Let's Go to the Bookstore Together (London)

hello everybody today we're going to go to the bookstore together we're starting off a new thing because i like to wander in and out of bookstores and my preference is that i leave with a handful of stuff and max out my my card um so we're going to start off we're gonna go to a bookstore in london it is waterstones you probably already know it if you're living in the uk you definitely do if you're from north america canada um it's kind of like barnes and noble it's our version of barnes noble or indigo so we're gonna walk in i'm gonna talk you through we're gonna look at some books and uh try and guess what i end up walking out with and then after after we've walked in i'll uh open open up the books and we'll have a little chat about so whenever i'm in london i'll typically go to this bookstore just because there's so much variety multiple floors london does have some other good bookstores like daunt in marleybone and i'll take you there at some point but i like this one this is typically where you'll find me if i want a day at the bookstore and they have some of their best books out front some of these really old style uh books and you can see like the original price in like two shillings and stuff like that jacobian tragedies is a good shout i did some of that at oxford that was my area of interest of course i was leaning towards picking up some shakespeare but i've got enough shakespeare yeah when you go through the front door you can go to the right a little bit and then you'll have all these orange original penguin paperbacks which which i think are really collectible and really nice you've got some award winners here um i typically i've tried reading those but not for me pushkin press this is pushkin press this is i think maybe a new publishing print oh the cool the covers are just gorgeous though aren't they there's tolstoy with a translation that i've not read before check off looking very dashing uh but the covers look at that the beauties by chekhov i just i think whoever designed that did a really good job uh granta is a good literary magazine up there with the paris review i used to like uh tin house i think it was called but uh that's out of print now okay this is where the big boys spend their time it's the loeb classical library area you've got greek on the left in green and in red that's the latin this is like i think old english style i haven't spent much time here haven't forayed into it but this whole classic section is a place that i like to spend a little bit of time um i used to be able to you know understand latin quite well but it's been many many years now so it's on my sort of bucket list literary book bucket list i suppose you call it to to refresh my latin and maybe pick up some greek i'm kind of interested in doing a doctorate in classics at some point i i find the the ancient stuff endlessly fascinating this big book here looks like a fun read and then you've got the music section downstairs in this waterstones next to the journals um so i typically go there quite early on i'll look at the vinyls do i want any classical music and then i'll have some fun with the journals i've recently started designing my own journals but i like the like terms 1917 they're better than the moleskins and these neon ones are pretty cool um for vinyl the genre of choice is typically jazz and then i go straight to the every man's now i make it a point whenever i go to a bookstore i have to leave with an every man you probably know that if you watch some of my videos already i'm always looking at every man's i'm always pulling the covers off and collecting them this waterstones in particular has a pretty good um every man collection what i'll say is i've i struggled to find any that i haven't already kind of got or read got thomas hardy here i've got all of thomas hardy he's a great read if you haven't you know met hardy yet and read any of his rule pastoral narratives then you should give him a good crack you've got les mis there i've got that version but the translation of that one isn't isn't the best it was i think actually the every man translation of les mis was the first english translation came out the same time as the original in french these covers are lovely there's a good mix here got muriel sparks silvia plath um well um oh there we go i've i was drawn to voltaire candide i'm not sure if i was going to pick that up but the tale of genji you can see that sort of caught my eye there thinking about it on the western front i've got there you've got philip pullman there i hope here's something potentially controversial i'm not sure about pullman personally um you've got jane austen wonderful stuff um she's you could easily read all of austin like very very quickly half a year uh you've got dickens down here i i personally like the dickens collection with the original printing fabry i believe but you've got barnaby rouge or it's called barnaby rubbish by some mean people baldwin he's i'm in sympatico of baldwin i read some of his stuff like giovanni's room and some of his non-fiction and i feel an affinity um this is a nice section here with like original covers i think the artwork on these covers is really nice i've actually got the terry pratchett myself signed by him i met him these are really nice horror themed um covers covers are important i do lambast some booktubers for focusing solely on the cover but the covers are important let's not kid ourselves and some of these these prints it's penguin right cloth bound i've got the anna karenima myself lovely that's by rosamund bartlett the translation i was drawn to these as well you can see you've got jane eyre and you've got some jane austen and it's kind of like