I'm absolutely addicted to your channel, my book wishlist always grows exponentially whenever I watch a video of yours... Excited about the herodotus readalong!!
I really liked this tour, thanks for doing this! I like the fact that you don't just say "I love it!" to every piece. I appreciate that you are candid when you say that you don't have a love for some of these books. I am looking to get into reading. maybe a bit of a middle-age crisis thing, but I haven't taken time to read in the last 2 decades.
I loved this! I'm always picking up the Penguin classics the thrift stores when I see them. I appreciated your honesty with a few of them. Now my wish list is even longer!!
Could you make a video that recommends a reading order for ancient novels, or greek and roman/Italian novels. It would be VERY HELPFUL! I do not know where to start at all
Found your channel yesterday and i was so mesmerized by you! Love how you explain the books and it makes me want to pick all up and read them. Thank you!!
my biggest bookish pet peeve is ordering penguin classics online expecting the 2000-10's edition and being sent the old 80's editions. i have two copies of charlotte bronte's the professor in the 80's edition because it happened twice, and i dont even like the book that much i just want it for collection purposes! 😩 you have so many cool books, i haven't read any of the ancients yet. i read the scarlet letter just on my own and i really couldn't get into it, i found it dry and confusing.
Jennifer, what a wonderful collection 😍 I don't have a favorite type of classics publishers, but you're making me hanker after Penguin lol I generally go by translator or get it at a thrift store/library/project Gutenberg copy 😅 Also, Ovid needs to be a thing in my life. I love what I've read, but I've only read excerpts. Thanks for the plugs!! Lol
I RARELY look at translator and so often that comes back to bite me, lol. I've heard Oxford can be better when it comes to translation but I haven't read enough of those to know for sure. You would really enjoy Ovid!!
Loved this video. Thank you for the recommendations, I've added many to my list. I just finished The Master and Margarita yesterday... it was interesting.
Gosh, this is *so* interesting. I know nothing (near as dammit) about ancient classics yet found this fascinating.. bookmarking this video for future reference so i can dip my toes in when my ridiculously overblown tbr is down some.. lol. What a collection! pleasure to watch/ listen : )
Omg lol you have a scandalous edition of The Decameron lol I'm so excited to get to Wilkie Collins next month and Dante later this year. If you ever decide to host classics readalongs or buddy reads, I'd def be interested! I have no experience reading ancient classics but would absolutely love to
Yes, it's very scandalous, lol!! I really hope you enjoy Dante. I think you'll love Wilkie. I keep thinking about readalongs and buddy reads... I need to commit to an idea!! Lol.
I really enjoyed this and made a list of some of the books I want to read! The Bible: I’d recommend the New Oxford Bible because, like the Penguin addition, it has the Apocrypha but also has a number of excellent scholarly notes.
Another great video Jennifer! I loved that you said you believe there is a norse saga for everyone :) I'm really intrigued by them but they also intimidate me! I don't know if they'd be very "beginner friendly". I don't know if you're still taking video recommendations, but a video about norse saga recommendations would be amazing
I keep doing the squeak of "I have that" - As this is your year of Napoleon, you might be interested to read his opinion of Caesar as Napoleon (modest as ever) saw himself as an equal.
Yes, it seems like he constantly makes reference to him in his own writings! I sometimes struggle with Napoleon's arrogance but then I think, I guess he had a point, lol.
Once you read Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' you should give a listen to Loreena McKennitt's musical rendition of the poem. It is abridged, but very lovely. If you enjoy it, check out some of her other songs - she's made other poems and pieces of plays into songs as well, among other things.
I have read Suetonius, which is fantastic. Frankenstein too, which I was genuinely surprised by. I think I assumed it would be like the films, but it is so different. I found it a fabulous read. I've just read Juvenal's Sixteen Satires in the Alan Green translation (which I did III and X for Latin A-Level). I'm not sure about the translation, which seems very loose. It was originally written in 1968 and updated in 1974 (and might have been updated since as I've got an old second hand-copy.) So, I did something I almost never do and bought another translation - The Oxford Classics, Niall Rudd one - to compare and contrast. I might not have bothered if I didn't have some familiarity with the originals. But I have too many Penguins to mention here. My favourite is, at the moment, probably North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which I may need to re-read at some point.
