester 2.0 and was thus disappointed...kinda my own fault. I complained about it at the time to one of my reading buddies and she cracked me up by quipping "yeah it sucks, ya should have asked me first!" R.I.P. sister Chris... But that was 2 decades ago and since then I've changed my mind. One of the YT readers (John David I think) pointed out that Gables says much the same as Faulkner's Southern gothics..." The past is never dead, it isn't even past".. a message that seems ever so germane today as we take about the war in Isreal or my damn 40 acres and my mule! Besides, speaking of Faulkner, who says that a genius should be pigon holed into one narrow canyon. Nobody ever reads his pre-Yoknapatawpha County works but I found Soldiers Pay excellent (Hemingway could easily have written it) and Mosquitos had to have been a collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain or atleast Jerome K. Jerome! No where in either book do you find the slightest hint of Thomas Sutpen or Quentin Compson...but they're coming, and so was his Nobel Prize! I know this is a classics channel and that's for the most part my thing too but every now and again I'll pick up somebody that's not dead, GOD forgive me...and want to read 3 more disparate novels then The Goldfinch, The Little Friend, and The Secret History...good luck! Incidently Donna Tartt's second book is what brought me to re-read my Faulkner cannon, I just assumed that grandma Edie was supposed to be Harper Lee's Scout projected out 50 years, hence down the Southern gothic rabbit hole...I think FEMKE's got us reading a couple Oscar Wilde plays next? Hope you enjoy them!
It is so thing with booktubers....they don't know how to hold a book still.....they bounce the books or hold them sideways. That's why I like if they don't have the book but rather a picture of the cover. No offense it's something that all of you do.
I disagree! I love when booktubers hold the books, rather than a pic on the screen! You get to see their edition of the book, any tabs or how well read the book looks, and just seeing the real book being held or being shown the pages, is comforting and the reason why I watch book videos!
What a perfect time to come across your video, it's dark & cloudy where I live right now and I've been curled up with Wuthering Heights ! I loved Jude The Obscure. I look forward to catching up on more of your videos
Awh enjoy reading Wuthering Heights! It’s the perfect book to read on a dark day 🌧️⭐️
Congrats on 1K subscribers! 🎉
I read Frankenstein last year and I loved both of your reading vlogs about it, this October I'm rereading The Metamorphosis by Kafka
Thank you! Kafka is perfect for a dark autumn read!
Hi @angirlgarrido, hope you're 'enjoying' The Metamorphosis! I've found Kafka to weird to like, but he certainly dredges up truth in a way that might make any Old Testament prophet proud. When you're braced for more Kafkaesque whak-a-dooness I'm sure you'll find his The Trial to live up to all the hype, no disappointments! I hope you 'enjoy'!
❤📚🎉❤️
Congratulations on 1k!!
I love Wuthering Heights!
Thank you! And yes, me too :)
Congratulations on 1000 subscribers. Best wishes on what you choose to read.
Thank you!
Great list! Yess Wuthering Heights is truly autumn!! Frankenstein - another favourite! Dorian Grey - yessss! Oh my goodness - I detest Jude! 😂😂 I'm glad you love it - I really really disliked it! 🤭🤭🤭 But I'm so happy I gave Thomas Hardy another go - read Tess in September and adored it!! Northanger Abbey yessss! So fun.
what the flip Femke!!! 1000 abonnees!!! insane!! proficiat!! 😘
zot he?! dankje 🥰
Thank you for the recommendations! I’ve been curious about Thomas Hardy for a long time but have yet to read one of his works! I’ll have to bump him up on my list :) I would recommend Wilkie Collins for some more great spooky season reads. I’ve read The Moonstone and The Two Destinies and loved them both!
I hope you’ll love Hardy as much as I do when you get around to reading something of his! I’ve recently finished Jezebel’s Daughter by Wilkie Collins and loved it. Can’t wait to read some more of his books :)
Hi KB, I just finished Jezebel and loved it. Everyone seems to be saying Moonstone is even better, guess I'll put it on my TBR list. I haven't read my Hardy cannon in 20 years, but as I recall they ALL have at least one scene that is exceptionally well written and all but maybe Far From the Madding Crowd (this is his book that brought us one my most oft quoted lines, the one about "the fate of dogs and other philosophers who carry an idea to is logical conclusion."...BRILLIANT!) have some pretty macabre elements, Jude probably is the worst offender. That said, as I mentioned in a previous post, Jude really is the patron saint of all of us who wished we could have been FEMKE, but instead ended up being Septimus Warren Smith...spoiler alert!...he totally doesn't end up owning a house at Purley and a motor car! (GOD bless Virginia Woolf). I say try out a Hardy, makes no difference which one, all are good. Enjoy the read!
Well deserved!!!
Thank you! I appreciate your constant support!