cut out in the design you've also got some chinese literature which is actually my literary blind spot i'd have to get into that a bit more at some point along with indian literature this is persuasion um i thought the cover design was really nice on this but the paper quality perhaps not mary shelley's frankenstein one of my favorite horror novels of all time and then this stuck out cerevaentes um i'm not sure what what that is but i'm reading don quixote or rereading it at the moment and it's a great book first world war poetry that's uh that stuff will make you cry we've got a podcast coming out where we we're going to be interviewing uh a man who who lived through the blitz so that'll be really interesting told story of course um i always try to add something to my tolstoy collection you got anna karenina of course um these norton critical editions are pretty good if you're into tolstoy i would recommend you you check those out taylor the genji all right so i really felt compelled to get genji or tale of the genji or genji monogatari but there's three translations ones in every man and so i was trying to compare them hold them up against each other and i don't know because they're so different um it was a hard decision they have a shakespeare section at this waterstones which i'm always drawn to these are the ardens they're really good if you want to get single volumes of shakespeare's plays and you want like introductions and notes and annotations they're somewhat flawed but they are probably the best option on the market we can talk about that at some some other point why i think they're flawed they can be a bit biased and stuff but they're lovely they're very collectible um and then you've got the poetry section here which and all persuasion with a beautiful cover um i like to sit down in the poetry section and spend some time but there was two people taking up the only seats which uh is a shame but the poetry section is a good good fun i usually find something new like single volumes of poetry i think people too many people just read anthologies and it's like it's like um like a greatest hits album it's all right but sometimes you want the actual album haiku yeah haiku is pretty cool um yeah what i liked about this is you've got the original on the right and then they've even spelt it out with the furigana um haiku there's an art to appreciate in haikyuu because it's so different from western poetry we pop upstairs and we're in the nature section and these covers i'm just just talking about the covers today these are beautiful they're about you know different birds and wildlife and finches oh let's grab some finches they're very very very expensive those are like 70 quid for one volume which is nuts so then i popped up to the foreign language section this is the french section no shade on the french i've got french books but the covers there i go to go on the covers again they're not as inspired as other languages i think they're a bit plain um then i looked at some went back to the everyman looked at the langland uh found this neat collection of sheamus heaney um and then i was torn i didn't know what to pick up i saw this deluxe version of jrr tolkien and i was starting to worry that i was gonna walk out empty-handed okay so i picked up three books three really nice books from my latest bookstore visit and i'd like to show you them and talk about them a little bit now i'm a bit of an amateur at this sort of vlog style i'm way more into the lectures and stuff so if you like this sort of thing let me know and i'll make more if not no worries just do more lectures okay the first book that i picked up and i'm really excited it's j.r.r tolkien's beowulf it's the deluxe edition you can see how beautiful that is should we pull it out there we go you can see by the way you can't i don't know if you can tell from the camera but this the the actual book quality is really nice it's actually hard to stop touching it it's the same with the paper quality very very sturdy paper i'd be quite interested just as a geeky little thing knowing what paper quality this is no wonder this was a pricey one um this it gold embossed dragon you can see that here tolking actually drew that himself there's a few illustrations and they've embossed it i'll show you on the first page there we go we can kind of see that's tolkien's handiwork there and there should be a couple more but anyway essentially this book it's got a commentary it's got the actual text the translation it's got a bunch of notes and it's got also the select spell this was compiled after tolkien's death by his son christopher tolkien funnily enough i actually was in the lecture hall the medieval lecture room for classes on medieval lectures like beowulf the very one that talking himself taught the very one that he would have been in that room and he would have walked past the bodily and he would have walked through oxford perhaps with c.s lewis um so i was in there when i was studying oxford which is really cool um old english is it's something i really want to get back into i struggled with it in my first year of university but now i'm endlessly fascinated with it as a as a language as a study um a lot of people talk about epics like homer they talk about virgil dante milton of course um but few actually i mean sheamus heaney helped with his translation which is more poetic and from what i understand less of a accurate rendering um if you forget that we've already been there the the brits or wherever we came from i suppose the anglo-saxons that sort of tradition danes you know we if you go back far enough we have our own epic tradition and beowulf is a solid story and more people should read it i will probably do a series of podcasts