I'm ashamed to say I've never read Juvenal! He's on my neverending TBR. I've heard the Oxford editions are some of the best in terms of translating ancient classics--I need to try more of them.
@@jenniferbrooks It's a problematic read in some respects. By modern standards, he'd probably be labelled with a lot of labels that never existed when he wrote. I think if he lived now he'd have a UA-cam Channel with a line in merchandise: T-Shirts with 'Bread and Circuses' printed on.
I think you could start with Beowulf, which is a longer epic poem, or Marie de France, who was a French poet of the medieval period. She wrote a lot about King Arthur!
Great video, and collection. Regarding Lucretius, I'm not sure if you know, it's definitely important to have a good understanding of Epicureanism prior to undertaking De Rerum Natura. I haven't read either admittedly, but had done some research on Lucretius a few months ago.
Hi Jenny. Loved this video! You’re giving me ideas for my own posts. You mentioned your reading of some of these books while in school. May I ask what your major was and whether you pursued a graduate degree as well? You also mentioned that you studied Latin as well. Was that also in college? Enough questions for now. I love so many of your posts. Thanks for being awesome!
Just a couple of opinions - I love the Lysistrata and it's a premise that was in fact used in both Kenya and Belgium in the 21st century. Also, Thucydides is utterly brilliant. I won't spoil it except to say that the speech of Pericles influenced greatly, the Gettysburg Address and the part dealing with the fate of the Athenians in Scilly left me genuinely distressed.
Oh, I‘m also really interested in translations! I recently read Robert Fagles‘ translation of The Iliad (and it‘s the only translation of it I‘ve read so far). I‘m planning to read a different translation someday because there were some parts I found a bit odd. So I would really love hearing you compare different translations of books (Metamorphoses is also on by tbr but I‘m still debating with translation I should pick up) :)
@@folksurvival Oh yeah! All in all I would totally agree. I guess I was just wondering if some things were literal translations or appropriations. But I guess you would have that with any translator. One question I had with the Iliad was that I had watched a video about colours before reading it and they said the colour blue doesn‘t appear in literature until much later than the other colours and they used Homer as an example („the wine dark sea“). So I was just confused as to why there were lines like „blue-haired Poseidon“ in Fagles‘ translation. I haven’t found the answer yet, I should probably look that up 😅
I completely agree with you about Strange Case Of Mr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. I went into it with great expectations, but left it with feeling highly disappointed.
I find it kinda funny how often the Metamorphoses and Twelve Caesars are recommended as good starting points on ancient Roman writing. I went into those after already getting really interested in Roman history (having listened to some great podcasts at Hardcore History, reading modern histories like Tom Holland's Rubicon, etc), but I found both Metamorphoses and Twelve Caesars (both Penguin editions) to be incredibly dull. I feel like 12 Caesars is exactly the kind of book that non-history readers think history books are: very boring minutiae on things like taxes and trade policies occasionally broken up by a fun fact or weird anecdote. Metamorphoses was a prose translation so that probably didn't help, but I couldn't follow anything that was happening most of the time. Now I'm left wondering if maybe I'm not interested in ancient Rome after all! I still have my Penguin copy of Livy's Early History of Rome so I guess that'll be my last attempt, haha.
Hello, I would like to invite you to read The Painter by Vera Britto, available as an ebook on Amazon. What is a man to do when he is trapped? - Based on a poignant short story by Aldous Huxley, one of England’s greatest writers It is 1923, and London is home to Rolls-Royce limousines, art snobs and cunning young men trying to better themselves. Some, like the dashing William, climb on the backs of others while friends at the club cheer him on. Some, like Lord Badgery, throw out crumbs of privilege to those eager to lap them up. Yet others, like the down-trodden Jonathan, are dazzled by England's aristocratic circles which he observes with ever widening eyes. What wouldn’t he give to be one of them and to escape his own suffocating circumstances? If he had to pay a high price for acceptance, his greatest dream, would he? Set against the backdrop of the world of painting and fine arts, with real and fictional artists and artworks, one man’s soul is tested. The cinema has not used Huxley’s short story, “The Tillotson Banquet”, but “The Painter” shows how rich and vibrant such a film would be. The story is written in a screenplay format, which author Vera Britto playfully calls a Movie-in-a-Book and shows it is a viable and enjoyable format as any other. With filmmaking’s freedom, she paints in characters and drama to enrich Huxley’s story. Directions for filming and acting will pique the imagination of the reader in a way that prose does not. There is “image” in “imagination”, and page by page this Movie-in-a-Book fills a mental screen. The reader enjoys both a rich interpretation of life in upper class England and the chance to embark on this exciting adventure sitting in the director’s chair.
