EASY CLASSICS FOR BEGINNERS | Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein & MORE!

hi guys welcome back to my classic series today I natal talking about classics for beginners where you should start if you want to read classics it's a video that I get asked to do a lot and I'm going to felt like I rode enough up until now so instead of just doing this one video I'm going to make it into a series within a series and do more videos like this of easy to read classics so today I've just got one list but I must do an updated one in the future I don't want me to think this is exactly where you have to start with obviously everyone's going to start in a different place but these are the books that I would recommend if you want to get into reading classics but don't really know where to begin so first I need to talk about the books I started when I first reading classics it works really well for me and it's just many reclass --ax over and over again so I can't have done anything wrong when I first started reading them so I first started by reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen I think this is a great place to start because there are so many film adaptations that unity read half of it and then watch the film and then read the other half afterwards I think it's quite an encouraging things we're not getting on with it you can watch a film and then work out the storyline and it's just a good place to start in terms of you've got a lot of support in place if you want to read it there are so many articles so many sparknotes type things on Pride and Prejudice because it is taught I know if it's still taught you can see when I did you say to use this was on the curriculum I don't know if it still is because they've changed it like crazy since I did my GCSEs which is only two years ago but if it still is there's so many resources out there if you want some backup when you're reading it first of you don't know about Pride and Prejudice this is about a Gokul Lizzie Bennet who is one of the best characters in literature ever and she has a muzzle and a few sisters and her mother is determined for all of them to get married and the book starts with a man called mr. Bingley coming into the area he has a very big estate and Lizzy Venice mom gets very excited and is determined to marry one of her daughters off to you mr. Bingley there is a romance between Lizzy and mr. Darcy I read a really interesting tumblr piece on mr. Darcy so I'm going to leave that in the comments what was really great about how actually a lot of Jane Austen's heroines aren't attractive and how we perceive mr. Darcy being really handsome beautiful but he's not actually described in that way but it's our modern take on him that makes him seen that that way so the book opens a very famous line it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife and Jane Austen humor really comes through in this book it is particularly noticeable in Pride and Prejudice I think I just finished reading Mansfield Park actually but I don't think I would recommend starting with if you want to read Jane Austen because it's one of the bigger ones and not a lot happens in it but I found that quite fascinating but a lot does happen in Pride and Prejudice it's quite good if you want to focus your attention solely on it so I wrote a man to a park and the humor is a lot more subtle in that but the comedy of manners which Jane Austen is really good at comes across in Pride and Prejudice and I really love it and my favorite application is the BBC 19 1995 one with Colin Firth and Jennifer ELA I love it so much it was a whole series about four or five possibly six episodes and it is amazing but one of the best adaptations of a book I've ever seen because it's so detailed it's pretty much everything you could wish for in a book adaptation you know when they cut this stuff out this doesn't happen during this adaptation I love it I don't really like the film on ways Keira Knightley is not a fan I haven't now to watch the whole thing all the way through because I just don't like it and but yes brain prejudice is a great place to start if you want to read classics it's where I started and then afterwards pound Prejudice I then read Agnes gray and Bronte I love the Bronte's I think you will know by now how much I do they are my favorites and Anne is a seriously underrated Bronte she also at the temple overhaul and what that might be a good place to start I do think that the simplicity of Agnes gray is really great if you are new to this style of language and the voice of the characters because and writes in a very straightforward and easy way and the narrative is simple to the reasons was invited in this video is because the structure of it is quite confusing and I think that can be a quite off-putting if you're not used to that style but what and as really well is just makes you feel really comfortable in the writing so Agnes gray is about a woman called Agnes gray and she is a governess she becomes the government's because her father is ill and then can't support the family so all the only thing she can do is go out and become a - and it follows her as she works with two different families who are awful there are not nice kids specifically the first family she goes through they are also and I think and right in a subtle humorous way - and she's got a very good observation of the people around her and and herself was a governess so she does kind of draw on her experiences of being a governess we can't say for sure how much of the book is true to her own experience but I like to think that some of it is it's got a really cute sweet romance mr. Weston is probably the best character in all the Bronte books he's the nicest you have Heathcliff and mr. Rochester who are detestable human beings and mr. Wesson everything you could want in a husband gives perfect and I love this book I think it would be a great place to start and I'd love to see more people read it then we have a book that I'm only halfway through so my recommendation is a bit well but I still want to recommend it and it is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley this is you can work in this library edition you see them all behind me I love my parenting flavor editions