my favourite books of all time 📖

hello everyone and welcome to another video today i'm going to be sharing an updated favorite books of all time i last filmed this video about two years ago and i think that it's high time that i gave you guys an update because between now and then i've read so many books that i love to absolute pieces and this list is actually quite different the thing that isn't different i will tell you is my complete inability to whittle this list down to a small and reasonable number i think last time i ended up with 23 this time i have 25 i have 25 books here i started with a short list like 32. the fact that we got it down to 25 books honestly is remarkable i'm kind of proud of myself for that hello everyone editing christy jumping in here i just wanted to quickly say a really big thank you to everyone over on patreon for supporting my channel we're currently at the beginning of the month so this is a very good time for me to speak about patreon over on patreon we have a whole bunch of lovely bonus content we have a monthly book club this month we're going to be reading the golem and the ginny by helene weka which is a gas lamp early 1900s fantasy set in new york we have exclusive videos where people can vote on what kind of videos they want to see i think i've made somewhere between 40 and 50 videos exclusively for patreon none of them have ads basically all of them are voted on we have a private discord server it is such a lovely thing i am incredibly grateful to everyone over on patreon who is supporting the things that i make and making these videos possible and making the time that i spend on these videos possible because without patreon i wouldn't be able to do this so if you're interested in checking out patreon it would mean the absolute world to me there is a link in the description down below okay i'll stop interrupting now back to the video i hope you enjoy these book recommendations in no particular order here are my 25 favorite books of all time kicking off with frankenstein by mary shelley this is a very well known classic which was written during the romantic period it was written in 1810 1818 i was close this is the story about a man named dr victor frankenstein he is a scientist he's studying at a university in geneva doesn't technically get the doctorate although he's referred to as dr victor frankenstein and he essentially grave robs a whole bunch of graves takes the body parts and makes a monster the monster does not have a name he is referred to as demon or rich throughout the story but he is not referred to as a specific name and it's essentially a cautionary tale about what happens when you try to play god this is a framed text so it's a story within a story within a story there's so much natural imagery here i really love the way that the humanity of the monster is depicted i love this book it's so brilliant i've reread it five or six times i think at this point i think i reread it almost once a year also last thing mary shelley wrote this as a teenager this is the book that single-handedly invented science fiction i cannot recommend it enough i love it to bits book number two on this list is pachinko by min jin lee this is my favorite historical novel of all time this is essentially a story about a young girl whose name is sunja she is born at the beginning of the 1900s in korea during the time of the japanese occupation she gets pregnant at 16 out of wedlock she ends up being saved essentially by this pastor whose name is isaac who marries her and takes her on a journey to japan and so sunja 16 pregnant goes to live in japan during a time where korean people were treated very badly this story is multi-generational it takes place over the course of like 80 odd years i i love every single part of this book i love it so much the way it's written is very concrete and specific there's not a lot of flowery writing here it's a very realistic style but i think it is so beautiful i really love the way that the passage of time was depicted in this story clearly a lot of research has gone into this book this book took minjin lee 10 years to write it's an absolute masterpiece i love this story one of the saddest books i've ever read please go read it it's so so very good and now we get into the neil gaiman section of this video first book i want to talk about is the graveyard book obviously by neil gaiman neil gaiman is probably my favorite living writer i think he's absolutely brilliant i love his writing i love the world he creates is signed neil gaiman drew a little gravestone on it for me when i met him just it makes me so happy we have this young boy whose name is bod which is short for nobody when he is a toddler his family is brutally murdered i will say very quickly this is a children's book and yet it starts off with something really creepy and sad and it's just brilliant and it's so compelling from like the first few pages he a little baby toddler toddles off up the road to the local graveyard and the ghosts of the graveyard end up taking him in and raising him and so this is fundamentally a coming-of-age story it's a story about growing up the chapters in here are quite episodic i love this world i love the way it was written this is such a good book to read around halloween and the cozy season the other two new gaming books i want to speak about are caroline and instructions so caroline is the story of a young girl whose name is caroline who is basically on her school holidays she's very very bored she lives in a flat within this old house she finds a doorway in the house to a sort of other world where she meets her other mother who has buttons for eyes coraline essentially has to fight her way out of this world and defeat her other mother and it's just this wonderful creepy story which is fundamentally about how dragons can be defeated and the fact that bravery is feeling scared but doing the scary thing anyway i think there's a really