Man, this is one of the best bookshelf tour I have ever seen!!
Great collection!
Thank you, Dario!
Couldn’t agree more!
OMG ur voice is soothing
Uggh! My poor TBR list! (Wonderful. Thank you.)
I loved how you present each title. Thank you for sharing your collection with us
Thank you!
Love Penguin classics so I thank you for this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I noticed the McKay sticker on the Alexiad. I love that store.
I'm absolutely addicted to your channel, my book wishlist always grows exponentially whenever I watch a video of yours... Excited about the herodotus readalong!!
This is the best bookshelf tour I've ever seen and I learned a lot too. 🤩 Thank you for sharing your books and your reading experience with us!
I really liked this tour, thanks for doing this! I like the fact that you don't just say "I love it!" to every piece. I appreciate that you are candid when you say that you don't have a love for some of these books.
I am looking to get into reading. maybe a bit of a middle-age crisis thing, but I haven't taken time to read in the last 2 decades.
I loved this! I'm always picking up the Penguin classics the thrift stores when I see them. I appreciated your honesty with a few of them. Now my wish list is even longer!!
Thank you! I always pick them up used too--it's an addiction.
Could you make a video that recommends a reading order for ancient novels, or greek and roman/Italian novels. It would be VERY HELPFUL! I do not know where to start at all
That's a great idea! Thank you for this!!
@@jenniferbrooks of course! I'm so glad you liked the idea!
Great collection 💛
Found your channel yesterday and i was so mesmerized by you! Love how you explain the books and it makes me want to pick all up and read them. Thank you!!
It’s so sad that we won’t get more videos from Jennifer since she passed away on Jan. 3 2024
Brilliant collection.
Thanks, Tom!
my biggest bookish pet peeve is ordering penguin classics online expecting the 2000-10's edition and being sent the old 80's editions. i have two copies of charlotte bronte's the professor in the 80's edition because it happened twice, and i dont even like the book that much i just want it for collection purposes! 😩 you have so many cool books, i haven't read any of the ancients yet. i read the scarlet letter just on my own and i really couldn't get into it, i found it dry and confusing.
Yes!! That happens to me all the time! I can’t figure out how to make sure I get the editions I want when I buy them used.
Jennifer, what a wonderful collection 😍 I don't have a favorite type of classics publishers, but you're making me hanker after Penguin lol I generally go by translator or get it at a thrift store/library/project Gutenberg copy 😅
Also, Ovid needs to be a thing in my life. I love what I've read, but I've only read excerpts. Thanks for the plugs!! Lol
I RARELY look at translator and so often that comes back to bite me, lol. I've heard Oxford can be better when it comes to translation but I haven't read enough of those to know for sure. You would really enjoy Ovid!!
I like your book collection a lot. Lots of wonderful reads!
Loved this video. Thank you for the recommendations, I've added many to my list. I just finished The Master and Margarita yesterday... it was interesting.
Thank you! I’m looking forward to trying the Master and Margarita!
There is a full Penguin Classics version of The Faerie Queene. I got it for my Masters.
I’ll have to be on the hunt for that.
Link me in, please!
AMAZING video.
Gosh, this is *so* interesting. I know nothing (near as dammit) about ancient classics yet found this fascinating.. bookmarking this video for future reference so i can dip my toes in when my ridiculously overblown tbr is down some.. lol. What a collection! pleasure to watch/ listen : )
Thank you!! I hope you enjoy the ancient classics you decide to try!
I bought “DVD/BluRay” shelves from Amazon just for paperbacks and Penguin Classics. Looks awesome.
