BOYFRIEND VS GIRLFRIEND - TOP 5 CLASSICS // our favourite books

[Music] hi guys it's jay and welcome back to another video today i've got a guest with me it's me kyra hi guys and welcome back to my channel today i have convinced jay to join me for a video a lot of you will know jay from my vlogs he's been in quite a lot of videos and you've probably noticed that he is also a reader jay actually pretty much only reads pretty exclusive with the classics in the past year i would say um it's quite interesting because jay hasn't been a reader for very long like obviously he's been able to read for the same amount of time as normal people but um you've not been a reader for fun you only would read like what you basically had to read for school yeah and then yeah i pretty much started reading at the end of 2017. that's the first time i picked up a book of my own like relationship yeah it's like that's the first time you actually read for pleasure and since then you've gone on quite a journey with classics and a lot of you who watch my vlogs ask about jay ask about what he's reading what books he likes i'd say you've got a little bit of a booktube fan club over here oh thank you so today we thought that it would be really really fun to dive into a comparison of my favorite classics versus my favorite classics and so without further ado we have both selected five of our favorite classics neither of us know what the other one has picked so we have them here wrapped up in towels to keep them secret so without further ado we're gonna dive into both of our favorite classics give you a little bit of a discussion about which books we've picked why we love them so much and just have a fun discussion about bugs so let's jump straight into it okay so who wants to go first um i think i don't know maybe we should do a competition for it okay let's do a rock paper scissors so ready i always lose rock paper scissors it's just like a running thing where i always lose rock paper scissors and jay always loses his thumb so let's do rock paper scissors ready yep [Laughter] okay let's stop it oh my goodness okay right i'm diving into my parcel to get my first classic i've like wrapped these quite well okay so the first classic on my list so this is your fifth favorite classic oh yeah that's a good point so we're going from number five position to number one so this is my first favorite classic but it is my least favorite out of my favorites and that book is the great gatsby by f scott fitzgerald this one just had to be on the list on account of the fact that one of our rabbits is named gatsby i obviously love the great gatsby it is such a wonderful book it's obviously set in the 1920s it takes place over the course of a summer we follow our main character nick carraway who is quite a wealthy man he's like got like a pretty rich background he went to yale but he's in new york city working as a stock broker and although he's quite wealthy he's certainly not as wealthy as some of the people that are surrounding him and he lives in quite a like modest cabin and he is kind of the outsider looking into this extremely extravagant world where we have people like the great gatsby who are considered to be like new money and have made their money through industry and have these really extravagant parties and then people like nick's cousin daisy who are old money and live across the bay from nick in this really extravagant but quite traditional and like fancy old house and there's basically this like dramatic series of events that goes on when these two worlds of old and new money collide there are old friends all romances infidelity all kinds of things and it's such a dramatic book and i think what i like about this one most is the like narrator of nick being this sort of outsider who's sort of well there's a quote in the book where it says that he is both within and without and i think that creates a really interesting narrative so i really like this one i would say i also really like that book i knew it was going to be on kira's fire so i chose not to choose that one but i didn't really like that one it's a great book okay okay now i'm not looking thank you oh dear i've rubbed this right now okay so my number five is a country doctor's notebook by mikhail [Music] so i've come across mikhail bukov a while ago i've recently gone down a weird rabbit hole not really weird because it's quite a big genre of russian classics it's definitely my preferred path definitely even though i'm not totally you know i've not got such a good reading skill like kyrie she can be like four or five books in a day it might take me like three four weeks so i definitely have a more basic reading skill this book very thin very easy to read it's a very i feel like man the description is not very good in a minute but let me try this i've never tried to describe a book so it basically starts with it's kind of like his own memoir but he's writing it as a fictional thing and he's a newly qualified doctor in 1900s russia and he has to to get some experience he has to work in a clinic that's way out in the sticks as it were and you just got to deal with the fact that he's working with quite an uneducated peasant base that don't really understand medicine and he's trying to help these people with limited resources very good book i like doctoring like we watch kind of like grazing that i mean yeah it's always really intriguing it was nice to hear all like the doctor lingo but it was also i love love love history it's the only a level of the three that i did that actually enjoyed um so i feel like that's why you enjoy i think that's why i like classics so much is that i really