wonderful message here i love how subtly gothic both of these books are and then instructions which is a picture book this is the first neil gaiman story i actually read slash listened to i listened to it as a part of my advanced poetics course in my post grad basically from this is how i fell in love with neil gaiman's work instructions is essentially a picture book about the instructions for growing up but it's written in a really fantastical lyrical sort of way i genuinely could not tell you how many times i've listened to instructions i love it to bits it's my favorite thing that neil gaiman's written and it just it makes me so so happy book number six on this list is on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean wong i borrowed this story from the library last year i believe it was and i was reading this story and i got to this one metaphor about an eye i was like oh my god this is the most beautiful thing i've ever read in my life i'm actually going to start crying here the way that ocean vong can sort of just rip your heart to shreds in a few sentences like his writing is so beautiful his prose his commander figurative language is definitely some of the best i've ever seen particularly the way he links together images like in this book in particular he links together monarch butterflies with autumn leaves and with fire and talks about how they're orange they're all fragile but the butterflies are linked to migration and his journey and his family's journey from vietnam and just the intricate ways he weaves together metaphor and imagery are just so beautiful i love his writing this book is essentially a young man writing a letter to his mother that she will never read because she cannot read english there's not a lot of plot here so don't go in expecting a really linear plot it's very poetical it's really beautiful it's the type of story that you want to read really slowly just for the magic of reading and the beauty of language the next one is his dark materials by philip pullman now if you consider the fact that we're talking about the whole series this is this is technically three books but we're trying to keep it to 25 so we'll just count this as one shall we i read this i think the first book last year and i cannot believe i waited such a long time the fantasy worlds that are constructed here are some of the most unique settings i've ever read the plot of the first book is that we have our main character whose name is lyra she is a little girl who's grown up in this university at oxford university with all these academics she's very boisterous and confident and outspoken her best friend roger is kidnapped by a group of people called the gobblers and lyra goes on this big adventure to go and rescue him from the north she meets an armored polar bear named yorick bernerson she meets an aeronaut named lee scoresby the whole story is the adventure of her doing that the second and third books are very very different i was just so blown away by how expansive this world was how beautifully it was depicted i love how creepy this feels i love them so much ghost empire by richard fiedler which i've spoken about a bit this year this is a non-fiction book about the history of constantinople which was the head of the byzantine empire constantinople is now of course istanbul richard fiedler is an australian journalist with the abc he does an amazing job of weaving together the most interesting parts of constantinople's history with a holiday that he and his son took to istanbul in 2016. he sort of uses the metaphor of his son growing up and links it with the city and you know the fact that this is an empire that rose and fell it's no longer called constantinople love the way this is written i felt like i learned so much about constantinople and it really sparked a massive interest i have in istanbul the next book on this list is the secret history by donna tartt also the goldfinch by donna tartt i love her writing i love it so much it's so beautiful it's so epic i was listening to an interview with donna tartt the way she describes her writing is that she's painting a really really big mural with a teeny tiny little brush and i feel like you can really see that the secret history is a story about a young man whose name is richard papen who transfers to an elite university where he stumbles onto this very selective little greek class of about five students with their eccentric teacher julian morrow eventually he ends up joining the greek class and he's kind of assimilated into this world of really romanticized academia this book directly criticizes idealized images of academia and the theme that runs consistently throughout this story is that behind true beauty is also true darkness and there's this like very creepy undertone of like what these students have gotten up to i love the imagery here i love the way the school is depicted i love the way the characters are depicted she reveals the murder on like the very first page of this book and still she manages to have a decent amount of suspense the whole way before because it turns from a who done it into a why done it and i love it to bits and then also the goldfinch which i listen to as an audiobook which is a story about a young man named theo decker unfortunately is in an accident with his mother the two of them are going to an art gallery to have a look at this painting which is the goldfinch by carol fabrizis while they're at the gallery a terrorist attack happens the gallery is blown up vo in his absolute shock picks up the painting the goldfinch and then runs home with it and so he's essentially stolen this painting out of the rubble his mother very sadly dies and it's the story of what happens to theo after this event and so it sort of looks at how this terrorist attack comes out of nowhere how his life is irrevocably changed in a moment and it looks at luck and fortune and also there's a lot in this book about art history and