Omg lol you have a scandalous edition of The Decameron lol I'm so excited to get to Wilkie Collins next month and Dante later this year. If you ever decide to host classics readalongs or buddy reads, I'd def be interested! I have no experience reading ancient classics but would absolutely love to
Yes, it's very scandalous, lol!! I really hope you enjoy Dante. I think you'll love Wilkie. I keep thinking about readalongs and buddy reads... I need to commit to an idea!! Lol.
I really enjoyed this and made a list of some of the books I want to read! The Bible: I’d recommend the New Oxford Bible because, like the Penguin addition, it has the Apocrypha but also has a number of excellent scholarly notes.
Thank you!! I will have to look into that one. A lot of people seem to recommend Oxford’s Bible.
Another great video Jennifer! I loved that you said you believe there is a norse saga for everyone :) I'm really intrigued by them but they also intimidate me! I don't know if they'd be very "beginner friendly". I don't know if you're still taking video recommendations, but a video about norse saga recommendations would be amazing
Thank you, Mariana!! I've been thinking about doing a saga video and I think you've given me the encouragement to finally do it!
@@jenniferbrooks Ohh, I'll look forward to it!
If you liked Mary Barton, I would highly recommend reading North and South if you have not yet. It is one of my favorite books of all time!
I keep doing the squeak of "I have that" - As this is your year of Napoleon, you might be interested to read his opinion of Caesar as Napoleon (modest as ever) saw himself as an equal.
Yes, it seems like he constantly makes reference to him in his own writings! I sometimes struggle with Napoleon's arrogance but then I think, I guess he had a point, lol.
High five for Master and Margarita! I am slowly going through it (it's definitely a mood), but it's so delightfully weird!
Once you read Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' you should give a listen to Loreena McKennitt's musical rendition of the poem. It is abridged, but very lovely. If you enjoy it, check out some of her other songs - she's made other poems and pieces of plays into songs as well, among other things.
I have read Suetonius, which is fantastic. Frankenstein too, which I was genuinely surprised by. I think I assumed it would be like the films, but it is so different. I found it a fabulous read. I've just read Juvenal's Sixteen Satires in the Alan Green translation (which I did III and X for Latin A-Level). I'm not sure about the translation, which seems very loose. It was originally written in 1968 and updated in 1974 (and might have been updated since as I've got an old second hand-copy.) So, I did something I almost never do and bought another translation - The Oxford Classics, Niall Rudd one - to compare and contrast. I might not have bothered if I didn't have some familiarity with the originals. But I have too many Penguins to mention here. My favourite is, at the moment, probably North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which I may need to re-read at some point.
I'm ashamed to say I've never read Juvenal! He's on my neverending TBR. I've heard the Oxford editions are some of the best in terms of translating ancient classics--I need to try more of them.
@@jenniferbrooks It's a problematic read in some respects. By modern standards, he'd probably be labelled with a lot of labels that never existed when he wrote. I think if he lived now he'd have a UA-cam Channel with a line in merchandise: T-Shirts with 'Bread and Circuses' printed on.
This vídeo made my day :)
Which medieval classic do you recommend to start?
I think you could start with Beowulf, which is a longer epic poem, or Marie de France, who was a French poet of the medieval period. She wrote a lot about King Arthur!
@@jenniferbrooks which translation do you recommend?
Great video, and collection. Regarding Lucretius, I'm not sure if you know, it's definitely important to have a good understanding of Epicureanism prior to undertaking De Rerum Natura. I haven't read either admittedly, but had done some research on Lucretius a few months ago.
Hi Jenny. Loved this video! You’re giving me ideas for my own posts.
You mentioned your reading of some of these books while in school. May I ask what your major was and whether you pursued a graduate degree as well? You also mentioned that you studied Latin as well. Was that also in college?
Enough questions for now. I love so many of your posts. Thanks for being awesome!
Just a couple of opinions - I love the Lysistrata and it's a premise that was in fact used in both Kenya and Belgium in the 21st century. Also, Thucydides is utterly brilliant. I won't spoil it except to say that the speech of Pericles influenced greatly, the Gettysburg Address and the part dealing with the fate of the Athenians in Scilly left me genuinely distressed.