"Wuthering Heights" is the gothic champion there, I'm not a huge fan but there is no questioning its classical gothic credentials 😺😃👍
Ahh I absolutely love Wuthering Heights, but to each their own of course :)
Hi FEMKE, great pics for fall! Wurthering Heights is my favorite Bronte book, that’s a high bar, can anybody think of another batch of siblings who contributed more to their craft? If you like the W.H. vibe try Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca…The Modern Prometheus works on so many levels! Beau of the Fifth Colunm was always fond of reminding us that Frankenstein was not the name of the monster, the doctor was the monster…Dorian has always been one of my 80/20 classics, I find myself referring to just 20% of my classics 80% of the time, Gray is definitely one of the 20%...I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Hardy in general and Jude in particular. Jude is in many ways the patron saint of all of us Septimus Smith types (“...half educated, self-educated men whose education is all learned from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day's work, on the advice of well known authors consulted by letter.” -Mrs. D., V.W. Still there’s things I don’t care for about The Obscure, the Father Time murder/suicide thing, just too weird for me. Maybe the same as my basic beef with Dostoevsky’s Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, I was a prison guard for three decades and never met either one of them in any of my cell blocks, just not how REAL villains act…I’ve read a bunch of Jane Austen (for a dude) but never Northanger Abbey, guess I’ll have to test drive it, she’s to great opening lines what Joyce is to great closing ones, I’m thinking of course of Pride and The Dead… Villette, can’t wait to read this one too! I’ve read a ton of the Bronte sisters (their mother must have been proud) but never met this title, bet I’ll love it! Thanks for the fall haul! P.S. what was your other pic? You said at the beginning of the video you had 5 plus 2, did I miss one? Keep up the good work, we’re all counting on you!
@@dougirvin2413 It is indeed really difficult to top Wuthering Heights! Thank you for the effort you put into writing this comment and sharing your opinions on these books! You are right, I forgot one of the books I wanted to mention (sadly!)… That book was ‘Jezebel’s Daughter’ by Wilkie Collins, a recent read that I loved soooo much!
@@femsfablesIn the immortal words of Charlie Brown…”Awwwwwww!” I’ve had Wilkie Collins come across my radar before, but for some reason never tried him out. So I started your Jezebel this AM. I can tell this title is going to be triggering. It looks to be only 10 hrs or so (I’m SUPER dyslexic, only recorded books for me) but I should be through it in a couple days. Thanks again for the recommendations!
@dougirvin2413 Let me know what you think of it! Enjoy your reading :)
@@femsfablesHi FEMKE, alright I got through Jezebelle PTL! I made a bunch of notes (I usually don’t do that!) so if you’re interested in a more nuanced discussion I’d be happy to meet you on a live stream or comments after your own review video, if you want to make one. I said before Jezebel would be “triggering” and O boy was I right. I’m a retired prison guard and spent fully 7yrs of my career working in maximum security psyk including with the SMPU (Self-Mutilator Prevention Unit)...yeah I’ve seen some s**t! So I was fascinated by the early introduction of the Jack Straw character in this novel, elements of which did not disappoint! I totally know Jack Straw, quite a few as a matter of fact. I always love it when an author is able to capture some small, fine point of an esoteric topic that I happen to know something about. I’m an old guy (obviously!) and not a Harry Potter fan, but one of my reading buddies some years back was and she ‘made’ me read the first few books in the series, and I was struck by her depiction of the guards in her Prisoner of Azkaban. J.K.R. imagined their primary job was to suck the souls out of the incarcerated wizards…I thought ‘damn, that’s my job!’ She wasn’t far from the truth! Similarly Wilkie really nails some little known aspects of RTP (Residential Treatment Programs) aka prison psky wards. Like the custom made restraints (absolutely true!), and the Warden of the institution calling for the two day-shift regular guards by name (we were called RUO’s, Regular Unit Officers and made a few dollars more than the CO’s, Corrections Officers…but we were assigned to the cell blocks every day, usually the same block, so you got to know the prisoners in your block pretty well.) I totally knew Jack Straw! did I mention that already?!? LOL! His real name was Spanky McDonald, a bit of a legend in the Michigan Dept. of Corrections! He became the most expensive self-mutilator the State ever housed, he was famous for his belly cutting (did I say I’ve seen some s**t?!?). Spanky couldn’t read or write so when he’d get letters from his mother he’d ask me or one of the other RUOs to read them aloud to him. By way of his own letters back to his mom he’d (wait for it, this may make you cry!) carefully trace out his own hand on a blank sheet of paper and mail it home…I’m not making this stuff up…triggering! Spanky is dead now, but just like with Mrs. Wagner…he’ll be back! As for the rest of this little Victorian jewel…well I happen to have a soft spot for the genre so maybe my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. You see my mother read aloud to my sister and I when we were kids and over the course of a year or so she read us all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, to this day The Hound of the Baskervilles is my go-to. So Doyle was kind of my gate-way drug into serious literature, they don’t get anymore Victorian than Sir Arthur! That said, my only critiques of Jezebel are superficial and maybe due to my own rush to