Where to start with classic literature & tips for beginners 📒 How to start reading classics

hi there welcome back to my channel it's emma if you are new here i make videos about well mostly about books but sometimes i do other things recently i've been doing a few clothing hauls i do some book reviews i do weekly vlogs if you're new here hi it is just absolutely wonderful to have you here so nice to meet you whoever you may be today i have a video that has been pretty highly requested for a very long time and i've been a little bit hesitant to do it and film it not only because i didn't know how i exactly wanted to go about it but i thought about it for a while and like i said so many people have been asking me to do this so this video is going to be a rex room episode because i do like a book recommendation series on my channel an episode of the rex room talking all about where to start for classic literature where you should be again if you just want to get into it if you don't know where to start if you don't know which classic you should start with if maybe you've read some classics in your life or you've never read any classics at all in your life and just where should you start dipping into the world of classic literature get to this video there are definitely a few things i want to say number one this video is not going to really go into or have big conversations about what constitutes a classic what makes a classic um what is classic literature because these are huge conversations and i would just ramble on forever and ever and ever so they will definitely in the future be whole videos about that because like i said i could just go on forever i also have quite a number of problems with classics and with classic literature not the literature itself of course but just how we've designated and created this thing in this category and what we consider a classic and just everything that goes into that i have a lot of problems with it i would of course talk about that in a different video as well i do also think that absolutely anyone at any time anywhere no matter your level or experience or what books you've read what books you haven't read i think anyone at any time can step into absolutely any book and fall in love with it i think it's just a matter of being in the right headspace as well as kind of making all of the outside factors to reading really suit your needs with that being said um so many comments that i've gotten and messages this video is kind of catered towards that because although i do think anyone can step into any book at any time i do know that there's so many times when that doesn't happen and that doesn't work and of course it's happened to me dozens of times where you step into a book it's way too long it's way too dense for some reason you can't grasp maybe it's the language maybe it's the metaphors maybe it's the super complicated plot maybe there's 17 characters who all have the same name marquez i'm looking at you maybe for some reason you're just not gelling with it and it just wasn't the best place to start main thing with classics is just to 100 throw away your intimidation and just go into them with an open mind and open hearts and just ready to embrace the plot and the language and everything and take it in stride and just throw away that intimidation because words are just words no words are really inherently better than any other words and the ability to read a sentence for example in a children's book like the magic tree house does transfer to reading a sentence very much constructed the same way in war and peace by leo tolster or something like that however of course there are huge steps and huge journeys to take between the magic tree house and war and peace and so maybe these books can be that journey for you these books i've selected some of them are short some of them have quite simple plots some of them have very easily navigable language they're very user-friendly classic some of them are just so interesting and so seemingly modern some of them deal super blatantly with like metaphors and images and symbolism and all of the stuff that classics really just do kind of squeeze into themselves and build themselves up with all these literary elements and i think um at least those elements in these 10 books are things that i think someone who doesn't have a lot of experience like plucking those out and analyzing them could still appreciate and could still like you know use this practice that's the main thing i want to say is that reading is just practice the more and more you read the easier and easier it becomes to digest what is being said to you to interpret and to really open that interpretation to so many different pathways sciences humanities history language politics literally anything everything just builds and builds and builds and i think if i was approaching the classics for the first time in my life never having read anything maybe these would be the 10 books that i would like to use as stepping stones so now that i've rambled on long enough and i said i wasn't going to do that let's just jump right in this first classic is just absolutely phenomenal the writing will make you cry um i know it made me cry this is the broken wings because was a lebanese author and this was first published in arabic in 1912. i read this last year it was one of my favorite books of 2020 and i seriously think like this is just such a beautiful place to start the broken wings tells the tragic love story of two young people in beirut lebanon at the turn of the century amidst very complicated religious and political tumults and what their relationship goes through it talks a lot about gender roles about religion about relationship and just it is so wonderful to get so easily lost in the story because zubron's writing is just out of this world like it is just pure beauty i think anyone no matter how much experience with language you have or with reading or anything i think just anyone could read this