enjoy history so this is a really good one for me really easy to read and i think that's pretty much everything i've got to say about that one nice i haven't read that one so but yeah absolutely yeah you're definitely giving it a lot of good talk okay next up for me so in place number four i have got to try and find it in my castle okay next up oh i wasn't expecting that actually animal farm by george orwell this is a really really really tiny book you're talking about a country doctor's notebook it's from easy to read this book is less than 100 pages and i think it is incredible george orwell is obviously a really talented author that is just like something that goes without saying but i would say that this one is my favorite of his books that i have read i've read this one i've read 1984 and i've also read a selection of his essays in a book called shooting an elephant which i also thought was really good but this one is my favorite because i'm always so impressed when an author manages to fit a really really impactful like story into such a short amount of pages and this one is just incredible it is obviously a book which focuses on a collection of animals on a farm but it is an insight into a critique of communism and these animals basically kick out the farmer take over the farm because they want better rights for all the animals they don't like the fact that animals are underneath humans and yet very quickly a hierarchy starts to take place within the farm there's a quote on the back which says all animals are equal but sun animals are more equal than others and it is just such a chilling story i think it's like one that you think is just going to be a bit silly and you're not going to take very seriously but it actually is so impactful and at the very end of the book i obviously won't talk about because i don't want to spoil it but the very ending of the book gives me chills every time because it's just so disturbing to see how power impacts people or in this case animals and what that does to their behavior and i just think this one is incredible and also really great if you want an insight into dystopian fiction but you don't want to dive into some of the bigger ones or maybe 1984 just seems a bit daunting because this is very similar to 1984 in the topics that it discusses but it obviously does it in a much more roundabout way and it's a lot easier to digest i also once again really enjoyed that book and fun fact about that book georgia well was commissioned by the uk government to produce that book to discount communism he did a really good job because he did very scathing review of communism okay my book number four um i don't know if he was expecting this one actually we'll see oh i'm excited it is dracula i can't remember when exactly i read this book but i remember i really really not last october it was last october even very on the point that i remember at halloween yep so obviously it's a very beautiful cover it's a penguin deluxe classic our favorite our favorites i read this one off the back of keira's recommendation and i was a bit you know kind of like i don't want to read that because like i said my reading is going great i kind of get lost sometimes in you know a writer has a very difficult way of writing and that's what i found when i read frankenstein which kiera suggested to me i didn't really enjoy that one as much i thought it'd be the same as dracula because you put them you know frankenstein dracula yeah i really enjoy this i think the first beginning part of the book you know it's not really spoilers first bit where i'm terrible with names of characters but where one of them i think that's it he goes to dracula's castle to help him is it to buy a property in england i don't actually remember why he goes but it's important he's hired to go there and that entire first section of the book is so gripping and so great and then it completely changed it goes to england for a little bit and you're in whitby which is quite narrows which is awesome and i was just hooked on the story i just could not put it down it was so good from beginning to end just a great story but that beginning being particular yeah i remember there's a bit again not really spoilery because it's obviously dracula everyone knows that he's a vampire but there's a bit where he's like basically jonathan sees dracula scale castle and he figures out that he's a vampire and that makes you feel a little bit sick it's so disturbing but so so good all right okay number three is i can never get into this parcel where is it okay no looking number three is little women by louisa may alcott this is a book that i actually only read this year i read this one on the back of having seen the 2019 movie adaptation that came out basically at this time last year right at the end of 2019 i absolutely loved it i had seen one of the older film versions like years and years ago but i just never had thought to pick up the book but the new movie adaptation was so incredible that i just had to read this one and it's obviously now one of my all-time favorites little women is just such a wonderful story and i kind of like completely opposite to animal farm and books like that i either like really snappy books or books where you like fully dive into characters and get to see them really grow and this is definitely a character study because we follow four sisters amy jo meg and beth and we start when they're quite young and we follow them all the way through adulthood we see them go on so many different journeys we see their characters develop we see different bits of tension arising between the sisters as they sort of grow and drift apart from