books i'd save if my house was burning down in a fire

the first time I started to film this video someone's car alarm just started like blaring so I don't know if that was kind of divine intervention saying don't film this video but we're going for it anyway wait this is take two so I officially have a thousand books in my collection which officially counts as a library which is cool and I was thinking about that and how this collection of books this collection of stories is so important to me and it kind of tells the story of my life too as I've collected these books over the years and so I started to think about which books are the most special to me if this house was going up in Flames if the alarm that was going off was my house and it was because there was a fire or something and things were being destroyed which books would I save and so I went through my collection and I think this is my list and what's kind of cool about this is that it kind of also tells the story of my life you know up to this point because I have been collecting these books and so they kind of tell the tale of what I've been up to for the past at least decade and the different stages of my life and the books that have meant something to me not necessarily because of the contents of the book but often like the circumstances around the book so these are all books I really like um but specifically they have some sort of sentimental value because of the physical Edition or because of what the book like represents to me and so I thought I would just like go through them and show you firstly George Orwell I saw a meme recently where someone said they thought his name was George Orwell and as of that moment it like shifted my brain chemistry and now I can't look at this man's name without thinking George Orwell so George Orwell or at least he works and I encountered them when I was probably like 15 and I studied animal farm at school and um I remember just thinking it was incredible and being amazed that this is what you could do with literature with writing um as you can see my Edition is so highlighted that actually more is highlighted than isn't highlighted so I'm not sure how much like literary criticism was really happening at this point in my life but I just know that this meant so much to me and this is a testament to how good the book is that so much of it is worthy of being highlighted on every single page and this was my gateway drug to this book which is 1984. now this Edition has actually won a lot of awards for Designing because this is the classic um penguin cover but of course 1984 is all about surveillance and censorship and so they censored out the title but now it's so iconic that if you see this a lot of people will be able to immediately identify that it is 1984. as you can see my copy is battered because I took it everywhere with me I remember this taking me so long to read and honestly not really understanding all of it at the time but I was reading it quite precociously and since then I've Revisited it and I don't know if I would have ended up doing a literature degree without encountering this book and reading in my spare time outside of school and being like wow the novel is an incredible thing and what you can do with it and what you can achieve with it is amazing and uh that's what this book represents to me so I think reading this book changed the trajectory of my life and that's why these are very precious to me next we have this book now this is a study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and this is a Sherlock Holmes novel when I was a child like up to the age of maybe like 11 I read voraciously I read so much I loved reading and I loved escaping into those worlds and then I think when I went to secondary school and started studying books for class I fell out of love with reading 1984 got me back into reading and then this was one of the next books that I read for fun I found Sherlock Holmes just such a brilliant character I love that he used his brain and critical thinking as his superpower he didn't have this Incredible strength he couldn't fly he couldn't shoot lasers out of his eyes but what he could do is use his brain and come to conclusions in order to solve Mysteries and to help people and I thought that was just so cool and so I loved this book and then the reason that it's so special to me is because I applied to be head boy at my school basically I went to an all-boy school and at the end of your time there in your final year someone became like essentially a student president and it was like a really rigorous and intense application process you had to be there were like so many different rounds and of course it's a big thing of like speculation like who's going to be head boy who's going to be the head boy of our year group and I don't know if my name was ever really in the kind of short list of names people were predicting that people would put money on uh to if they were betting of who would be the head boy but I really really wanted it and I think in the application process that was when I kind of proved that I actually kind of had What It Takes I guess and in the final stage of the application we had to deliver a speech about someone who inspired us and I Doyle and I did my speech with this in my hand as my prop and I spoke about this book and what it meant to me and why it inspired me why the story of Arthur Conan Doyle um originally following a different career path and then going into writing and you know pursuing that passion why that was really important to me and I got it and that year of my life getting to be in that role was really formative for me as a person I think it kind of made me who I am and really boosted my confidence because I was such a shy anxious kid and I think that really made me yeah believe in myself a little bit more and that's exactly what this book means to me as well so um yeah a study in Scarlet fights Arthur Conan Doyle now also in my time at school I kind of put these in chronological order as well um of when I read them but also at my time at school I was really into drama and that was kind of where I I don't know got to express myself I really loved learning how to act and working with a team of people to create a piece of art I guess and I loved also that scripts like words on a page could be turned into something so immersive on a stage and this is the book that we worked on for our final performance our final GCSE exam for my drama qualification and um this is accidental death of an anarchist by Dario foe it's an Italian play and it's basically about this Railway worker Anarchist Who falls out of the window of a police headquarters and the policemen realized that they are going to be blamed for pushing him out of the window and so they are trying to convince everyone that it was a suicide and so they employ the help of this Maniac who comes to help them prove their case