My Home Library Tour

hey everybody I hope everything is going well I wanted to make this video because one thing that I've always enjoyed about YouTube are the home lab home library tours or home bookshelf tours there are a whole lot of these on YouTube if you weren't aware and it's good especially if you're really into reading and I'm really into reading they're good for finding out about books that maybe you wouldn't have found out about on your own because everybody's reading reading tastes are different therefore everybody's libraries are different and so you get a sense of how much is out there really and how much of everything you really don't know anything about and I decided that I wanted to make one of these videos as well not because I have anything super rare or exciting that you can't find in somebody else's home library tour or their home bookshelf tour whatever you want to call it but because I want to give that opportunity to some other viewers on YouTube that I had which was to learn about books that maybe you didn't know about before and hopefully um this isn't too boring for you hopefully there's some books that catch your attention maybe want you to look up on your own and find out more about and yeah it doesn't seem too weird I thought it would be weird kind of putting this video together almost like ooh let me show off all the books I have but I never really got that impression from the other youtubers I saw that we're doing something like this so I just have to hope that I don't create that same impression as well so without further ado let's get into the library tour okay and here is my home library slash office slash secret lair let me try to get a full shot of everything before we go into the particulars there's a lot to cover so this might be one video it might be two we'll see I'll try to go kind of quickly as well but let's go ahead and get started we can see first over here above my electric fireplace I've got a few shells I got a fossil and most it took Moses or tooth and a bust of Charles Dickens there which I was super excited to find because I'm a big fan of Dickens and I ran across that in an antique shop so was lucky find the Shakespeare bust was a lucky find as well because Shakespeare is also one of my favorite authors and I found this in a garage sale and I got it for pretty cheap as well so a lot of the cool things in this room or at least I think they're cool I sort of stumbled across they were a happy chance same with this old map here and it depicts the classical world with the borders there of the four elements on one side the four seasons on the other and then above we have the four heavenly bodies it was kind of a glare there sorry about that and then at the bottom we have the seven wonders of the ancient world now this was a cheap reprint it's just like a piece of poster paper that again I found in an antique shop but it still looks pretty nice I have a DaVinci clock there that I got from Hobby Lobby pretty cheap and here is Pete Pinto Pete my sidekick he's a pink toe tarantula the scientific name is Anne avicularia avicularia and there's a cricket in there somewhere that I dropped in earlier today and he didn't notice it sometimes that happens so I'm hoping he finds it soon and eats it before it dies in there on its own and then I have to fish it out so let's start out by looking at the books on this smaller shelf here you'll see in the top shelf that I have some older books ones that again I've picked up in antique shops I think older books are cool some of them are quite old this is a Baptist hymnal from 1835 25 off the top of my head I can't remember right now but I got that book and it's really cool to see all the old hymns that people used to sing and to hold a book in your hands that's actually several times older than you are yourself moving on here I have a bunch of different Bible versions even some Bibles and other languages like Spanish Greek and Turkish more Bible versions here I was studying the Bible version issued for quite some time and so I liked having a whole bunch of different translations to see what words were different what's been changed over the years and you can see here I have a copy or a reprint of the original 1611 edition of the King James Bible which is pretty cool down here I also have reprints of the Matthews Bible and the Geneva Bible this is the Bible that the pilgrims would have brought over with them to the new world so that's pretty cool to see that and on the inside there's different sorts of cool engravings and pictures and it's also fun to try to read and read the old type print to emphasis on try I'm here I have some books on apologetics I have some books by Timothy Keller Lee Strobel I like them I haven't read all of these books and that kind of goes the same for everything we'll see here today I've read a little bit over half of everything so some of them I don't know too much about sermons by John Wesley I liked those I have John Wesley's journal over and some other part of the room we'll get to in a minute David Hunt GK Chesterton further down I have books on Catholicism and then I have there's the Book of Mormon there then there's books on other religions world religions and they and the analytics or Analects of Confucius and the Quran some books on Islam and then just my sort of humor I threw Richard Dawkins down there - because atheism is in my opinion just as