each other and then the kind of like family-bound love that draws them back together every time and it's just such a wonderful story and also for the time that it was written very very feminists because it very much dives into the fact that each of these four sisters is so different and have their own individual talents and one of them very much wants to follow that traditional path of becoming a mother and having a family but there are other people in the family who have much more like focused ambitions and this one kind of dives into the fact that your ambitions as a woman don't have to be defined by your gender and i just think it's a really great story especially when you consider when it was written so i love this one once again read it loved it it was on my short list of my top five but that wasn't one that you stole from me okay it was like it was in like the top 12 or something like that it was so good all right next okay we're going down a very particular road now i so what it's going to be okay so we have cram punishment by uh what is it for your door i read this one initially this was probably one of the first 20 books that i read and when i read it the first time around i didn't really enjoy it it took you a while did it it took me a while and i gave it a 7 out of 10 originally okay j rates books by tens not fives which i don't agree with but it's more precise so um i didn't really enjoy it that much i did i just kind of got lost like i said i wasn't really that good at reading at the time and i got lost i didn't really understand what was going on and then only recently maybe a few months ago i read a second time i understood completely clearly what happened all the way through and i absolutely loved it the thing is with russian classics you have to understand is that the russians have a strange way of naming so they can have up to you know like five names that they go by so for instance in this book there's a character who goes by a name for the first maybe 70 pages and then suddenly it's just completely referred to as a completely different name with no context given as to that's the same character and you have to just kind of figure that out and that's the same they have to figure out with all the russian classics and once you get into that it's a bit easy but what's the book about the book yeah i don't really know whether i want to give it completely aware because quite a big part of the story happens quite early on in the book okay basically a main character commits a crime um that he thinks is just at the beginning he's also quite mental and well um and his family his mother and his sister live far away and he's not really got much money he's living in a city and he's a poor student so he commits this crime to what he thinks is going to help him out but then suddenly he's struck by grief and he's also thinking that he didn't commit the crime you know like cleanly so he's like going back to seeing the crime and he's like he thinks he's going to get caught he thinks he's going to get caught all the time he's like that his mental health gets deteriorated completely by the fact that he's in the constant word of the detective that starts sniffing around amazing book all the characters good he's got a student friend in it which is a great character um the man who's trying to marry his sister in the beginning of the book is also just a great it's just a great book great characters once you understand the naming and how everything works amazing i definitely want to read that one yep i've definitely suggested that to you as one of the probably the top russian classics to read soon so what's your number two number two okay what is number two well you have briefly mentioned this book so it is frankenstein i didn't think it was down on them i didn't think you picked it because i saw the other copy upstairs i was like what is she doing she talks about all the time we do have frankenstein in several different editions i have like at least two editions that i read at school and university that are like annotated we have this one and then we have a like a leather bound copy as well but i went for this one just because i completely forgot that to be honest i love it it's classics and also but i don't put you off the center of it and but yeah i'm going to call you out how could you not pick frankenstein i love frankenstein frankenstein is the book that made me want to study um english at university i was not planning to study english whatsoever i was going to be doing like either psychology or mental health nursing that was like the path i was going to go down and then i read frankenstein and the process of studying frankenstein discussing it diving into it writing essays about it and just that whole experience really kind of changed my view of studying literature and it set me on a whole different path so mary shelley is like a life transformer it would seem but frankenstein is a book which follows the tale of victor frankenstein a young doctor or not really a doctor he's studying to be a medicine student and he basically decides to create life by bringing together all of these old body parts using some kind of scientific techniques that he's come across and he basically brings life to this new creature who he then very swiftly regrets creating and abandons this is a book which kind of follows a few different characters we have an outsider character who is someone that frankenstein meets later in his life who starts retailing the um like the story that frankenstein had told him by writing letters to his sister we then dive into frankenstein's narrative looking at his childhood how he ended up coming towards