TOP 10 Books of ALL TIME (According to a Dude Who Reads)

foreign ERS I'm Adam AKA a dude who reads and today I want to tell you about my top 10 books of all time across all genres everything so stick around okay so with any list like this there are a few things that I should mention right off the top first of all this is my personal top 10 list this is not a attempt by me to objectively describe the 10 greatest books ever written these are my 10 favorite books of all time you are completely free to disagree in fact I encourage you to disagree that's how we're going to have some good conversations um if your favorite book is not on my list well there's a few good reasons for that the first is I may not have read it yet or maybe I will never read it or two maybe I have read it but you know what you and me are two different people and therefore we're going to have different opinions and that's what makes this so fun so uh I encourage you guys to drop me a note in the comments with how you feel about my list give me your top 10 list and let me know what your thoughts are caveat number two this list is subject to change this book this list is my top 10 books of all time as of mid 2023 and I will tell you that if I had to do this list a week from now you probably would get a different list because cutting this down to just 10 books was so incredibly hard I fully expect this list to change and at the end of this video I will explain to you guys why I in fact I'm almost positive that this list will change completely by this time next year so stick around to hear what is coming up in the next year that's probably going to turn this entire list up upside down on its head okay with that let's get started I am gonna go in reverse order here um starting with book number 10 and this was a very difficult ranking to do because honestly book 10 on a different day like I mentioned could potentially be book number one but for today it's book 10 and book 10 on my list is Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as you can see my copy is pretty battered and pretty yellow this definitely was not purchased new by me uh must have got it secondhand or something and it has been read many many times um the old man in the sea why is this book on my top 10 list well there was a time where if you had asked me who my favorite author was I probably would have told you Ernest Hemingway as time has gone on uh my thoughts towards Hemingway have changed a little bit I've changed a little bit as a person and so I'm not sure I would necessarily put Hemingway up there as my favorite author anymore specifically some of his Works um like uh To Have and Have Not which is over there Farewell to Arms The Sun Also Rises um these are books which I appreciate but they're no longer books that I hold up in my top textbooks of all time that being said The Old Man and the Sea is still in my list of top 10 favorite books of all time because to me The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway at his absolute finest I think Hemingway is still one of the most beautiful impactful writers to have ever lived people may describe his prose as terse or as you know overly functional I personally absolutely love the way Hemingway writes and I think the beautiful part about his writing is what you need to bring to the book yourself in order to feel something the old man in the sea is a great tale because Hemingway is at his best when he's in a short form and so you know the old man in the sea is Tiny this book is 120-ish Pages um and the Les Hemingway says the more impactful he can be which is why some of my favorite writing of Hemingways is actually not his novels but some of his short stories uh Hills like white elephants for example when you understand the subtext of that story it is absolutely remarkable it's an incredible feat of literature uh The Old Man and the Sea is the novel version of that the emotions that he can make you feel with such few words you feel like you are right in there in that boat you feel like you are fighting off that shark with the boy with the uh and you just have so much emotion towards uh this old man um all together just a super impactful book for me I read it a long long time ago but still stands up as one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing book number nine this is completely different from book number 10 and you're gonna notice this pattern a lot in this list this list is going to be all over the place book number nine on my list is the big nowhere by James Elroy so James Elroy is a writer of crime Noir style detective novels which is not really my bag in general in fact I don't think I have a single other mystery novel on my bookshelf but James Elroy is one of my favorite writers of all time the way he writes brings such emotion and Clarity and punch to everything he does and specifically his La quartet of novels of which the big nowhere is book two in that quartet you don't have to read them in order you can read them any way shape or form uh the big nowhere is my favorite out of those four books uh LA Confidential which is the third book in that series is probably the most well known because it got turned into an oscar-winning movie you have book one the Black Dahlia and before white Jazz all of those books are absolutely phenomenal my personal preference is for the big nowhere I just love the way Elroy does grit does drama there's a palpable feel of attention in everything that he writes the way that he writes just feels so emotionally gripping that you are in that story from page one to the very last page and this is he's one of those writers that can get me to finish a book in a day to Tops because I just can't put his books down um but this is not one of those you know whodunit kind of plots either invested in the characters you feel like you are in the moment to the point where this book is set I believe it's in the 50s Los Angeles 1950 that's right um and you feel like you're living in the 50s you feel like you are part of that culture you feel like you're in LA in the 50s just I have not experienced any other writer who can transport me 73 years back in time and make me feel like I belong there elroy's writing just super impactful and to me the big nowhere my