much of a religion as any of the other ones over here actually we'll look up on top first I have some of the books from the Encyclopedia Britannica great books of Western world set I don't have them all because I've been picking them up as I can find them in antique shops I have a bust of Homer up there and then over here on the other side where they end I have a bust of Aristotle oh and that's pretty cool - that's a statue of Leonidas maybe you know about Leonidas from the movie 300 or maybe you've read Herodotus histories of the Persian Wars and I found this statue in a flea market and got it for relatively cheap about $30 or so but it really brings the room together I think okay so starting out with these books here and at this point I have everything arranged chronologically going from here to the other side of the room I'm not gonna take credit for this system of arrangement I actually got the idea from West callaghan's video over at Roman roads media so go check out that YouTube channel if you want to see another really cool library but it makes sense to me to arrange books this way and also it kind of makes the room itself into a sort of story it reminds me of the older medieval tapestries where you could see a story progressing from one into the other we're also kind of like a comic strip - I guess you could say that's the same thing about that so not only are the books arranged on a shelf the shelves themselves are actually telling the story of human thought human imagination and you can see that change happening just by looking at the shelves - so back to this shelf we're starting out I have some works by the ancient Greek Greeks I have a lot of different translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey my Greek playwrights Greek historians this is an interesting book this is a really old edition of lucidity in the original Greek I only have the first volume of it because apparently there were two others I don't know where those wore that was the only one that was there when I saw it so that's the one that I got we have philosophy Plato Aristotle coming down to the ancient Romans where we have the Ennead the poets Catullus Lucretia's I like a toeless um Seneca both his philosophy and his plays the tragedies that he wrote a couple different wrote works on Cicero Roman historians Julius Caesar's autobiographies themselves the historian Libby and then coming down here we have Plutarch Tacitus I've got two different editions of Tacitus because this one that I hadn't initially bought had a weird miss set in the binder and so I'm missing about 20 pages in that one and another 20 pages are repeated on themselves so I had to go and buy another copy to figure out what was going on there God works of Josephus Eusebius st. Augustine there's a bunch of different translations of Beowulf I'm a big fan of Beowulf ever since I initially read it in my senior year of high school Tolkien's translation is pretty cool and there was some overlap there between my interest in Beowulf and my interest in Lord of the Rings so that one's a fun read and coming down here we have medieval riders the Nibelungen lead books about Charlemagne then some contemporary historians takes on the Middle Ages the battles of medieval war world a bunch of different books on Arthurian legends I've always been a big fan of King Arthur stories I think the first King Arthur aside from the sword and stone the Disney movie the first King Arthur movie that I ever saw was the one with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley that came out in 2004 I think and ever since then yeah I've been kind of obsessed got Thomas Aquinas The Canterbury Tales moving on up here sorry to give you a whiplash got Dante's Divine Comedy more history books on the Plantagenets on the medieval English kings we got Erasmus Machiavelli books by martin luther we're coming into the Reformation period now there's foxes Book of Martyrs Institutes of the Christian religion by John Calvin and then we come to my Shakespeare stuff I have two copies of the complete works of Shakespeare ones more for looks and this is the one that I mark up and kind of it's well-worn and red and then on the Shelf below that this is acts actually a facsimile edition of the first folio of Shakespeare and that's really cool because you can open it up and see how the plays were originally arranged all the print is set in that Elizabethan font so it's actually kind of hard to read but you can also see where changes have been made between the first folio and the editions of Shakespeare's plays that we have now did I have some individual copies of other plays of Shakespeare that I've studied more intensively because it's hard to carry that big book everywhere some Shakespeare scholarship Marjorie Garber or Shakespeare after all that was pretty good Harold Bloom Shakespeare the invention of the human I actually have a bunch of different books by Harold Bloom and they're good but in my opinion he's kind of a difficult read the life of Shakespeare Stephen Greenblatt James Shapiro and damaged some of Shakespeare's contemporaries Ben Jonson Christopher Marlowe edmund spenser and then a bunch of stuff about John Milton Paradise Lost Milton criticism John Bunyan George Herbert stuff about the Puritans movin on down we have here the poetry of John Donne calper and then we're getting into their earlier novelists when novels as an art form