get through the title so I could discuss it with you. On the whole I found Collins to be a solid good read (I concur with it’s 3.8 out of 5 score). Incidentally other readers do not cite this as his best work, like I said I’ve never met him until now, have you read other Wilkie’s, which one is your favorite? I thought Collins was going to do more in the direction of his early feminism than he did with this novel. He starts out with the whole “hire more female clerks at the firm” thing but then kind of only makes it an afterthought. Seems like he might have contrived a female narrator instead of David, the story could have lent itself to that, especially since he didn’t pursue the plot line of a 3rd wheel relationship between David and Minna when anybody could see they should totally have fallen in love after their first meeting in the post office scene. Come on Wilkie, where’s your imagination guy?!? Of course he did bring us basically strong female protagonists, a real innovation for the Victorian mind I’d say! My beloved Sir A.C.D. only has one woman who jumps out of 1321 pages of Holmes, in his Irene Adler of A Scandal in Bohemia. Mostly female characters of this era are expected to just go to parties, gossip, drink tea, chase boys, and faint. I know I’m being too judgemental on this one point but I always hate it when an author with a readership shys away from a full throated commitment to some progressive idea in which they clearly believe, I’m still mad a William Faulkner for not coming right out and saying “hey Southern bigots are stupid” when he had a platform to do it, instead he dances around with hundreds of circuitous pages of Henry Sutpen and Quentin Compson ‘representing’ the antebellum South and acting like a**holes. Come on man! just say it!! GOD help me, surely this has done me more good in the writing then it will you in the reading. Like I said, if you want to discuss Jezebel’s Daughter or any other classic work please “Just Send Me Word”-Orlando Figes. (WOW! there’s another one for you, but I’ll shut up now!) Take care FEMKE and “Keep up the good work, we’re all counting on you!”---Airplane, circa 1980AD
@dougirvin2413 Woah thank you for this incredible comment! I wish I could answer to everything you said, but that would take me quite some time.. I haven’t read anything else by Wilkie Collins but after my experience with this book I know I have to! I do agree that it would have been interesting to read more of the feminist side of the story that was introduced at the start. And yes… a little love affair between David and Minna was looming and it would’ve been great to see that happen. I’ll discuss this book a bit more in depth in my wrap up at the end of the month :)
Only read Jude the Obscure, if you're prepared for a scene of horrific and heartbreaking violence. my 2c.
It truly is very horrific and heartbreaking!
@@femsfables It came as a surprise to me, just picked up the book by chance, and at worst expected to find it a little bit boring. At that point I had to put the book down and it took me months to pick it up again...
I understand! I was already familiar with Hardy’s novels so I knew they could be quite violent and triggering sometimes, but this one was on a whole other level…
I would like to suggest the House of the Seven Gables.
Thank you! I’ll add that one to my list :)
Hi Mike, surprised no one else put Hawthorne out there, seems an obvious choice! Problem I had with Seven Gables was that I'd read Scarlet Letter first, loved it and expected Gables to be Hester 2.0 and was thus disappointed...kinda my own fault. I complained about it at the time to one of my reading buddies and she cracked me up by quipping "yeah it sucks, ya should have asked me first!" R.I.P. sister Chris... But that was 2 decades ago and since then I've changed my mind. One of the YT readers (John David I think) pointed out that Gables says much the same as Faulkner's Southern gothics..." The past is never dead, it isn't even past".. a message that seems ever so germane today as we take about the war in Isreal or my damn 40 acres and my mule! Besides, speaking of Faulkner, who says that a genius should be pigon holed into one narrow canyon. Nobody ever reads his pre-Yoknapatawpha County works but I found Soldiers Pay excellent (Hemingway could easily have written it) and Mosquitos had to have been a collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain or atleast Jerome K. Jerome! No where in either book do you find the slightest hint of Thomas Sutpen or Quentin Compson...but they're coming, and so was his Nobel Prize! I know this is a classics channel and that's for the most part my thing too but every now and again I'll pick up somebody that's not dead, GOD forgive me...and want to read 3 more disparate novels then The Goldfinch, The Little Friend, and The Secret History...good luck! Incidently Donna Tartt's second book is what brought me to re-read my Faulkner cannon, I just assumed that grandma Edie was supposed to be Harper Lee's Scout projected out 50 years, hence down the Southern gothic rabbit hole...I think FEMKE's got us reading a couple Oscar Wilde plays next? Hope you enjoy them!
@@dougirvin2413 Doug: I’ve made a note of all of them. Cheers!
It is so thing with booktubers....they don't know how to hold a book still.....they bounce the books or hold them sideways. That's why I like if they don't have the book but rather a picture of the cover. No offense it's something that all of you do.
I think it’s just really hard to keep a book still when we’re so excited to talk about them :)
@@femsfables maybe get a bookstand
I disagree! I love when booktubers hold the books, rather than a pic on the screen! You get to see their edition of the book, any tabs or how well read the book looks, and just seeing the real book being held or being shown the pages, is comforting and the reason why I watch book videos!