this is about my uncle dr. Frankenstein who makes a monster no the monster is not called Frankenstein Frankenstein is the one who makes the monster common misconception I will correct anyone who says otherwise it gets on my nerves when people get that wrong so find a site is all about him making the monster and I not admit Mary Shelley isn't one of my favorite writers I don't really click with her style it is very easy and straightforward to read it's a pretty short book and because people know the story you can follow along with it really easy I want to finish it soon because I should have finished it ages ago and I wrote half of it last year didn't finish the other half so I would like to do that soon as I said earlier about the structure of watering Heights this one is kind of similar but I think it's a lot easier to follow along with if you expect it so the first bit is told in letters and then a little bit from a man on a boat in the Arctic or Antarctic I think maybe Arctic he goes on about that and about seeing this monster so if you expect that narrative style and you like that then I think you could go on to weathering height I think this is a good book that you could read to get used to that Gothic style is quite Gothic soon to have somebody else telling the story through is not involved with the story I don't know what it is particularly like it but I think that Frankenstein is a good way to introduce yourself to that style of writing and this was written when Mary Shelley was only 18 and I'm 17 now so we've got to get a move on and write but like Frankenstein Hyundai I hadn't got long I've got a year basically to write a book like a Mary Shelley I can't push this eighteen and it's like only eighteen because teenagers are amazing we are incredible when we can do anything we said I'm going to do but also she was 18 and I was amazing I love Mary Shelley for that I like Mary Shelley as a person when I like her writing but I would highly recommend Frankenstein then I want to recommend to you Carmilla by J Sheridan Lozano this is a novella and it is a vampire story so if you like Twilight I don't know it's a good comparison but if you want to read trakula then I would read this first because it came before Dracula and I haven't read Dracula yet but I kind of wanted to recon Allah first because it's shorter than Dracula Dracula is really long and I'm a bit put off by its size because even I get scared by the size of classics like I'm never going to read Middlemarch let's face it it's 1,000 pages that puts me on Camilla is you're probably weird because the main character is a girl who had clothes seduced by Camilla it was written in 1872 where a might be written before that but it's published for the first time at 1872 and there's so much gay subtext in there that it's quite surprising when you read it Carmela is this really fascinating character because she is so seductive and she kind of subverts everything about Victorian women in the fact that she is really bad she's such an empty heroine and I really like that I think it's a fascinating people to read about I think it's a really fascinating book to read particularly if you want to look at reading more critically I think that Camilla would be a great way to do so because it's a short book but then a lot packed into there and a lot of interesting tropes and just things that don't even appear for the rest of the Victorian period or even earlier I think it's quite a unique book and I really want to read more of J Sheridan the son whose works after reading this because I really did enjoy it a bit of an unusual book but in a good way so I highly recommend this then we have more of a series of books I want they are the Penguins little black classics which I think are amazing if you maybe not sure about reading a full-length book by an author but want to know more about their style I would highly recommend these my favorites are the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which is quite a popular novella I doesn't love it but I think a lot of other people do I was maybe a bit unique in not injuring as much I think maybe because other people did enjoy it a lot just didn't live up to my expectations fully but it's definitely a feminist novel it deals a lot with mental health in a Victorian way and the treatment of it and character who is going mad and thinks that the wallpaper in the room she's in is moving and is alive and it's a really fascinating thing to read and in here there are also some other short stories in this edition it's the yellow wallpaper and then the rocking chair and old water and they've kind of got a creepy feel to them and the ending of the yellow wallpaper is well you've got to read it to find out what it is but it's it just sent chills up my spine I would highly recommend that one and then there is letters to a young poet by Ryan and Maria Rilke which will are my favorite books of last year is so inspirational if you're a writer if you enjoy writing I've highly recommend reading this because you advice that he gives is so poetic and lyrical is so inspirational and it's one of those books I'm going to repeat a lot over my lifetime because I love it it's so beautiful and just really motivates me in kind of a weird way it's not a but it tells you this is how you should write but it does it in quite a subtle way and I really like that and then the other one I want to recommend is Lady Susan by Jane Austen this is such an amazing book and I wish more people would read it because it is hilarious it was one of the books that she wrote when she was a lot younger as well as the ones that we classed as Jane Austen's juvenilia so she wrote it when she was quite young but you wouldn't yet tell that because she always writes amazingly doesn't matter how old she like I said about Mary Shelley it doesn't matter that she's young when she writes it it's still amazing and I don't think we should separate particularly the juvenilia from Anna work especially in the case of Jane Austen in the Bronte's you can really see the difference but with Jane Austen you can't so lately Susan is about the woman called Lady Susan who she's again on anti heroine and she's hilarious because is quite saucy and seductive as well they