not only on beowulf but paradise lost very soon so if you're you're interested uh check out the link to the hardcore literature podcast below and subscribe that'll be appreciated um but it's just really really interesting and the one thing that's most interesting is that is the fact that you can pick up on his son's hesitation for publishing and that's carried over from his father who obviously was hesitant about publishing because he says he wanted to create a translation for the general reader who knows nothing about this sort of thing and but he also knows that the academics will have their pistols unsheathed and loose and ready to go i can relate with that and they'll be ready to butcher him and crucify him and say oh why did you make this linguistic decision that's wrong that's wrong and tolkien's like well i actually have years of experience in research i have pages and pages and i can go into my decision for why i changed this kenning by the way as an artistic thing the kenning is a really nice um nice thing that i'd like to talk more about in the future but he and and and so he says people will crucify him without knowing that he's done the reading and actually that their reading is more surface and but he also doesn't want to include all of that sensibly just academic waffle because it will put off the lay reader so he basically abandoned it he abandoned what's probably the most faithful translation is it the most poetic no but it is probably the most faithful and it's a riveting story and because he thought people wouldn't appreciate it well i'll tell you what it might be a bit belated but i appreciate it and i would highly recommend you check it out i'll drop a link in the description below if you like the look of that and that's beowulf the deluxe edition all right we've got two more books the next one and i had some struggle with this one it's the tale of genji okay now the struggle was i picked up the everyman um translation initially big i can't remember his name exactly said and becca his translation apparently is like the nicest i think but perhaps not the most faithful but it's also one of the early ones there's a couple of other translations but the one that most people gravitate to is this one tyler now i put them up against each other and i found it really hard because tyler's style was overly poetic and was hard to follow but in that sense it's kind of more faithful to the japanese because the japanese constructions are more passive they go all around the houses there's a lot of ellipsis and sort of the unsaid so it's not very direct tale of the genji anyway i went for this one just because firstly the the company notes uh look really really good and it's just filled with pictures you can see the picture there and i like the the chapter beginnings where they tell you a little something you know little linguistic things picture there picture there so i have a reading schedule and technique outlined for the tale of the genji similar to another book you might know it ag yoshikawa's musashi this is the sort of book genji that i think you probably want it to accompany you or be a companion across many years some people do binge it and inhale it but i think with these big books it's um it's good to slow down so personally i'm going to be reading one chapter every month and i'll take years to get through and if you finish your chapter for the month cool you can either reread the chapter or you can read a different translation or you can search things out like poems historical facts and learn more about it but you can't go on to the next chapter and then when you come to the next chapter now you can go back over two chapters uh but you can't go on to the next one until the month is elapsed it's a style of reading that is uh it's somewhat similar to the proofs project um but that's a little bit of a different one taylor the genji a lot of people call it the first novel i think it was written in like 1 000 or 1100 or something like that written by a woman some of these early texts were written by women a lot of people don't know that the book of genesis was written by a a woman of the solomonic court um so that'll be interesting from that i've dipped into it already i find it endlessly interesting i love the culture i remember speaking to my japanese friends when i was in japan and i asked them about genji monogatari and they said no it's just boring don't bother with it i think maybe they just weren't literature fans because i think it's quite interesting and i'm quite good at putting up with these long books where ostensibly nothing happens um but anyway yeah tale of genji should be a fun one and last i have this thing where when i go into a bookstore if they have an every man collection i always have to leave with a new everyman it's my little treat and so i opted for the art of war by sun tzu now with the every man's what i like to do is denude them or nude them whatever the made up word is take their covers off basically yeah strip them bare because the hardback is lovely and they come in different colors depending on the sort of literary epoch or where they are in the world or the genre and stuff like that and uh that's a light green one for my collection sun tzu the art of war which will be endlessly valuable as i uh hurtle into battle atop my horse next week which is definitely on the schedule anywho those are the three books i picked up on my latest bookstore visit let me know what you're reading and if you thought this was cool please hit the like button and subscribe happy reading

Channel: Benjamin McEvoy

Views: 9,804

Keywords: Waterstones London, bookstore vlog, book trip

Id: 60IfLH94jD4

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021