art and painting and the underworld of painting and it's a really brilliant beautiful story and in the same way as the secret history it feels really expansive there's so many nuanced characters i love the character of boris in this story he's so good i love pop chick which is the dog that theo ends up with like i pop chick has such a special place in my heart i love her writing i think she's amazing book number 11 is what happened to you by dr bruce perry and oprah winfrey this one is a non-fiction book which is all about trauma how the brain processes trauma as i've mentioned before i'm really really interested in psychology i got recommended this book and it was absolutely phenomenal the way this story looks at trauma especially childhood trauma and the fundamental way that trauma changes us it was written in a way that was so accessible all of it was incredibly interesting i feel like i learned so much from this book i will say though there's some very heavy content in here it does speak about child abuse it does give examples so i would recommend that you read this when you're in a good headspace because there were some anecdotes in here that were a bit quite a bit heavy but in terms of books on psychology and trauma i think this was absolutely amazing book number 12 is the book that has to be on every single one of these lists it is harry potter i feel funny talking about harry potter now given everything that's gone on with the author but it's still fundamentally my favorite book of all time this book got me through school i reread this book obsessively as a child i've read harry potter the whole way through 12 13 i honestly couldn't tell you how many times i've reread the whole series this book i've reread over 20 times i reread it at the beginning of this year and no matter what is said by an author whose views i don't agree with this story has a fundamental place in my heart and it means the absolute world to me it this is this book is the reason why i love reading this book is the reason why i want to be a novelist i'm assuming you know the plot of harry potter it's a it's a story about a young boy who's 11 whose name is harry potter and he one day is told that he is a wizard and he's going to be going off to wizard school and it follows his magical journey from there number 13 and 14 are two books by susanna clarke and they are nessie and jonathan strange and mr norrell i think i've spoken about these books in almost every recommendations video and that is honestly just a testament to how much i love them and also how different they both are like these two genuinely feel like they were written by different people but i love them both kicking off with jonathan strange and mr norell this is a story about two men who want to bring magic back to england it is set in an alternative world in which magic does exist during like regency england so think the time of pride and prejudice mr norrell is this really stuffy uptight magician and he's very respectable and he believes that magic needs to be respectable as well jonathan strange essentially becomes his apprentice the honest triumph of this book is the fact that it reads like a regency novel it's very very long it also has a lot of footnotes this is a kind of extreme case this is the text this is the footnote in these footnotes the author is basically giving the backstory for this world and parts of this feel very academic because we're referencing a lot of made-up academic texts on magic the history of the raven king this world feels so thoroughly fleshed out it's really magical i love the way that the author integrated fairy magic and fairy folklore honestly so remarkable i love it to bits like it will take you an age to read it will take you such a long time to read but it's honestly so special hiranessi where did i put it this is much shorter so this one's written in the first person it's an epistolary novel and so this is the journal of the titular character pironessi he lives in this house which he believes to be the entire world and the house contains the ocean the house is labyrinthine it's enormous it's huge there's parts of it that is quite dilapidated and the tides float in and out of the house is albatross like it's it's a really interesting setting there's no one else in the house aside from this man whose name is the other and the story sort of kicks off when piranesi starts to wonder if maybe the other isn't the only other person in this house i think this is a really interesting gentle dark academia book if you're looking for a dark academia book that has a more speculative lens to it i thought this story was so interesting and so brilliantly done i love the voice of it i love piranesi as a character the song of achilles by madeline miller i myself was naive when i went into reading this i was like i know the story of achilles i've studied greek mythology i i watched the movie troy when i was a kid turns out i hadn't actually paid that much attention to the story of achilles because there was a really specific thing that i forgot that happens and it ripped my heart to shreds i am one of those readers that if a book can make me really cry i think it's a five-star book like i think that's really fun i really love the fact that books can make you feel such intense emotions that you're actually just crying reading words on a page i think that's really magical tell from the perspective of patroclus he accidentally causes an accident with another boy and he is banished from his kingdom he goes to live with achilles and they become very close so this story is beautifully written i love the way it was written it feels like it was very very well researched i think madeline miller does such a good job at retelling the greek myths she also did cersei which is a wonderful book i loved the nuance of the characterization as well i loved that neither patroclus nor achilles were perfect or you know romanticized really i love that they