making this creation and then we follow the narrative of the creature after frankenstein abandons him and so we have lots of different like frames to look at this narrative through and it's really interesting because the i guess the main theme of this book is like who is the real monster and of course it's not so easy as just the character that looks monstrous like the creature being the evil one and actually frankenstein himself who obviously looks much better is really intelligent has actually done something really monstrous and there is no right or wrong in this book there is no good or bad this book shows how the morally gray is something that exists within all of us and it is really your actions and the path that you choose to take that dictate whether you become good or become evil and we see characters especially victor frankenstein making really bad decisions consistently and it's just such an interesting book that really dives into the human psyche and into the theme of good and evil and how things aren't necessarily so clear-cut my favorite character is the creature and i am 100 on team victor frankenstein is the real monster the creature is the hero of this story i think i was on team victor frankenstein no but yeah it's really interesting one because that's it's the book that kind of lends itself to so many different perspectives and you can like you can basically convince yourself into viewing it in either way depending on which parts of the story that you look at and that's what i think makes it such an interesting book can i just ask this is not really to do with i guess it is has she written anything else or isn't that just a one book um she did write a novella okay um i think it was called matilda i'm sure it was i remember not the not the royal guard but no i'm sure she wrote some other things and i don't know she was obviously surrounded by a lot of poets her husband and everything but i don't i think this was kind of like her main work all right should we do my number two number two number two all right you might be surprised by this oh okay okay okay because of how much i go on about it it's in number two oh i mean look at that oh my god so beautiful now this book you know it looks beautiful it also has a russian classic edition like the crown punishment kiera's probably surprised about this maybe because i talk about this book [Music] i love this book even you even talked about going this week to go and get another copy of this book to add to your many many book collection of this one when does it say where the artist is for this book does it say it down here um cover up cc ask you amazing job look at this book it is absolutely beautiful i mean what the chance is that one of my favorite books has such a beautiful penguin that's classic some of the penguin village classics the art isn't really for me so yeah such a beautiful you know version of it amazing so the book tell me about the master of margarita so on the front you've got some characters i assume that is margarita and that is not master that is in fact behemoth of whom is a big talking cat and the reason i love this book so much is because i've read the rest of the five russian classics which are you know all very serious and historical books i love them all the same but this one is so whacking bizarre it's about um the devil showing up in i think it's in peace but oh my god i don't know if it's moscow i don't know i think it's in petersburg he shows up and he just starts causing havoc he's got a gang of misdeeds around him like behemoth the cat and a bunch of other ones and it's just so wacky and crazy for a book that's written in communist russia in the early 1900s it blows my mind at how funny and like nuances the only only only reason i put it in number two slot is because there are certain chapters where it takes you out of the current story and takes you to a storyline where it's about pontius pilate and jesus oh so i i love the story and i can understand them bits i you know maybe if you're religious you get a little bit more out of that and maybe he was very religious i'm not really too sure but then bits kind of i'm like oh man i just want to hear more about what's going on i'm sure it links in with the main story somehow but i just personally don't enjoy the jesus and pontius pilate as much um there's no there's not too much of that there's only a few chapters this book is amazing it's just so hilarious and wacky and crazy it's great it's such a good book for such a a weird place to come out of his communist yeah awesome second book okay wait it's time for numbers i think i know this i think you probably do as well you stole it from me i knew this one was gonna be my number one and i knew it might have been on your list but i knew it wasn't gonna be your number one which is why it was worthy of being mine okay it is emma by james austin okay what did you think it no i decided not to rebecca and mine just because i like it but it's now emma so emma by jane austen like little women this is a book that i actually read this year and until reading this book i wouldn't have really called myself a massive fan of jane austen i'd read a few of her books up to this point i'd read north anger abby i'd read persuasion at university i'd read pride and prejudice and they were fine but like they didn't really jump out at me as being incredible and then i read emma and everything changed it was just so incredible emma is a book which follows the narrative of emma woodhouse a young very very rich girl who lives with her dad her dad is a widow so she is essentially the mistress of her house her sister is already married so she has a