and just be so stunned and so swept away by his sentences like this man knows how to write a sentence i feel like some language and classics can be quite heavy quite dense charles dickens likes to write sentences that are longer than the mississippi river but i think in like the broken wings it's just very intuitive and that's kind of what i find with poetry this is an extremely lyrical poetic book of romance and like romance with a capital r and romance with a uh not capital r what the hell the lower lowercase are i think it's just very intuitive and that beauty that just like strikes you down is a very like intuitive feeling that you can just kind of get and it's just an experience of something that washes over you very much like poetry um it's just like the flow and feel of the words there's not really a need to go much deeper other than this extremely beautiful striking image like this one passage that sorrow which obsessed me during my youth was not caused by lack of amusement because i could have had it neither from lack of friends because i could have found them that sorrow was caused by an inward ailment which made me love solitude it killed in me the inclination for games and amusement it removed from my shoulders the wings of youth and made me like a pond of water between mountains which reflects in its calm surface the shadows of ghosts and the colors of clouds and trees but cannot find an outlet by which to pass singing to the sea yep i think this is also a super good place to start because we have a very minimal cast of characters we have this couple we have some family members we have some local religious figures but that's about it there are very few scenes in the short book as well it's really really nice because it's just short sweet the opposite of what i know how to do and it's just such a little book but it packs such a huge punch the speeches in here that jabron gives to selma who is the woman in the story are just so powerful so refreshing to see because i think you don't really get a lot of that in classics from this time period but her speeches just have stayed and stayed and stayed with me so yeah i would just highly recommend this for anyone but i think it is a really good place to start and it's a very like graspable story like you know immediately what's going on and the language it's a very simple story but the language just elevates it to a whole other level so i think japan is a really really great place to start and i can't recommend this enough so lots of broken wings broken heart more like this next book is one that you probably have absolutely heard of if you are at all interested in the classics and maybe because you might have heard so much about it you're worried that you won't love it so much you won't appreciate it you won't enjoy it um or maybe it's just like too much for you because everyone's like oh this is the greatest book of all time it's so good i know i felt a little bit about this because i just heard so much about this book especially when i got first into literature everyone was like you need to read this book it's just incredible and it just made me so intimidated by it but then when i read it last year as well for the first time it's now one of my favorite books of all time that's the picture of joy and gray by oscar wilde i don't know why i was intimidated by this book because oscar wilde's writing is just so accessible i'd recommend this book for a number of reasons the first one is that it's just so interesting you start this book and you're just your curiosity is immediately peaked you want to know what happens um and it's just like such a good story as well but within that again like with jabron wilde's writing is just like i've never experienced anything like it the characters in this book are just so fascinating and i just cannot get the story out of my mind i think also like the simple premise of this book this is about a man named dorian and he has his portrait painted by his friend basil he also gets wrapped up in a friendship kind of a very corruptive and toxic friendship with another man called harry and we follow these three men as their lives collide as dorian descends into this world of debauchery and madness and all the stuff in victorian society i think it gives you such a good look at decadence and the grotesque and aging and beauty standards and just everything like that it is just so interesting if you would all know the story of dorian gray i think it is so worth reading the book even if you kind of know a little bit of the premise if i also had to start reading classics for the first time i would probably gravitate towards those which are more kind of quotable and really inspire you and get you into really beautiful writing because i find for me that's a huge motivation like every single line in this book that every single person speaks is just like one that you kind of want to get like a tattoo of or that you want to write down and remember or like use yourself at a witty dinner party so it's just very like inspirational in that way as well because you're like how can people speak so beautifully it's also just so tragic again it's very compelling it's a very easily followed plot and premise and within that though there's just so much room for interpretation and i think kind of these not not that they're easier um topics and subject matter of literature but dealing with things like age and beauty and love and betrayal and tragedy like they're very essential things in literature and this work just deals with them so well and really kind of gives you a little bit of a basis of understanding of those things because dorian gray does play a lot with and is built upon other kind of traditions of age and beauty very much incorporates into itself stuff like romeo and juliet and shakespeare's tragedies and stuff like that there's a lot of mythological references as well and i think in oscar wilde's at least maybe not his place but i think in this one they