favorite of his books carrying on with the trend of showing books that have nothing to do with the previous books this book is titled asterios polyp by David matzo Kelly and this is yes this is a graphic novel and if you I will hold this up here for you get a sense of the art style it is not a super realistic art style um but it is a beautiful one and David matzakeelli who is the artist and writer of this book you may know him as the artist who did uh Batman year One which was written by Frank Miller and that got a ton of Praise in the comic book Community but to me this book I started as follow up by David matz Kelly he is one of the greatest uh pieces of writing that I have ever read and that is across all mediums all genres including the fact that this is a graphic novel so asterious polyp is ostensibly the story of A Sort of uh middle-aged slightly older professor of uh I'm not sure I think he's a professor of physics he's well respected in his field he's got pretty much everything going for him he has quite a high opinion of himself um and then one night something happens and essentially he uses everything and he basically starts over in a different place where no one knows him gets kind of back to his roots different he he does different work altogether he starts doing more manual labor he gets more in touch with kind of uh physical reality of things as opposed to kind of uh esoteric high level thinking so it is not uh a book where you need to have the lived experience of a 50 year old physics Professor to appreciate it the themes in this book are something that anyone can relate to it has to do with being grounded being present being there in the physical world and appreciating the things that we have and this is not a new story by any means but the way that mads Kelly does it in this book is just so beautifully written and so beautifully drawn to me one of the greatest books ever written and my favorite graph novel of all time and yes I will put graphic novel in here with other works of literary fiction because they are literature book seven on my list of top 10 books is The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien um and yes it is The Hobbit and not the Lord of the Rings that I am putting on this list the Lord of the Rings does not appear in this list spoiler alert for the rest of the list this is the only Tolkien on this list and so I do know that most booktubers who are Tolkien fans will usually name the Lord of the Rings as their favorite Tolkien book uh some really hardcore Tolkien fans will even say something like this so Marillion is tolkien's best work um and then there's the esoteric ones who think his bail of translation is his best work but I digress to me The Hobbit is Tolkien at his finest uh the Lord of the Rings is a wonderful uh wonderful story and what it did for their genre of fantasy Ken is is undeniable it is basically the forefather of the entire modern fantasy genre that exists today but The Hobbit which many people think of as a children's book to me is just um so much more of a pure enjoyable read I read this when I was really young and I reread it when I was older and it just stood the test of time so well it's an adventure novel about you know in this case a hobbit but it could be anyone getting outside of their comfort zone uh finding courage to do things that they didn't think that they could do it's just a wonderful beautiful story and it's told in like 250 Pages 300 Pages whatever the case might be uh I guess the print is relatively large in this Edition but it's a small book um children can read it adults can enjoy it it is just such a beautiful story and it doesn't get bogged down in a lot of the stuff that non-tulkin fans have a hard time with when they read the Lord of the Rings so you know the overly expressive description of the world you know reading Elvish poems and the miles and miles and miles of walking that everyone's doing even though there's a lot of walking in this book too talking like these characters to walk right [Music] um but to me this is Tolkien at its finest this is the book that got me interested in Reading fantasy as a genre and I will always love this book I'm looking forward to the days where I can read this to my kids and pass all along to them the love that I have for this book and this genre number six on the list and again going all over the map and nowhere near the same vicinity as the previous elections I have a non-fiction book and that is Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain so Anthony Bourdain you may know him as the guy who had multiple really popular television shows from No Reservations to The Layover to uh whatever the one he had on CNN was tragically took his home life just a couple of years ago Anthony Bourdain was to me a great voice for a generation of artists that were not recognized as artists even a couple decades before he started writing and the artists I'm talking about are chefs and Cooks Bourdain's Memoir Kitchen Confidential outline sort of his life in kitchens going through sort of coming up the ranks being trained at The Culinary Institute of America before it was prestigious to be trained at The Culinary Institute of America working in Lion kitchens learning to speak sort of pigeon Spanish with lime Cooks who are from other countries drinking on the job his heroin addiction this is just a very real and raw book uh and ordain's way of writing and his prose and his style is just so gripping and so emotionally connecting and for me personally uh my first jobs when I was uh even before I was in university but then even after I graduated some of my first jobs were working in restaurants and in kitchens and so I connected with a lot of the stuff in this book because I saw just how real it was and I know that the stuff that he was writing about was not stuff that he was over dramatizing in order to kind of paint a picture in fact he was just laying things out the way that they were and superimposing his own story on this with his own very unique voice which uh honestly he developed more and more as he got older and I think he found his medium when he was in television a little bit more than when he was writing but to me Kitchen Confidential of all the books Anthony