lot of power and because of how much power she has and how much money and security she has she doesn't actually need to get married and marriage isn't something that she's particularly focused on so instead she sets herself to match making other people around her and she is not a very good matchmaker so it ends up causing quite a few different problems and then of course romance does find her in a few different ways as well but emma is a character who is definitely flawed she is judgmental she is a little bit selfish she's not very nice to people sometimes not in like an evil or malicious way but just in the way that we all do have our personal preferences of likes and dislikes and of people that for some reason just really annoy you even though they've not really done anything wrong they just are an annoying person to you personally and emma is a character who embodies all of that but also has so many lovely traits as well she's funny she's nice but she also has those flaws that i think make her a really relatable protagonist and i think that's what made this my favorite austin is because austin's characters are all really interesting and have since like grown to appreciate her writing a lot more i think there is a tendency for women in literature at this time generally not just in jane austen's books to be these perfect like pious flawless characters who are only good and emma is a character who kind of is a lot more nuanced and balanced and just really funny so i love this book it's incredible and it's obviously jane austen's comedy so it is really funny fun there are loads of characters and it's just a great time yes it was my fourth spot before took it from me um i would say i also really loved the book i was expecting it to be more bland than it was and i originally picked this up first i bought it one because it's part of the penguin dolls classics and we're trying to catch them all um seriously we've seen the advert on the side of the bus for emma and i thought that looks like a good film should we read the book first so i read the book first and i was astounded once again same as master margarita how a book can have such good comedy in it yeah or a book 100 you know that's even is it even older yeah definitely older this one will be written in the 1800s this one was first published but it's got this is a 200 200th jersey um first published in 1816. so that's it it's amazing how how kind like modernish yeah it's just like it has a comedy that doesn't feel old it just kind of it still feels relevant relatable characters the fact that a new character can come in and the main character emma just hates the character off the bat is a carrot is the characteristic you'd put on someone who shouldn't be a main character but it is something that people do naturally so it is more relatable it's like 100 like you say i actually only read this one because of jay because i had kind of gotten this expectation of jane austen's books as being a little bit bland and i'm mostly thinking about persuasion here but it just wasn't that intriguing to me and whereas this one is so fun and light-hearted and just generally a great time so that's my number one i love love this book okay time for my number one the thing we've all been waiting for oh yeah i wonder what it's going to be it is the behemoth and that is well not that big is the monster that is war and peace i mean this book we both read this book we have cured it a long time ago over a long span of time yeah it took me a long took a long time and we both got onto this train of russian classics the whole collection that we got was based off of this book which is based off of the main cure going to edinburgh flicking through the tv and seeing the third episode of peace on bbc it was the 2016 bbc mini series of war and peace and oh my god changed our lives that scene where pierre says should i ruin it where pierre and dolorcov are dueling in the snow it just captures and i was like what enough is this kim's like one of this we watched the whole series now some people might say that book is too big i would never read that book as i said i have not been reading for a long time and i read this in i think the early months of last year so i've only been reading a year and a half and i read this i think what you've got to do is just be like and that's what i did i just said i'm going to read 20 pages a day and you just have to stick to that and i think you can make it through now this suffers the same as other russian books in that characters have an infinite amount of names so what i would say is do the same as me and kiera watch the mini series it's an amazing watch you will lose nothing from watching it and then you understand the story and you can understand who the character is based off of what they're doing i would never ever ever have considered going into this there are thousands i'm joking thousands of characteristics some are just side characters and some are big main characters and it's going to be really hard if you don't understand russian classics to get into because you'll have like a good picture in your mind then of each of the characters and their names and their relationship to each other and then obviously the book has way more detail than the miniseries does and so you can then appreciate all of that detail without getting lost yeah in because the politics that's what that's why i don't really like about some classics is that you just get lost for hundreds of pages you're like i'm bored of this i'm lost and something's going on if you've watched any series you'll understand what's going on from us but the book we've not talked anything about no what happens