felt realistic they both felt like real people i cried a lot i definitely recommend it you can cry too the traveling cat chronicles by hiro arikawa this is a story about a man and his cat it's told from the perspective of the cat which i thought at the beginning was kind of a try idea which kind of would get old kind of quickly it didn't it was excellently done i listened to the audio version and the audiobook voice actor the person who read the audiobook did an amazing job of having the voice of a sassy cat the cat's name is nana because his tail is shaped by the japanese character for seven and it's a story about how the owner is trying to find the cat a new home and so they're going on a road trip across japan and there's all this really beautiful imagery of the japanese countryside we get to meet all these people from satoru's life who was the owner of the cat i really loved the complexity of the different character stories we had in this book i was blown away by how much this book impacted me absolutely excellent book number 17 is the wind-up bird chronicle by haruki murakami this story is definitely the most like i okay i love haruki murakami which you guys are quite aware of i love his writing i think he is one of the greatest natural talents for writing prose ever i love the way he does imagery i love the way he constructs worlds i think his writing is incredibly atmospheric and immersive and amazing i think he is wonderful he does some problematic stuff in his stories i'm not gonna lie to you fair warning is probably the book of his that has absolutely traumatized me the most the reason why it's my favorite is because this book is set during the summertime in japan and i read it in my first month of living in japan during the summer time i felt so immersed the cicadas the sounds of the birds like everything so this is the story of a man whose name is toru and he is a paralegal he's working in a law firm he's unhappy so he quits his job and one day he's given the task by his wife to go and find their missing cat and in the process of trying to find the lost cat his wife also goes missing and his life ends up being upturned and everything stops getting really weird and sinister there are all these tunnels over the city there are these flashbacks there are moments where dreams might be real there's a lot of really interesting almost surreal magical realism elements in here this story just it's sat with me for such a long time it's one of the most memorable books i've ever read book number 18 on this list is 100 years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez this book is incredibly significant because it's so influential to the magical realism genre it's so interesting and weird and magical it follows this family over the course of roughly a hundred years beginning with the patriarch whose name is jose acadio buendia all the men in this story are called jose cardio or aureliano and that says something specific about their personality the magic is very gentle but it's never questioned i thought it was incredibly expansive it felt epic it felt like even though i wasn't actually reading that many words or that many pages i felt like i was experiencing this enormous story and i think that compression is really impressive and really really important oh and i should say really quickly there is a content warning for this one i think it's kind of important there's a scene with a particularly large amount of gun violence in here so if that's the type of thing you want to avoid go ahead and avoid that but otherwise the violence is not like i heard that the violence and confronting elements of this story were really really bad like they're to me as a reader they're honestly not wind up bird chronicle so much more confronting the next one is orlando by virginia woolf this is a story about a person whose name is orlando at the beginning of the story they are born male during the elizabethan period but they end up living for a very very long time many hundreds of years and by the end of the story they are female and they're living in the modern world this book was incredibly ahead of its time in terms of depictions of gender and gender fluidity this story is said to be a love letter from virginia woolf 2 vida sackville west and she allegedly based orlando's character off of vita this story is beautifully written virginia woolf is an absolute genius the way she writes is spectacular you have to read her stories a little bit more slowly because it's so academic and it is absolutely wonderful so so interesting so different book number 20 on this list we're getting there guys we are we are getting close this is house moving castle by diana nguyen jones as many of you know my favorite studio ghibli movie is house moving castle the film and this book are both very very different this book is a portal fantasy whereas the film is entirely secondary world hal is welsh he plays rugby he gets drunk with this rugby team it's so strange sophie's character is very different they just bicker the whole time like their relationship is so funny to me and i just i love it so much like i find it hilarious the whole way through housing castle is the story of sophie hatter she ends up being cursed by the witch of the waste turned into an old woman she leaves her hat shop and ends up going and trying to find how she becomes his cleaning lady i love diana wynne jones i love the way she depicts magic i love the way she depicts these worlds i reread it and i reread it and i read it so much number 21 is another non-fiction book and this is educated by tara westover also as a segue i recently read i'm glad my mum died by jeanette mccurdy which was amazing and brilliant this book was so raw and honest and i felt so much for her and her journey if you liked that book i definitely recommend reading educated educated is the story of tara a young woman who grew up in a very extreme mormon family in the u.s they were