like Camilla but she does it in a very different way and she just tries introduces all the men leukemia and to try to marry off her daughter and there is actually a full lactation called love and friendship and I love that film I think it really captures the humor of Jane Austen and this one as well is pretty short it was one of the later Penguin at about classics so it is a bit longer for this one is 2 pounds so again he's a really affordable edition of the books if you don't really know where to start want to start from where I would highly recommend the penguin the little black classics and it is 117 pages and it's told in letters so it's really digestible reading you can pick up and put it back down again and you can probably read it in a week a slow pace a fast rate you can probably read it in a day maybe Susan is an amazing character and you just get the letters from her perspective you get everyone else talking about her too so you get a lot of different views on her and so you're not really sure if as a reader you like her or not but I love her I think she's an amazing character and I wish there are more characters like Titan Jane Austen that James wasn't disapproving off because you don't get that sense of Lady Susan you just get that she's classed in this character and it's up to the reader decide whether to model or not and whether you like her or not I can't speak highly enough of this book I wish more people would read it it subscribe in the back as glittering with often subversive young imagination this wicked early novella features the devious adulteress anti-heroin and that perfectly sums up the book and the final focus I want to talk to you about all American classics which i think is a really good place to start as well because the language is so much more easy to understand and these are all written around the 1920s to 1950s period and the first one I want to recommend to you is The Great Gatsby by F scott Fitzgerald I've just finished studying this for my English literature course I'm really sad to leave it behind actually I just have always loved it but towards the end of the year as I reread it for my exam I really fell in love with it and f scott Fitzgerald has such a beautiful writing so he's so descriptive so imaginative the way he uses language to craft his books is just incredible if you're a writer it's a really useful thing to study how he does it because if I could replicate something half as good that would be amazing his writing is incredible I really wrote the Great Gatsby by hand by Juan Therese Moore and this is about Jay Gatsby and he is quite an elusive rich man and it's told from the perspective of Nick who has just moved to this area of new money in New York on outskirts of New York there's the new money and old money in there different parts of the island and it's all about how people made money after the first world war how the people's old money were quite disapproving of that and the people who were of new money who made money from scratch from absolutely nothing can get treated and what I love about it is that it's kind of got that Romeo and Juliet feel of star-crossed last but doesn't this Shakespeare does really well even though Romeo and Juliet isn't my favorite play I think he does do it really well and you kind of get that same feel in the book and love Nick and Gatsby I think they've got a really wonderful relationship and Nick is a really interesting character to read from because his perspective he talks about being and bias how he doesn't judge anyone but the book is him kind of judging and picking his moment to judge the people around him particularly by the ends but you get that sense that he has been judging them all along so I would highly recommend that it's good one to analyse if you want to be more critical guns but you can also read it for pleasure and have a lot of fun with it and on the final book I want to recommend to you is one of my favorite books of all time and it is The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger I actually studied this in year 8 of school so when I was about 13 or 14 and I really loved it then it was a time when I actually really needed this book because it's about Holden Caulfield and I think it's again about mental health and depression and it's about 10,000 motions and expressing yourself and Holden is a really interesting character not everybody likes this book by after met that I really really enjoyed it when I read it I don't know if I didn't do it again if I read it we'll see I might reread it soon I was highly recommended I think that JD Salinger is very self-important a bit up himself I actually much prefer the way that JD Salinger writes in that style because I feel like he owns up to it he's not trying to hide the fact that he loves himself it's quite evident in his words but that is a problem I have altogether with American literature I just feel like a lot of yours from between like the 1920s and 1960s are just a bit self-important and I don't like that but I think that it works very well with Holden Caulfield he was a interesting character if you frozen like the bell jar by Sylvia plus you'll really enjoy this or vice versa I love both of them in very different ways but I still really love them it's not worth my classics for a beginners video I really hope you enjoyed it there in the comments if you've read only read football if you have any further recommendations to add to my list for people who are maybe a bit nervous to read plastics but still want to I hope you enjoyed watching this video and I will see you guys soon happy reading

Channel: lucythereader

Views: 105,823

Rating: 4.9339571 out of 5

Keywords: lucythereader, Lucy the Reader, booktube, books, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, classics, classic books, classic literature, classics booktube, Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë, the Brontës, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Carmilla, J. Sheridan le Fanu, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Letters to A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lady Susan, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

Id: 3ssS5OpoiXM

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017