are pretty much explained and you can kind of see where that's coming from even if you don't have a lot of exposure to a particular myth or to a particular tragedy or something like that like i think dorian is really good at highlighting kind of where it's getting the source material and stuff like that and seeing how it's like applied and used in here and especially through wild's language so that is dorian gray just loved it another classic author i'd love to recommend um is one who i haven't actually read anything from yet but i really really want to and i know i just know i'm going to to love him so so much kind of another tip i have if there is an author that you are intimidated by if there is someone that you don't know where to start with them i always like to start really small either with little bits of poetry quotes maybe there's non-fiction autobiography in this case it's short stories i think short stories are a really good place to start with classical authors because first of all they're short and if you don't like them you don't have to read them for very long you can also pick and choose which particular stories you'd like to read if you're interested in some more than others they also provide a really good playground for a lot to go on in a very short amount of space and pages and words and so you can really see like how brilliantly people can write by infusing so much metaphor and symbolism and beautiful language and writing and literary elements and da da da da in like a very short um little piece on top of that is just a nice place to dip your toes in and get a little bit of kind of a taste test for a sample of their work i always forget the word like sample because when i think of it i think of like you know when you go to a grocery store you go to costco there's like samples but for my whole life i've called them tryouts as if it were like an audition for like a soccer team or something and so i just never know the word sample i always used to go to the store when i was little and asked for like tryouts um instead of like a food sample anyway this is a this is a tangent anyway so these short stories i'm going to recommend we have the alienist and other stories of 19th century brazil by michelle jayasis so this is a brazilian author i've heard so much about so so much about i basically know like the plots and everything like that from this and of course his other book the posthumous memoirs which i have on my shelf and i'm really excited to get around to but like i was saying and i think for me i am going to start with his short stories the alienist is extremely famous i think michelle geosis as well is like a good place because a lot of his works i know and i've read a little bit of like the introduction to this his fiction explores ideas attitudes feelings motivations and behavior if you are kind of coming into classic literature for the first time i think a lot of it is kind of hard to kind of peel back the surface and see what's really going on because someone like michelle geosis will write these short stories about seemingly certain things and seemingly things that are very much one-sided but it takes so much and so much time to build up these kind of skills and i know like doing a lit degree just seeing kind of the way that i know i've progressed throughout my years of uni so far and seeing how much more now when i start something like there's so many more levels there for me to kind of like access and go down instead of just having the story in front of me um and just thinking of like the plots and the characters and how people are feeling um but then kind of when you just start reading more and more you see like what's really there what perhaps is like really being said what's going on behind the scenes of the book because of course that's what books are as much as they are their story and stuff like that there was a whole person behind these words writing something with huge intentions and huge visions of what the story was actually going to be about and so to be able to kind of get to that is sometimes really hard reading classic literature is very much like being a detective and taking on a detective job i think when you view it that way and you see kind of each book as a case or as a puzzle to figure out and stuff like that it becomes just so fun and so rewarding and just so ah just so much fun yeah i think when you start classics as well it's so good not to get kind of stuck in this one rut of maybe just reading all like english classics or all british classics or something like that i think it's so wonderful to be able to do kind of a worldwide tour and you just get so much more out of it that way you get to experience so much more you get to know so much more you get to know history and politics and really find out like where these ideas and where these books trace back to and how everything relates to one another so that's something else i would really recommend as well is just kind of going out of your way to find maybe new countries new authors new people new ideas and it's only ever going to be beneficial to really like kind of step outside of your comfort zone um translation is a whole other topic of course that i won't go into like i said that's kind of in the realm of the other topics around classic literature that maybe i'll make a whole a whole other video on but yes i would really recommend the shadow gias as well because i've just heard so many people love him and this one is on my tbr for hopefully fingers crossed next month so i'll be able to see more on this very soon alright next i'm going to recommend brave new world by aldous huxley this is actually on my syllabus for my introduction to english literature course in my first year that i took in uni my undergraduate english degree program we had to read brave new world i think this was the first proper novel i read for my english degree if you've never heard of brave new world it is set in a dystopian future where world