Bourdain wrote really shows his range really shows sort of it was his most deepest personal story and it came out so raw so unfiltered and it was just a really impactful book so to me one of the best non-fiction books uh I ever read in my life uh and it had a huge impact on me and I am not one to get wrapped up in Celebrity culture and when I hear news about someone I've never met before passing away I am sad for them and their family but it doesn't affect me more than that when I learned of Anthony mourdain's passing it was the first time I think in my life that I actually had an emotional reaction to someone I had never met before uh passing and that's because that's how much his work uh touched me as a person all right now we're moving into the top half of our top ten and now we are going to hit number five on my list and number five on my list is on the road by Jack Kerouac um so maybe you're starting to see a pattern in all these books even though they all seem very different there might be a little bit of a thematic thread that is going through them on the road obviously Jack kerouac's most well-known work and the lore behind this book is just absolutely mind-boggling I think the story behind the story is even more enthralling than the story itself so for those of you who don't know supposedly Jack Kerouac wrote this entire novel in just a few days by getting really high on Benzedrine which is a stimulant and basically just pounding out the entire story on his typewriter on a single long scroll the scroll still exists I don't know who owns it but it is one incredible artifact that you know I I think fans of kerox writing must really admire um but the upshot of the wig Kerouac wrote this book is that he took experiences that he lived he fictionalized them and by pumping them out in such sort of a manic way it really gives the entire book this this sort of manic hyperactive feel to it and the entire book really uh encapsulates gives you that impression that feeling that you are Along on this ride with Kerouac and the characters that he has invented right demorality cell Paradise uh these are characters that are fictional but that are Loosely based on Kerouac and his Entourage right um so by writing this the way that Kerouac did he found a way to convey the feeling and the emotion and the Ambiance and the vibe of the of the period that he was in to someone like me who is living you know a generation two generations later but I can still feel like I'm right there with him uh also something you should know about me I have a strange fascination with sort of 50s and 60s era Americana I think that may have started with this book and my sort of uh minor obsession with all things Route 66 so uh geroact to me very influential in in kind of the way I looked at literature from a very young age and still to this day one of my favorite books of all time so at number five on the road by Jack Kerouac number four on this list is once again departure from some of the other books here but it is Kafka on the Shore by Haruki murakami I do not have a copy of Kafka on the shore which is ironic because I own something like 11 of murakami's novels and two of his short story Collections and one of his works of non-fiction but I do not bone Kafka on the shore which is my favorite work of his uh the reason for that is that I read Kafka on the shore because someone lented to me and that was my introduction to murakami as an author and after I read Kafka on the shore I just went out and devoured everything else that origami wrote um he is at this point uh I don't think I need to explain who murakami is especially to an audience of readers he has become a very well-known figure in the literary canon both in the Western and Eastern hemispheres uh in recent years he's become a little bit more of a controversial figure with a lot of people pointing to the fact that his books might err on the side of sexism by no means do I think murakami is a feminist but I also don't know if I would go as far as calling him a sexist based on things that he put into fictional books the thing that I enjoy the most about murakami's writing and Kafka on the shores especially is that it's got this quality to it where on the one hand it feels so grounded and real and his protagonists just seem so average that it becomes almost impossible not to feel like you understand who this protagonist is but on the flip side he he moves these these stories and these plots in such a way that everyone feels real but at the same time you feel like you're following this very real person going through a dream and so it's this juxtaposition of a very real first person narrator in many cases especially in the case of Kafka on the shore with an environment that's completely weird and bizarre and it's jarring in a way that is good in all the right ways like it shouldn't make sense more common you should feel like an absolutely absurd piece of fiction but he doesn't it all just works so well and I think that's his genius because I think if anyone else tried to write like murakami it would just come off completely absurd it wouldn't work but he manages to pull it off in a way that's absolutely beautiful uh and it it it's made him one of my favorite uh contemporary authors if not my favorite contemporary author and I have enough of his books on my shelf to prove that point unfortunately my favorite of his books of all time Kafka on the shore didn't uh didn't land there but the one thing I do need to see though is I need to get my hands on a copy of this book and reread it because I need to understand for myself whether this is uh so high on my list of favorite books because it was my introduction to murakami or if it really is my favorite of all of his books because uh in fact my favorite more comedy writing in general outside of Kafka on the shore are his short story collections which I think are absolutely brilliant um and so I'd be really curious to re-read Kafka on the shore to see if it would still maintain this really high spot on my list of top 10 books moving on to our top three we're at the top three here we go home stretch all right so going from a contemporary Japanese novelist to a classic Russian novelist my number three novel uh of all time or my number