and that was my role I don't know what that says about me but um at age 16 but this was the book that we worked on and even looking through it now like I can hear how I delivered these lines because we went through this over and over and over again I don't think I've ever worked so hard on a single project like we would meet up after school just to rehearse this as much as we could and I got full marks in the exam which was crazy and again that was a really proud moment for me and so um this book is the reason for that and I love it so that's also really special to me because this is the physical copy that I had while we were learning our lines and I took on stage with me um in rehearsals and so yeah this this is very important to me then I went to sixth form and when you're doing your a levels in the UK you also have the option to do an extended project qualification which is essentially where you assign an essay to yourself so you come up with the essay title and you write an extended project about that thing and I wrote about the portrayal of German characters in post Holocaust fiction and so one of the books that I wrote about was The Book Thief and I remember just being absolutely entranced by this book I just found it spellbinding again I thought it was so experimental the fact that death is the narrator it's so different to anything else I've ever read and I think this really changed the game for me in terms of thinking about storytelling and I think this is where I decided that I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to be able to achieve some something like this and yeah this is where my love for reading became a love for writing as well and so um The Book Thief is very special to me the book that I have read more times than any other book is the handmaid's tale I studied this for my a levels and just thought it was incredible and every time I read back through it I find that there's so much more texture and meaning and symbolism I talked about this book all the time because I think it is just the height of Storytelling and political speculative fiction of dystopian writing and this Edition has all my annotations in it I worked really hard on this I just remember going through a really difficult time in my personal life and so I put all of my energy into school and what I was studying and so this is the thing that kind of helped me escape my brain I have then since reread it tons and tons of times and I would love to be able to write something anywhere near as good even a fraction as good as this book is so that is the handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood and full circle moment but very recently at hay Festival I got to be in the same room as modern outwards I didn't speak to her because I honestly was just so in awe but just getting to be in the same room as her getting to share a space with an author who I Revere to this extent uh just was incredible now jumping forward a little bit in time two years after my a levels I was at University and I applied to teach English in China over the summer and I got the job and so I spent two months in China working with these kids who was so amazing and their parents wanted to send them to British or American schools and so they were there to have this like immersive English experience where they would get to practice using English all the time and while I was there I didn't really have a lot of access to social media I was a long way from home it was the first time I'd been away for such a long time and I brought this book with me this is Brighton Rock and having grown up around Brighton this book just alleviated all of my homesickness I don't know there's something about reading about home that really meant a lot to me at that very specific time and this book is about this kind of like under World in Brighton where there are gang wars the book opens talking about a murder and they go to the races and I don't know being able to chart the kind of geography of the novel of like all the streets that they walk down and the areas that they go to because they're all around where I grew up was just really wonderful and immersive and so bright and rock uh has a little little place right in here and I've gifted a copy of this book to a lot of people who I care about because I'm like please read about this place where I grew up so yeah and I would love one day to be able to adapt Bryson rock into a screenplay for a TV series because I think it would be so wonderful I think it'd be so cool it would work perfectly on the screen I felt like it was so visual and Vivid um like a picture absolutely everything and so I would love to do that one day if I can but before I move on to the next book I just wanted to let you know that today's video is very very kindly brought to you by Squarespace Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your website or online brand and the best news is you don't need any coding experience to do that cause they have hundreds of incredible templates available on their website you can take one of those 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now we're in the final year of my degree and I discover this little book this is a single man by Christopher isherwood and I fell in love with it I thought it was absolutely remarkable and so astute and insightful and sad with stunning prose I think this book is genuinely a masterpiece and so I decided to write my University dissertation on this book which led me to read all of Christopher Sherwood's novels and I became infatuated by researching this man who was such an interesting character both on and off the page and so this is another book that I feel like kind of shaped me and the physical copy of it of course means a lot to me because it has all my annotations and my notes that went on to become my thesis which is of course the biggest piece of academic work I've ever written to this point so um yeah a single man by Christopher issuewood and in that third year of my degree I was kind of back to the point where I was falling out of love with literature because you know I had this real imposter syndrome when I was at University English literature had gone from being the thing I was good at the thing that I excelled at at school and you know what it's like where people kind of compartmentalize different individuals and say this person is good at sports this person is really good at geography this person is really good at English literature I was the book person that was what I was good at that's what I understood that's what I excelled at and then I got to University and everyone in that room was exactly the same everyone in that room had also excelled at literature and a lot of those people had excelled more than I had I felt like a lot of those people were much better at the subject than I was not that it's about comparison but I think naturally you start to feel a little bit