This has made me feel far more encouraged about both the Lysistrata and Thucydides! I hope I feel the same way you did.
Oh, I‘m also really interested in translations! I recently read Robert Fagles‘ translation of The Iliad (and it‘s the only translation of it I‘ve read so far). I‘m planning to read a different translation someday because there were some parts I found a bit odd. So I would really love hearing you compare different translations of books (Metamorphoses is also on by tbr but I‘m still debating with translation I should pick up) :)
I thought Fagles' Iliad and Odyssey were brilliant.
@@folksurvival Oh yeah! All in all I would totally agree. I guess I was just wondering if some things were literal translations or appropriations. But I guess you would have that with any translator. One question I had with the Iliad was that I had watched a video about colours before reading it and they said the colour blue doesn‘t appear in literature until much later than the other colours and they used Homer as an example („the wine dark sea“). So I was just confused as to why there were lines like „blue-haired Poseidon“ in Fagles‘ translation. I haven’t found the answer yet, I should probably look that up 😅
@@liamfrederic5203 I didn't know that about the color blue.
What do you think of reading pdf books ?
Ahh so exciting I love bookshelf tours 😍
I uploaded one aswell🥰
Gore Vidal swore by Calvino as top of the list of novelists .
There's a readalong for Brothers Karamazov in February? Who's hosting it?
Christy Luis-Dostoyevsky in Space, the History Shelf, Musical Bookworm, and the Codex Cantina! It should be a really great time.
Aristophanes is enlightening!
😍
I wouldnt mind finding old Penguin editions because i hardly find any Penguin classics in my country 😑
I completely agree with you about Strange Case Of Mr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. I went into it with great expectations, but left it with feeling highly disappointed.
Yes! That was exactly how I felt about it!
I find it kinda funny how often the Metamorphoses and Twelve Caesars are recommended as good starting points on ancient Roman writing. I went into those after already getting really interested in Roman history (having listened to some great podcasts at Hardcore History, reading modern histories like Tom Holland's Rubicon, etc), but I found both Metamorphoses and Twelve Caesars (both Penguin editions) to be incredibly dull.
I feel like 12 Caesars is exactly the kind of book that non-history readers think history books are: very boring minutiae on things like taxes and trade policies occasionally broken up by a fun fact or weird anecdote. Metamorphoses was a prose translation so that probably didn't help, but I couldn't follow anything that was happening most of the time. Now I'm left wondering if maybe I'm not interested in ancient Rome after all! I still have my Penguin copy of Livy's Early History of Rome so I guess that'll be my last attempt, haha.
21:39 same with the Orthodox bible, but those aren’t common in the English world
Hello, I would like to invite you to read The Painter by Vera Britto, available as an ebook on Amazon. What is a man to do when he is trapped? - Based on a poignant short story by Aldous Huxley, one of England’s greatest writers
It is 1923, and London is home to Rolls-Royce limousines, art snobs and cunning young men trying to better themselves. Some, like the dashing William, climb on the backs of others while friends at the club cheer him on. Some, like Lord Badgery, throw out crumbs of privilege to those eager to lap them up. Yet others, like the down-trodden Jonathan, are dazzled by England's aristocratic circles which he observes with ever widening eyes. What wouldn’t he give to be one of them and to escape his own suffocating circumstances? If he had to pay a high price for acceptance, his greatest dream, would he? Set against the backdrop of the world of painting and fine arts, with real and fictional artists and artworks, one man’s soul is tested.
The cinema has not used Huxley’s short story, “The Tillotson Banquet”, but “The Painter” shows how rich and vibrant such a film would be. The story is written in a screenplay format, which author Vera Britto playfully calls a Movie-in-a-Book and shows it is a viable and enjoyable format as any other. With filmmaking’s freedom, she paints in characters and drama to enrich Huxley’s story. Directions for filming and acting will pique the imagination of the reader in a way that prose does not. There is “image” in “imagination”, and page by page this Movie-in-a-Book fills a mental screen. The reader enjoys both a rich interpretation of life in upper class England and the chance to embark on this exciting adventure sitting in the director’s chair.