three book of all time because not all these are novels is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy um and so War and Peace is a book that I only read in the past year and so it is uh the most recent book that I have read on this list not in terms of publication obviously but in terms of when I read it and so this is a fairly new read for me and I'll be curious to see if over time recency bias sort of wears off and this starts to slip down my list but as of right now to me War and Peace is so high up on my list of favorite books of all time because I cannot remember the last time that I read a book and was just so engrossed so enthrough old for such a long period of time that this book is I think 1400 pages long and I didn't want it to end the way that Tolstoy has created this sort of Epic Saga around these lives of people who for all intents and purposes I should care nothing about because what do I care about Russian aristocracy during the Napoleonic Wars I shouldn't and yet I have become so invested in these people's lives and I find myself reading through these pages and yelling at them and saying here what are you thinking Natasha snap out of it this is not good for you it is just such a an engrossing novel and the characters are just so real so human and what I love about tolstoy's writing is it good authors give their characters arcs so they start somewhere they go through a journey they change and they end up somewhere else Tolstoy does that but instead of having a traditional character Arc I guess because this is a 1400 page book he has room to make this Arc go all over the map with highs and lows for all of his characters where you feel like they're evolving and then they backslide and they screw up and then they realize that they screwed up and they get a little bit better but then they fall back into their old habits again and then they pick up again and they get better again which is just so much like real life to me Tolstoy just writes life better than anyone I have ever seen and I could read whole story writing about paint drying and I would probably still enjoy it because the way he describes life is just so beautiful and so real and so vivid that I enjoyed this book just immensely now I will add one caveat which is if you've never read War and Peace and you go into it a with the fear that it's a really big book you're gonna have a hard time because it is a really big book Okay so this is not going to be a one day read um but if you go into it to enjoy it and to savor it and to appreciate every single page and you stay with it for a really long time and you're willing to read a book over a long period of time it is absolutely worth the investment even though certain parts of this book seem to not be part of a novel at all in fact there are four parts in this book the fourth part I believe I think it's the fourth part uh feels a lot more like essays than it does part of the actual book itself essays on the role of historians and the role of you know sort of um determinism versus um versus Free Will and so obviously those are themes that come up throughout the novel and I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that um but there is a point where where Tolstoy gets away from the story and really starts writing directly to the reader which in a traditional novel would feel really strange but Tolstoy somehow manages to weave it into this narrative about these characters who are going through this really important period of history and uh he does it in such a way that only a master could do so to me War and Peace an absolutely beautiful book and I think uh anyone anyone who has not read it and who's been put off by the fact that it's ginormous should still pick it up and give it a try just enjoy it appreciate it don't think of it as uh as a Sprint think of it as a marathon there's tons of book clubs out there that read this over the course of a year uh with every the chapters in War and Peace are super short they're like three to four pages each and so you can read one chapter a day and there happens to be I think around 300 60 chapters in the book so three or four pages a day you're done in a year it's and it's absolutely worth it this is a book that despite its size I will be rereading maybe more than once all right runner-up for my number one book of all time uh and this is uh I don't I don't own this book I don't know why I don't own this book I actually was shocked when I was putting this list together to realize that I don't own this book I feel like I must have owned it at some point but maybe I lent it to someone never got it back that happens regardless uh at this point I'm going to look for uh a really uh nice addition and buy the nicest edition of this book I can and the book I'm talking about is actually a series of books it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams I just finished talking about War and Peace this book could quite possibly be the complete opposite of War and Peace where War and Peace is the most grounded and real book that I think I've ever read uh The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the most absurd off-the-wall ridiculous thing that I have ever read in the best way possible Douglas Adams writes humor so well that it is the only book I've ever read where I think on every single page I actually physically laughed out loud most humorous books you read you will read and you will maybe smile or maybe you'll think to yourself oh that's kind of funny rarely does a book make you laugh out loud The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made me laugh so often that I could not read this book in front of other people because they thought something was wrong with me um I don't know what there is to say about this book uh or this series of books that hasn't already been said but Adam's creativity the way he takes characters who are fish out of water yes that is A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pun for those of you who get it uh takes Fish Out of Water characters put puts them in the most absurd scenario possible and still makes it a compelling story and makes you want to root for these these characters even though it's completely absurd what they're going through you