were starting to come into being we have Laurence Sterne Samuel Richardson also some philosophy from the period some enlightenment philosophy Pascal dis Descartes Immanuel Kant Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations then we start getting into the Revolutionary period documents coming from the time of the American Revolution and thinkers who are writing at the time of the American Revolution we've got Thomas Paine the Federalist Papers and the anti-federalist papers Mary Wollstonecraft and then more history books about the American Revolution I've got a bunch of stuff on Thomas Jefferson I think he's a really interesting character definitely flawed but also you can tell that in my opinion he really possessed the American spirit wanting to be free wanting to be independent and able to make one's own choices consider concerning one's destiny Jefferson and Monticello I got some books on Benjamin Franklin - and on John Adams more books about the founding fathers Tocqueville is democracy in America that's a good read if you're wanting to know what the opinion of America was at the time from writers from abroad Tocqueville was from France more revolutionary stuff book about Andrew Jackson Jackson I'm not sure I would agree with him politically but he was definitely a character someone worth reading about didn't we skip forward in time here just a bit we have the British romantics poke poetry from the Romantic period Wordsworth and Byron Keats and Shelley I've always been a fan of the romantics in terms of poetry that's probably my favorite time period my favorite poets are from that time and we have browning Tennyson and then moving into novels of the late 18th century early 19th century we've got Walter Scott Thackeray Frankenstein by Mary Shelley which we'll be talking about in a class I'm teaching in the fall over at Keppler education you've got Jekyll and Hyde The Jungle Book we're coming back up again to the other bookshelf up on top here we've got my Jane Austen books I've got a lot of different books of well actually have all Jane Austen's writings but then I got a lot of other books about Jane Austen herself a big fan of Jane Austen I'm also a big fan of the Bronte's one of these is missing because my mom's reading it right now but I've got biography on the Bronte's Charlotte Emily and actually it's strange but I haven't read any of Anne Bronte yet I've read so much about Charlotte and Emily but the younger sister I have gotten too then we have this whole self and the majority of the self underneath it is all Dickens so he's a rather prolific writer and his books were big books I like to call them skull crushers because you know if you took Nicholas Nickleby and dropped it off of a stairwell and it landed on somebody said it will crush their skull he's not the only one who's known for this we're gonna get over to dust or have ski in a minute but yeah Dickens rat skull Crusher's sometimes you feel like your skulls been crushed as you're trying to read them but he's really in much the same way that Jane Austen is I think modern art audiences are a bit intimidated by them because they're known as the classical novels and they're written in a style that's different from the works of today and because of that you have to remember when you're reading them that there's a lot of humor there Dickens is a comedic writer to a large extent and Jane Austen is also and if you remember that you're supposed to be laughing at some of these characters it really makes the stories come alive for you yeah more Dickens books the letters of Dickens a lot of different biographies about Dickens including one of the earliest ones it was written by his friend then more Victorian novelists George Eliot moving down we have books by Elizabeth Gaskell and then a lot of books on Thomas Hardy actually all of Thomas Hardy's books because I was reading them studying them for my master's thesis I worked with Hardy quite a bit he's an author whose worldview I completely disagree with but his writing is so good and it makes it easy to step outside of your own worldview and step into the shoes of someone else and understand where he's coming from and even if you don't agree with what he's saying to be able to sympathize with the character in the story and to sympathize with the themes that he's trying to elucidate and his riding a really dark rider - I imagine Hardy kind of like Edgar Allan Poe he's probably the kid that always sat in the back of the class drawing not talking to anybody else maybe writing cheesy gothic poetry I don't know more stuff on Thomas Hardy and then I've got some mysteries Arthur Conan Doyle Wilkie Collins who was a friend of Dickens these are books are more darker more concerned with a mystery sensational fiction whodunit books things like that and in that vein we've got Dracula by Bram Stoker heart of darkness some stuff by Oscar Wilde Picture of Dorian Gray is really good and then we move into French literature I have all my French books kind of organized together I'm probably gonna bunch of the pronunciation here but lay liaisons dangerous his the book that the movie Cruel Intentions was based on with sarah michelle gellar that was a book that i saw when i was younger and i thought was a really interesting movie and i didn't know that it had been based on a book at the time but it's an example of an epistolary novel so the whole book is written