I recently found your channel and I can’t stop watching it. The way u describe your favourite books is fantastic. Your channel is so underrated. Keep going! 💜

Love the wooden spoon XD

You are my favourite booktuber. Got so many awesome recommendations from you. Thank you! ☺

You give me hope for the new generation. A reminder of how much light there is still in the world. You are a true role model, carrying  depth, wisdom, and such gentleness and kindness.

Les Miserables will forever change you and you will never forget it. It is profound on every page.

I’m always amazed by your English skills, you are so well spoken sometimes I forget you’re German, you describe books so eloquently, my congratulations, I don’t know how you managed that 🎉

I love the way you talk about books!—Have no fear of the Canterbury Tales; they are amazing! Also, you do not need to read all of them at once or all in sequence (though I’d recommend revisiting the introduction that introduces all the pilgrims and their quirks if you leave off reading them for some time). Their writing style, topics and humour (or lack thereof) varies greatly depending on who is telling the tale (the pilgrims take turns), which really goes to show what an amazing writer and observer of society Chaucer was. I read the Canterbury Tales at uni for a Middle English class and I’d recommend trying out a bilingual edition (Middle English/English or Middle English/German). If you know both German and English, Middle English is not difficult (source: my own experience).

Regarding Vanity Fair, there actually is a character you can root for and who is the hero of the book, in my opinion, and that is William Dobbin. I actually also really like Jos Sedley, though I suppose you’re not meant to like him quite as much as I ended up doing 😂 It’s an entertaining book overall, though it does have some lengths in the latter section of the book (it’s one of those classics that became longer than it needed to be because the author was paid per chapter). The Penguin Classics edition actually does not include the sketches, so I would not recommend picking that one. I recommend choosing either the Oxford Classics edition or the Norton Critical Editions version.

A day is nicer when I listen to you! :)

I think what makes the ‘boring’ books so worthwhile is that what it lacks in action or plot it more than makes up for in the depth of its characters e.g Oblomov. They showcase an author’s ability to not only understand the human psyche but to portray it in such a way as to make us believe that what are ultimately words on a page are living, breathing people and beings

A lot of the french classics you mentioned are also on my bucket list. I really want to read them in the original French and even though my french is advanced I’m still holding back.Eventually I will get to them though.

As always wishing you a great week and looking forward to the next video 💕😊

Finished reading Les Miserables last month, and it took me two full months to get through. It's long and meandering and full of digressions but worth every single word, imo. I don't think I've ever been so moved by a piece of art. Victor Hugo was such a precious man, so concerned and optimistic about the humanity's progress, it's a good thing he isn't here to witness what a mess we've made of it.

Enjoyed your list. Thank you.
Have read many of the books on it (Proust, the two Hugos (and a few others), Moby Dick (& Typee), The Divine Comedy (in college nearly 60 years ago), Middlemarch (& The Mill on the Floss), and The Tale of Genji). The Tale of Genji took me over 50 years to get to. I bounced off it several times. You really need a good translation and adequate critical apparatus to supply context and explain allusions to Chinese poems that are over 1000 years old. Even if you are familiar with Japanese culture and the past several hundred years of Japanese history, that may not help much. The Japan of Murasaki's era was a completely different world. One needs a guide. The translation I finally ended up with the Penguin Classics edition translated by Royall Tyler. It did a very good job of supplying background history, setting up each chapter with a list of characters and their relationships, and providing extensive notes on the poetic and other allusions in the text. One could also use a separate guide to the work such as The Tale of Genji: A Reader's Guide by William J. Puette or The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris. I've read the first and looked at the second. There are a number others available. You should pick what looks good to you. But the Penguin Classics edition I recommended I found to be very good and self contained. That was what enabled me to get through it in 2019 after having bounced off of at least two other translations at various times since 1966.

The Tale of Genji has three translations in English. I read the entire book transl. by Arthur Waley, who was the first to translate it, and loved it. I then tried the next transl. by Edward Seidensticker, and liked it much less. Having lived in Japan, I felt the Waley translation was somehow closer in feeling to the flowing script it was written in. The Siedensticker version is too literal - and I remember him giving a lecture on translation (in Kobe, Japan) saying that being literal in turning the language into English was best; but an opposing view was given by a Japanese Prof. who believed one needed to allow the translation to be 'a work in its own right,' and maintain the feeling. Thus, Seidensticker's version felt too cerebral to me, but Waley allowed long sentences to flow along as ancient Japanese does. The third translation I haven't tried yet, but it's the most recent.

For the Divine Comedy I highly recommend you get an edition that has the engravings by Gustave Doré. These engravings are transcendental, a masterpiece just like the book itself.

Don Quixote was a bucket list book for me. I recently started reading it and I'm loving it

The Decameron is really good. Many of the stories are hilarious. You will laugh out loud,

Love and memory. Luv luv luv luv🦋Makes your consciousness drift in space😊

Thats a pretty happy spoon!

Penguin Deluxe Classics have The Tale of Genji unabridged.  I have it and read it last year. To me it feels like two completely different books. I would say the first is Genji's life and the second is the next generation. I have not read the abridged version but from reading Goodreads comments it is my understanding that the abridged version is the first 2/3 or 3/4 of the book that is Genji's life. The remaining part of the book, which to me feels like a sequel, is about the next generation.  I don't think I'm  giving anything away in saying this. If you can only find the abridged version, you will still know Genji in full.

A great list! Some of these are on my must read list as well.

Hiiiii Vanisha! How are you doing? It feels so long even though we watch you every week. :P You know what, watching you guys (you and incredible people in the comment section) talking about classics is giving me some sort of crisis moments because I recently have discovered modern fantasy and I am on my second series - Monsters of Verity, first being The Villains both by the same author (insert monkey side-eyeing meme). I pushed all my classics and non-fiction aside at the moment but I am not gonna feel bad about it because at least I am reading. :P Seeing all the comments here feels that all the people that follow your channel are insanely well-read, just like yourself and I know that would drive me too. :D Okay, enough of that. Now, I have something to share too because of the books that you mentioned here in this video and in the past. I went on a trip and found several all English bookstores, which I am really out of touch for several years (in India, we have majorly English books in bookstores and regional language books too). I was so overwhelmed by seeing all the books that I could read and, naturally, I went to history section and they had special shelf for Indian history books and I was shocked to be honest. They had shelves like Asian history, European history, Greek history, Chinese history etc. etc. It felt like I was in heaven. And and the story just doesn't end there, I went to a bookstore where they had locked shelves which had Mishima's older editions' books and you know what my first thought was "Vanisha would be excited about this!" and it was fantastic. Also, I learnt about Everyman's library edition from your channel so I bought a book in that edition and guess which one was it? Yeah, it was none other than Middlemarch (you see, as we say in India, we have matching bookish wavelength there :P). Then I bought several second-hand books some of them were familiar because of your channel. So, thanks a lot. :D You're incredible reader.

So many I've read and some I still want to read. Thanks for the recs.