shouldn't want to care about what's going on because frankly it's just Bonkers and yet it's just such a good time I I don't know how else to explain The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but it is quite possibly the most fun I have ever had reading a book and for that reason I could pick up that book at any time and it would make me smile and laugh and so it has to go really high up there and that's the reason it's number two on my top 10 list of favorite books of all time now the moment you've all been waiting for if you've been watching this video for this entire time my number one book of all time is Barney's version by Mordecai richler and at this point about half of you watching are saying huh who what and I would not be surprised because Mordecai richler despite the fact that he is an award-winning novelist and one of the greatest novelists who has ever lived probably is also uh not nearly as well known outside of Canada as he is in Canada where he is frankly a National Treasure mordechler grew up in Montreal as a English-speaking Jewish boy and he left Montreal an early age went to go live in Europe was kind of part of the same Lost Generation as the Hemingways and the fitzgeralds and so on and so forth but because he was Canadian don't think he got the same recognition and I think that is a shame because so much of richler's work is absolutely excellent the apprenticeship of Dodie Kravitz uh the saint Urban's Horsemen so many more he he was an excellent author um but to me one of the last books that he wrote uh was born use version and to me this was kind of the peak of his craft richler wrote in such a way that he combined humor with very real and serious topics and so he's one of those writers who can make you laugh on one page and then make you cry on the very next page and this is I think the reason why Barney's version has made it to the top of my top 10 list because if you look at the rest of my list up till now you'll see that I definitely have a thing for excellent character work I have a thing for books that make me feel a certain way I have a thing for um strong motions whether they be positive or otherwise and I have a thing for humor and I think this one book does all of those things really well in one book Mordecai has excellent character work his main characters usually are a little bit of a spin on himself and so uh by the time he wrote this book he was an older chromogen curmudgeonly gentlemen uh and so hence so is the protagonist of this book um and he's got drinking problems he smokes a lot of cigars all of these are traits that richler himself had as well uh he's got multiple Ex-Wives so there's richler um he's got complicated relationships with his children richer did sort of a little bit as well all this to say this book seems like it would almost be autobiographical it's not but it does take all the greatest parts of Richard's life and his career and he rolls them into sort of his magnum opus which I believe is Barney's version this book is hilarious at times it will make you think it is sad at times and the other thing that this book has which almost none of Richard's other work has is it has a plot that has you guessing and it has a little bit of a page Turner aspect to it there's a little bit of mystery wrapped up in this book as well and for an author who has never really done that before in his career the way he pulls it off in this book is one of those moments where I was like oh wow I did not see that coming that is not why you read richer you don't read richer for the AHA moments you read him for the humor and for the excellent characters but he pulled that off and then some in this book and to me this is the closest I have ever seen to an absolutely perfect novel ever written and I think it's a shame that more people don't know about it I think it's a shame more people haven't read it um and if you haven't please do yourself a favor grab a copy read through it I think it's uh I think you'll enjoy it if any of the rest of the books that I mentioned in this video are or appealing to you then I think this one might be as well and that's it that's all I got that's uh all the all 10 of my books all 10 of my top 10 books wrapped up for you and thank you if you've made it to this far in the video I really appreciate you sticking with me and before you go I did say at the very beginning of the video I would explain why I thought this list was going to change completely by this same time next year and so here's the reason for the last 10 to 15 years most of my reading has been non-fiction it has been stuff that is has either been personal development oriented or business related or uh something I was reading to acquire a specific skill and so while I read a lot of great books over the last 15 or so years none of those books impacted me like truly great fiction impacts me it's only in the last six months or so that I've really started to get back into reading a lot of fiction and I'm I'm now embarking on a bit of a project which I'm going to talk about in a future video which uh has me really excited because it's got me looking at some books that I just can't wait to read books that I can't believe I have not read yet and so in the course of the next year I'm probably going to be reading you know 20 to 30 books that could easily if they live up to my expectations have a chance of cracking my top 10 list so I wouldn't be surprised if a year from today my top 10 looks my top 10 list looks completely different and I hope you'll uh be here with me in a year's time to see if that's true or not and uh yeah if you uh if you are that's great if you're not I hope you do some excellent reading of your own and that's it that's all I have for you guys today uh let me know what you think of my top 10 drop me a note down in the comments below do you agree do you disagree are there any of these books you've never heard of before or is there some of these books you want to check out what is your personal top 10 look like let's have a conversation all right gang that's it for me cheers foreign

Channel: A Dude Who Reads

Views: 166,100

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Id: 3lvIQcA3qQs

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023