as a sequence of letters back and forth between the different characters and there's sort of a fiction being maintained that the author of the book didn't actually write the book they just found these letters and compiled them after the fact that's not the only book that does this as a matter of fact Dracula does the same thing and to a certain extent Frankenstein by Mary Shelley does as well and where they get that from is from Richardson the book Pamela one of the earliest novels was written and such a way where there was kind of an adder echt acknowledgment that the reader was there and an excuse being made as to how the documents that the reader was reading came about hello we have my desk here my Bible my King James Bible I try to start my day off by reading at least a few chapters out of that my stand over here where I keep my laptop and my microphone for when I'm making videos a bunch of books here that I don't really have time to sort through to show you interesting stuff more things from mostly theology got some CS Lewis books down there there's that uh diary of John Wesley then moving over here up on top I have another set of great books the Harvard five-foot shelf of books and again I don't have them all they're just ones that I've seen in antiques shops and I picked them up when I could and I've got some cool globe bookends every library needs a globe right I don't have a giant globe but I figured that having some little ones would bring the look together I also have a little bust of Napoleon up there on a horse and I thought it was appropriate because right underneath it we have my French books now this whole shelf is Victor Hugo and about part of this shelf is two up here these are all different translations of limas Rob because lame is is my favorite novel I think it does so many things perfectly that other novelists do well it addresses so many different issue issues so many different elements of what it means to be human what we experience there's love there's hate there's revolution all these things and they're tied together in my opinion perfectly and so I have a whole lot of different translations because I actually can't read French which is unfortunate I would learn French in just be able to read lame is in the original language honestly maybe someday when I have time I'll do that but until then I want to make sure that I'm getting as comprehensive and understanding of the novel as I can so I have the Julie Rose translation I have Norman Denny I can't remember what the name of the author is it does this one the Julie Rose translation it's more modern it's not bad I preferred though the translations by Charles Wilber these are both Wilbur translations this one's a more updated one these are antique editions I would open them and show them to you but actually I'm afraid of cracking the spines if I do because there's some cool drawings in there I have the love letters of Victor Hugo and if he thought that he could ride a good novel the man could write a good love letter too actually he wouldn't have approved I don't think of these being made public these are letters that he wrote to his wife and before he died he requested that she burned them all and she burned all the ones that she wrote to him but decided to make public the ones that he wrote to her so not a super faithful to his dying wishes but then again he wasn't quite super faithful to her either so what can you do a 93 is probably outside of lame is my favorite novel by Hugo the characters in there are really well written Hunchback of Notre Dom his other novels some of his poetry here's a set of some of his other novels too the man who laughs indirectly is responsible for the Batman villain the Joker do a search on that if you're interested and if you have time to find out how this guy who sort of has a scar fixed on his face so it looks like he's always laughing is out seeking revenge against the people harmed him in the past more French literature de moss Rousseau Balzac Jules Verne I've always been a big fan of Jules Verne I like the sort of I don't know what you want to call it not quite yeah I guess you could say early science fiction field that you get from him emile zola Foucault not that I really agree with too much he has to say but it's nice to have it as reference all the same and here we come to Russian literature we've got Tolstoy got two different copies of Anna Karenina not sure why I think I just bought this one because I really really liked the design of it is really pretty then we have dust we have ski I've got all the dust Roy have skis actually not all I'm missing oh what's it called I'm missing one of them that was super helpful I know but anyway most of his works I'm a big fan of him outside of Hugo and Shakespeare and I guess I would say Jane Austen I don't know if it comes between Austin and Dostoevsky they might be tied for third place in my mind down here I have more of this works I especially like the possessed it's also been translated the title has been translated as the demons are the devil's I think it's a novel that has a lot to say about contemporary issues and modern ideologies as well as what it had to say about the issues of the time Solzhenitsyn dead souls haven't read that yet but I hear it's good got some book of books of iron Rand and I actually haven't read the famous iron ran novels yet I haven't read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead and tend to get to it but I really enjoyed the Romantic manifesto it's her philosophy of art and literature and it's influenced my thinking in regard to literature in aesthetics things like that her political philosophy you know it's sit or miss but her aesthetic philosophy is pretty good then there are the American novelists the god Moby Dick The Scarlet Letter big fan of The Scarlet Letter I hope you can see this bottom shelf here it's all kind of blocked out from the light we've got Mark Twain Edgar Allan Poe Little House on the Prairie as one of the earliest books or book series I can remember reading with my mom as a big fan of those we've got Thoreau Walt Whitman TS Eliot letters of TS Eliot some books by folk I'm sure it's lovely hearing me groaning trying to stand up from the floor every time sorry about that bull finches mythology that's a helpful summary of the Greek and medieval myths so if you're doing study in that area and you want sort of the layman's version I recommend that F scott Fitzgerald we've got Virginia Woolf D H Lawrence James Joyce when it comes to James Joyce I've read a portrait of the artist as a young man it was really good he's one of those writers though that sometimes when you read him you get the impression that he doesn't really want you to follow along Finnegan's Wake is a great example of that and I know somebody's watching this and they liked Finnegan's Wake I'm sure they would think differently but I don't know it kind of puts me off when I'm reading something and it seems like the author's trying to make me work for it not that that's a bad thing but that should come naturally like a great book or a good book should be one that stretches your mind makes you exercise your brain a bit but it should be because the ideas within it are themselves great or complex not because they're sort of a an intentional obscurity or obfuscation being put into the text and that's kind of the impression that I get from joy sometimes and to be fair I got that same impression from Dickens as well before I really got into reading him and liking him it was the best of times it was the worst of times well I didn't like that entire first chapter and I couldn't believe it once I actually got past the first chapter how good the rest of the book was so maybe I need to give Joyce another chance we'll see neverending story and here starts my Tolkien shelf big fan of Tolkien middle-earth and all that got so Marillion Lord of the Rings my original series of books that I got when I was in the fifth grade this was around the time that the Fellowship of the Ring film was coming out by Peter Jackson and I got these I think for my birthday and I read through a mall in one summer I can't really claim to I understood them all at the time I think I was 10 or 11 so some of it was a bit beyond me I remember having the impression that he talked about trees a lot but in nature and you know when you're 10 or 11 but the stories were still good and I stuck with him I really liked The Silmarillion too and these are all the texts compiled by Tolkien's son Christopher Tolkien early drafts of the Lord of the Rings early stories that got worked into the Lord of the Rings mythology I'm a writer so it was really interesting for me to see the creative process at work with tolking to read the rough drafts see what he changed see how we structured the story stuff on The Hobbit and then naturally following Tolkien we have CS Lewis yes I do have two copies of The Chronicles of Narnia because I had one initially but I was doing a presentation in college about CS Lewis on The Chronicles of Narnia and I didn't have time to go home and get my Lewis book and I needed a book because I wanted to read a couple of quotes from it but only had an hour or so before class started so I ran to the bookstore in town there wasn't like a single copy I just wanted the line into which in the wardrobe but there wasn't a single copy that book I thought I'd be able to get it for cheap but it wasn't there so I went ahead and bought that why not the space trilogy is a big fan of that especially peril andr I think is really interesting and that hideous strength definitely reminded me of my experiences with college actually and some of the people you meet there other works by Lewis some literary criticism by him as well an experiment and criticism is really good the once and future king again because I'm a big King Arthur fan haven't read Asimov yet I know that people like him and they say if you like science fiction you'll really like him I'll get to it eventually coming on down we have brave new world not sure why I have Robert Graves here I need to probably fit that into a dip better scheme further back on the bookshelf here I have the Left Behind series which when I was about I don't know 12 or 13 years old again I was a huge fan of those they really fire up the imagination as well as teach you good things about the book of Revelation God Harry Potter books Game of Thrones books the only ones available because somebody hasn't written the last two not that we're in a hurry or anything up here another author that I was a big fan of when I was younger more for her style of writing than for the things that she wrote herself or in the books themselves she's just a really I guess you could say poetic prose writer I learned a lot about how to describe a scene and describe a character