of an inferiority complex when you're around such incredible people and I loved all the people I took my course with they were so brilliant and that's what made them so intimidating in a way and I think I was going through a period where I was really struggling with that and that kind of started to corrupt the way that I looked at literature I decided to see it as something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do and then I read this book this is funny boy by shine salvadorite it's about a boy grappling with his identity and the international politics and domestic politics of Sri Lanka and I think a Common Thread here is that political fiction is something that's always captivated me from Animal Farm 1984 to the handmaid's tale to funny boy I've always found political fiction to be the thing that really hooks me and I always think it's such a gift to be able to write about the intricacies of The Human Condition and how we as people as individuals survive in amongst chaos and in amongst a regime and in amongst the situation that we didn't personally choose you know we were just born into it these circumstances happened to us and so I've always enjoyed that juxtaposition of personal identity in amongst domestic and international politics and this book perfectly straddles that line and so funny boy to me was what reminded me why I was in that classroom why I had chosen to be there why I had whittled down all of my other passions all of the other things I cared about to be in that room and to be studying books and this represents that rekindling of my lifelong passion for books and storytelling and narratives and literature which was really important in the final year of my degree because I was about to graduate into a world where I didn't have to read anymore and reading something like this during my degree reminded me why I love reading and why I want to continue doing that as much as I can forever reading this was part of a modulator called resistance in post-colonial Southeast Asian literature and this also was the part of the process of diversifying my own reading because up to this point through the you know academic education system I'd mostly read books from White European middle class men and reading a book by a Sri Lankan author made me start to think about the other countries that I hadn't yet read from and so this really also Diversified my taste in literature and led me down a lot of interesting parts so I kind of credit this book for that and then of course the final book that I kind of have as a relic from my time at University is this one this is my book which still feels absolutely insane to say out loud that this is the universe the ultimate University Survival Guide by me Jack Edwards Like Yours Truly and this is one of my proudest ever achievements this has my heart and soul poured into it um when I went to University I decided that there wasn't enough student representation online you know all of the advice that you get is usually written retrospectively from people who have left University at the time it was really hard and really rare to get genuine advice from current students people who are meeting you on your level people who could give you unfiltered honest authentic advice that was actually very useful and practical in an everyday way and so I set up this YouTube channel and I started to talk about it and to share it and to Vlog my University experience right from freshers week like freshers week was so funny because I was trying not to look like an absolute weirdo like with my camera documenting things and filming things so most of the footage from my first year was just like in my bedroom because I was like my safe space and then by my final year I was sharing everything and I wrote this book which basically distills all of the things that I wanted to share and all of the ways I wanted to demystify the higher education system and make it more accessible into one book so it's meant to be a kind of University handbook for students by a student and I loved writing it the thing is okay here's the thing with this book is that I finished my final manuscript in January 2020. we edited it we submitted it to the printers and then the pandemic hit and so the original release of the book was pushed back a few months because of the pandemi Lovato and then it came out in August 2020 and by that point it kind of went from University handbook to like historical document about what life was like pre-covered of course now it's back to being relevant but there when it first came out when it was first published it wasn't relevant really because University had all moved online and a lot of the advice in here no longer applied for that period of time so it's a bit of a Bittersweet memory because the book book it didn't have the kind of Commercial Success that we maybe hoped for um but that's okay because it was such a brilliant experience and I loved making it I loved writing it I loved interviewing people and putting the whole thing together and writing this alongside my dissertation was the most idiotic foolish thing I've ever done and then of course in the pandemic it was like well damn this is the perfect time to sit and write a book but I'd already submitted it writing a book during the final year of my degree was so stressful and yeah I wouldn't change it for the world because it was the best experience and so yeah I just I'm very proud of this and actually at hay Festival last month I got to do my first ever book signing because of course mine were canceled because of covid so I got to see my first ever book signings and book event and that was just a dream come true like everything I've ever wanted and more ever ever since I was a little kid um so getting to do that was just magical if my like younger self would know that I was holding a copy of my own book he would scream I'm screaming currently internally then when I graduated from University and I sort of distilled all of my knowledge and everything I wanted to say into this I was at this real dead end and I didn't know what to make content about online and the first book I read when I finished my degree was normal people by Sally Rooney and again that was a book that just reminded me why I love reading then after making book content for about a year I was contacted by Faber and they wanted to send me a copy of Sally Rooney's new novel this is beautiful wherever are you this is my arc proof copy of beautiful Hardware are you um which I was said before the book came out I got to announce the official cover of beautiful world where are you on my YouTube channel which was just such a privilege and incredible to get to work with the marketing team of one of my favorite authors and I have this Edition which was never sold in this kind of color palette and so it's so special to me I regularly reference the beginning of chapter 12 in this book I I just think it's so