preparing for the ends of days the father of the family would not let his kids go to school he wouldn't let them seek medical attention for anything and it is essentially about her journey of how she breaks out of this family and how she fundamentally claws in education for herself she is a person who has never been able to go to primary school or high school and she ends up going to an elite university she ends up incredibly educated and so this story looks at her journey to become educated things she's learned the things she's had to unlearn and looks at her family in a really complex and nuanced way there were moments when i was listening to this book that i just had to stop and do nothing but listen to it and i was just crying her journey was so harrowing and the way she expresses what she went through was incredibly engaging and i loved reading this book i thought it was such a wonderful memoir the magic toy shop by angela carter it's really funny because this is one of her more commercial books it's less weird and wacky than the infernal design machines of dr hoffman this one which is considered to be her magnum opus and i know she was a lot more proud of this book than she was of this book but despite that i love this novel this is definitely my favorite novel by her and it is the story of a 16 year old girl whose name is melanie her parents die in a plane accident and her and her two younger siblings have to go move to london to move in with their estranged uncle philip who's this creepy man who owns a toy shop it's very much a gothic novel i love the imagery here like i just reread passages of this book the way angela carter writes is absolutely phenomenal she is such a genius i think it's so beautiful and of green gables by l m montgomery i was so surprised by how much i loved this book i never read anne of green gables growing up so i read this book maybe three years ago for the first time and i was absolutely blown away by how brilliant the writing is by how complex the characters were and also by how much i personally identified with anne this like over-enthusiastic chatterbox child who's always like putting her foot in her mouth by saying the wrong thing i love anne's characterization and beyond that i love the way that natural imagery is depicted in this story i think this is a really beautiful pastoral idyllic story if you like nature i definitely recommend reading these books i really love the fact that she has really strong friendships with other girls the basic premise of anne of green gables is that we have an orphan whose name is anne who ends up being adopted by matthew and marilla cuthbert who are brother and sister and she comes to live on this farm in canada named green gables book number 24 on this list is the house in the cerulean sea by tj clone this is a story about a man whose name is linus he is a officer for the department for magical regulation and this is a particular world where children who are magical end up being put into these orphanages because magic is very much looked down on here lioness is a person who has to go and inspect these orphanages and make sure that they're up to code he ends up being sent on this job to the titular house in the cerulean sea where he meets these children and their caretaker the thing that's really beautiful about this story is how honest linus is as a character is how raw his feelings are depicted the fact that he's not happy in his job he's not happy with himself so linus's vulnerability as a character really really struck me i think this book has the most positive depictions of fatherly love i've ever seen in a book the way that family was looked at here the way that love was looked at here was so wholesome and beautiful and really comforting like this is a very comforting book and moving on to the very last book on this list of 25 technically like somewhere closer to 30 but the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde this is a gothic classic and it's about a young man who is incredibly beautiful he is being painted by a painter whose name is basil hawkins hazel hawkins is this person from one piece he looks at this painting once it's done and he realizes that every day after this he is going to grow older and less beautiful but the painting is always going to remain the same and he makes this wish that he could swap places with the painting and somehow this wish comes true just magically and so dorian ends up remaining beautiful and young he doesn't change as he commits acts that are unkind and and not good to other people the painting becomes uglier and it starts showing his sins i mostly just reread it because it's so beautifully written i love the themes that are explored here i love henry i love how kind of pompous his monologues that he does henry is one of dorian's basil's friends one of my favorite books of all time we are done that i think to film this video was an hour and 20 minutes good luck to editing christy for cutting that down into a watchable length basically every time i talk about my favorite books i get very very enthused and excited but i'm really happy that i got to share these books with you thank you very very much for watching and also an enormous thank you to everyone over on patreon for supporting my channel take care everyone and i will see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Christy Anne Jones

Views: 37,835

Keywords: christy anne jones, aileaux, favourite books of all time, favorite books of all time, favorite books, my favorite books, best books i've ever read, my favourite books, what to read, book recommendations, best books of 2022, favorite books 2022, favourite books 2022, fave books 2022, favourite fantasy books, favorite fantasy books, favorite fantasy books to read, best fantasy books, best books 2022, book recommendations 2022, 2022 books, 2022 book recommendations, books

Id: wTQUbi60i8s

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022