from reading and rice the Vampire Chronicles which in the interesting series because given that her worldview changed as she wrote them they were written over many number of years and she'd initially written the first one interview with vampire as an atheist and then returned to Roman Catholicism later on and that change in her own worldview is reflected in the novels - I gotta love Anne Rice books you've been coming down here of a bunch of different steampunk books mortal engines which they made a movie of but I don't think it did - well I'm not sure why because the story is great I haven't seen the Cloud Atlas movie I don't know if that's any good or not and then some normal fantasy and its own the Shannara series by Terry Brooks these were good I've read the first one in high school for an assignment and got the other two sort of a dystopian fiction series vampire novels by Justin Cronin and at this point my bookshelves kind of devolve from being chronological to being arranged topically because we've reached modern-day but I still had a bunch of other books I wanted to get through so there's what we did we have some more works on philosophy Kierkegaard Karl Yune for some reasons up there we get in some books of psychology as well Nietzsche I've got a lot of Nietzsche books over there on that stand underneath my laptop too that I haven't found a place to fit him into the bookshelves and going off of Karl Yune some books by Joseph Campbell the hero's journey famously George Lucas who wrote who made the Star Wars movies based the Star Wars movies off of ideas and Joseph Campbell's a hero with a thousand faces hero's journey William James got some Karl Marx more Harold Bloom the Western Canon again it's a good read but in my opinion it's a difficult read Mortimer Adler here we come to my books on literary criticism we've got writings from a bunch of different schools of thought rhetoric of fictions good mimesis is good coming down here Heidegger Lacan reader-response criticism and then I have some anthologies here of English literature because English literature is more my thing I like American literature too but I don't know English literature captured my imagination more I guess you could say some books on writing and rhetoric and Composition books on linguistics some dictionaries a Greek dictionary down there too well I got some works on the digital humanities education when it comes to new media's new technologies some books on teaching look at that I didn't grown that time I'm not an old man yet and then we come to some historical books I got books by Susan Weiss Bower sort of summaries of history the ancient world the medieval world I don't have the Renaissance world yet because I'm broke another outline of history by HG Wells some books on the civil rights and on the Middle East and then I've got figures and current events books on those I try to keep something of a balanced bookshelf when it comes to current events I don't want to have just the Republican side or just the Democrat side I like to have books that cover both perspectives then what we have here some ethnographies more ethnographies when we come to short stories modern poetry Elmore Leonard I like his work more short stories we get into graphic novels I took a few graphic novels classes in college so there's a lot of these here even more graphic novels you don't call them comic books in college you call them graphic novels books on different games card games chess poker got some books on publishing and then sort of miscellaneous stuff pop culture things on filmmaking my bottom shelf here I have books on science we have theory of relativity by Einstein book by Stephen Hawking Brian Green books on dinosaurs have books on evolution as well as sort of critiques of the theory of evolution by Daniel Dennett and Mayer I can't remember what Myers first name is and then because I a bibliophile and I can't get rid of books I still have all my math textbooks as well from college who knows why okay then let's see here's some books on Nietzsche Timothy Keller more books in there and this closet here I have books that I've had since I was a kid childhood books so we've got goosebumps the Animorphs got my Hardy Boys books over there as well as some Stephen King books I've really kind of outgrown him I would say but there they are I've got more young adult novels series of unfortunate events things like that okay guys I hope that was enjoyable I hope it gave you some good ideas about things you could be reading especially now since if you're watching this is at a later date then never mind but right now we're all under kind of a lockdown because of this global pandemic thingy so there's plenty of time to read right hopefully some of the books you saw gave you some suggestions if you have any questions I'm definitely curious to know what you guys like to read as well so please leave in the comments and ebooks that you think would be good both for myself to know about and for other people who are watching the video too that is about all that I have so thanks a lot for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Ryan Griffiths

Views: 38,613

Keywords: Ryan Griffiths, home library tour, library tour, bookshelf tour, BookTube, book tour, reading, books, English, literature, home office, showcase

Id: BmBCz9j5ODs

Length: 44min 25sec (2665 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020