wonderful it talks about how in our lives the thing that means most to us often is the people that we meet and the relationships that we Forge and the communication that we have with people and often people dismiss Sally Rooney's writing and contemporary writing as frivolous and silly in fact it's always been a criticism of the novel because it writes about what it's like to be a human being what it's like to be alive what it's like to navigate this world that's silly and unimportant and unnecessary and Sally says actually it means so much to be able to capture that and it's a thing that we spend our whole lives trying to understand so why shouldn't we create art about it why shouldn't we write about it why shouldn't we talk about it and I love that sentiment and yeah getting to work on a project with one of my favorite authors was such an incredible moment because I went from studying literature to being you know at the helm of a really exciting novel that was coming out and that was going to have a huge impact on the publishing industry and I just felt one year after graduating for my degree I had achieved something that I was pursuing my passion which was reading and writing and literature um and that's what this physical book represents to me so I lived in London for just over a year and then I decided that I wanted to move somewhere and have a bit of an adventure and covered was clearing up and the world was starting to reopen and I read this book this is a Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway and in this book he says if you were lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you for Paris is a Movable Feast and I remember reading this and being like maybe Paris could be an interesting place for me to live and then I moved there and I lived there for a year I learned French and I met so many incredible people and kind of all stemmed from reading this book and I took this copy of the book with me I had it every step of the way every apartment that I moved to I had this book with me it went on that adventure with me and I would return back to that one quote all the time and I just really appreciate this account of being an unknown writer in your 20s navigating the city and uh yeah that's a Movable Feast then we're fast forwarding a little bit to quite recently so these are some books that have meant a lot to me in recent months this is Young by Douglas Stewart and it's not so much the contents of this book but the fact that it is signed by the author himself because at this year's hay Festival I got to introduce Douglas Stewart and do a leaper onto the stage for their book club discussion I got to meet them beforehand they were so wonderful and generous and gracious and kind I had a really interesting conversation with Douglas about the novel and place because the novel that I'm working on is concerned with the concept of setting and space and the places that we occupy and how we feel space and how we move around space and getting to hear Douglas talk about that and getting to ask him some questions um about how he uses space in his novels was really important to me because I think he's such an important writer and such a talented writer too and he signed my copy wrote a little dedication and a note in there and this represents to me the opportunities that I get to have now because of my love for reading and that like blows my little brain I still can't believe that I get to do things like that and get to speak on a stage in front of 2 000 people about why I love books and introduce an incredible author and an incredible musician to the stage and so to me this book will always represent that day um which was so surreal and wonderful and really freaking cool and that's all come from you guys and this community and this Channel and so that's very very special to me and then this is another book that represents that same kind of thing because Claudio Pinero is an author I absolutely love I read her book Elena knows while I was living in Paris and it made me baby cry weep SOB just in a cafe I've been shouting about it from the rooftops ever since and so when this new book came out a little luck which is her next novel um her Publishers at charcoal press sent this Edition all the way to Argentina in order to get Claudia Pinero to sign it and write me a little note which is so kind and generous and I'm so grateful and I just can't believe how lucky I am I've got a big amount of love like the fact that this book has traveled so far and back again to be with me and for me to have a signed copy of this means the world to me so um I just thought that was so cool and I can't wait to read it and then the last book is this one this is a copy of a little life but with the Italian title because this week I was invited by Valentino to their Milan Fashion Week show which was inspired by a little life which is one of my favorite books I've ever read and this book was my invitation so here is the venue um at Milan University where the show happened and then inside was this bookmark that had my seat allocation I got to sit front row at a fashion show it was just so amazing and they dressed me and their narratives projects really championed storytelling and the fact that you know I got to attend this event because of the videos that I have made about books like this that I loved the fact that I get to be in those spaces just like blows my mind and I don't know going from books like these that I read at school to things like this is God I'm getting a bit like what am I gonna like choked up no no no no not this immediately not that but like sitting here with my book and these books that represent incredible life-changing experiences that I never thought I would get to have I never even dreamed of or because I started reading these books um it's kind of insane and I just feel like the luckiest person in the whole world God I didn't expect this video to like go in this direction but what a lovely Life Animal thanks to books and reading um and these words on a piece of paper you know isn't it crazy like what books can do and the people books can bring together and the ways books can change and shape your lives and that's why I love reading that's why I will continue to read as much as I possibly can and that's why I'm so thankful to each and every one of you for being here and being part of this community of Book Lovers of book nerds thank you for watching this video I would love to know which books you would save from your house if it was burning down which books would you run in for and grab because these are mine so thank you for watching this video all the best stay in touch have a wonderful day you can subscribe if you're new and I'll catch you very very soon bye bye

Channel: Jack Edwards

Views: 218,654

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Id: tGcF3aYS4ZE

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023