so it's set in the early 1800s in the napoleonic era so you know france is going crazy and napoleon's rising up and it's set within the like aristocracy the high echelon and they're all talking about oh napoleon all that kind of stuff and you follow a whole host of characters so many literally like i mean let's see if we can actually see like at the beginning of this book there is a list of characters oh is it i don't think that was in this one oh maybe it's that's life no there is one in them the addition of one piece that i read because i've got this [Music] a list of like well i mean it goes several pages long of all so what's great about this is it's obviously over thousands of pages there's different characters some are enrolled in the army and they're fighting at times others are involved in love affairs and there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on the characters are engaged and then bad stuff happen people die the stories go off in one direction and two characters will come together you never fall to come together is so amazing absolutely amazing and my favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite scene from the book and the film is not film the tv series is when pierre is sat at the big dinner table with dolokov and dolkov just rubbing it in his face that he's should i really spoil the book i should just say i'll just say he's going to say his line yeah dollar cop's been doing something that you should have been a naughty boy he's the opposite of his big table and pierre's sick of it and he's just done with life and he goes i challenge you and it's just such a great scene watch the tv mini series i'm not even joking watch it so good it's literally like still to this day i mean several years later one of the best things i've ever seen in my life the cast is incredible i absolutely love it and i do really think it makes a difference to your understanding and appreciation of the book because it wouldn't have been something that would have appealed to me i also think similar to little women in the sense that you do follow characters over such i mean this one you follow them over years and like decades of time so you really see characters grow develop and change and it's just so interesting to see them go in so many different paths it's really interesting i would say don't be put off by the size no there's so many people i cannot really read i'm gonna be serious i have a childish level of reading and i read this a year and a half into it yeah just read tiny bits every single day people read book series you know and that might be several books of like 300 pages in length you know but that's just one book so treat it like a series you really are following these characters over the length of time that you would in like a book series and so yeah don't be put off it is really good i'll also say there's a great quote on the back here which is also one of my favorite crews it's a great question i cannot talk um this is from prince andre shortly after one of the battle scenes when he's been mongi's very emorgie character and i like he's a brooding character he's a brooding character and he says and i believe this is also a bible quote i don't know what part of the bible comes from but it says let the dead bury their dead but while i'm alive i must live and be happy and i love that quote such a good quote there's a lot of great quotes and philosophical stuff in this book as well and it's just a complete powder keg of a book amazing it beat our master magaria which i didn't think was gonna happen i was thinking about my list yesterday and fought it has to be number one absolutely so those are our favorite classics amazing so i think it's been really interesting because we definitely have some crossovers books that i've picked up because of jay and that he's picked up because of me but we obviously i think both have quite different tastes in reading in our favorite books and everything so i hope this has given you an insight into the kinds of books i like to read as well as which is just russian books one um but yeah so i really really hope you've enjoyed watching if you'd like jay to join me for any more videos then definitely let us know down below if you enjoyed this one whether you'd like to hear us talk about more classics or any other bookish ideas that you'd like us both to talk about thank you for having me thank you for joining me oh and let us know your top five classics down below as well oh i was gonna ask something about war and peace tell me in the if you've seen the bbc mini series tell me what your favorite bit is from the tv mini series or just from the book and i honestly i read all the comments on the video so comment that and i want to see from one piece specifically okay tell me if you like that i will tell i challenge you it's a great scene that was the scene that paul was in really so well the following that scene i'm sorry i'm sorry everyone anyway we're rambling so thank you so so much for watching i'll see you next time okay bye

Channel: Ciara Foster

Views: 72,455

Rating: 4.9594774 out of 5

Keywords: boyfriend vs girlfriend favourite books, boyfriend vs girlfriend favourite classics, boyfriend vs girlfriend favourite classics books, boyfriend vs girlfriend top classics, boyfriend vs girlfriend top 5 classics, boyfriend vs girlfriend top 10 classics, my top 10 classics, my top 5 classics, my favourite classics, booktube boyfriend tag, booktube boyfriend, my boyfriend's favourite books, my boyfriend's favourite classics, boyfriend picks my tbr, 2020 favourite books, 2020 books

Id: aYmfUnHAOKk

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020