controllers basically control everything all of society is regulated there's different people who do different jobs there's different technology as you can imagine um and society is just very very different and very much controlled however there are also these places outside of this society these reservations where the old ways still persist where people aren't governed and ruled and regulated and drugged and so we're following this man called bernard marx who is very much in the society he's very much controlled but he's finding that he's not happy at all with his life and so he starts to fall through the cracks of this dystopian society he makes a visit to one of these reservations and things just snowball from there this one's really great because it's a very intriguing enticing plot so much of our literature today especially young adult literature is so focused on the dystopian on these societies that have perfected themselves but have really destroyed themselves and so much political intrigue so much political drama and problems there's a lot about history in here as you can imagine our character's last name is marx and there's just so much going on this book also offered i think a really good look into stereotypes um and tropes especially character tropes i think if you're getting into classic literature and you want to get into that dystopian genre which holds so much importance and is such an interesting one to consider especially because there's so many books like this that have come out 1984 fahrenheit 451. yeah i think brave new world is a really good place to start it's super accessible super easy reads so smoothly the sentence structure is like very simple very blunt there's no words you're probably gonna have to look up and it's just really really easily read as well and it's a very quick and fast-paced read this next classic was published in the very early 19th century kind of on reading older classics i think it's actually really helpful to kind of work your way backwards so if you want to start with maybe some literary fiction that came out in 2020 or in the 2000s or something like that and slowly work your way back to like the 50s the 30s the 20s the 1900s and then maybe into 1890s 1880s 1820s i think it's just really actually helpful going backwards and kind of experiencing language in reverse because that way you don't just go from your present day knowledge and handful of words and language and the english language as it exists today as it's been formed this whole time and is ever evolving and changing and taking new things on and throwing old things off and you're just suddenly plunked down in like 1746 and you have no idea what anyone is saying because i've done that and it just did not work for me at all and so taking a step back and kind of going through history in reverse really really helps because you'll see how slowly your language that you know devolves but you're doing it gradually and you gradually get that vocabulary and that shift and those phrases and those ideologies and that tone that maybe might be missing it's like kind of backing out your car slowly out of the driveway trying not to like hit anything or like run anyone over and it's just like a very helpful thing i found so anyway regardless this next one is from the early 1800s no yep yep 1818 in fact and that's frankenstein by mary shelley now this book is so brilliant so interesting the first time i read it i really didn't like it i first read this in high school and at the time i just really didn't like it i didn't care too much i thought mary shelley just went on long-winded running sentences for no reason i thought there was too much description i thought it was too dense and i just really didn't appreciate it um at all and then i grew up a little bit and i realized how cool this book is and just how much i was into it and into the ideas and into the plot and how brilliant mary shelley is and all of the kind of science and the sci-fi and um religion that went into this book as well and now it's like a favorite classic for me when i first read it i think the tone in frankenstein was very much toned down and felt very watered down and almost monotone but i think going back and reading it now i see that maybe like i was just inserting that in there myself because i wasn't reading the sentences with a good flow in my mind and of course i've grown up my whole life with these ideas of like frankenstein and different retellings and movies and myths and what frankenstein has really become in our literary culture i suppose but now reading it i feel like i would just kind of get goosebumps because it's actually so good and so beautiful and i think frankenstein is maybe a book it is short but i think just taking your time with it and maybe reading it in small doses every day would really be helpful frankenstein is the story of victor frankenstein who creates a monster sewn together out of body parts different body parts very much talks about religion and creation and who should create things and how much responsibility you have for something you've made i just think mary shelley's writing is really good if you can kind of digest it to then kind of see maybe the different like flavors that older classics write themselves with like there's very much a lot of description there are lots of heavy passages describing maybe one certain emotion and then that passage will end and talk about the time and like nature and what's going on and so it's very much this romantic pairing of what you're feeling inside with what's going on outside pathetic fallacy i feel like frankenstein is just really good to read if you want to get into like jane austen or charles dickens thomas hardy the bronte sisters and stuff like that i think um maybe having a plot like the plot of frankenstein and like the events that go down in frankenstein which are very much gory and gruesome and exciting and gothic and just spooky and so intriguing and fascinating and like horrifying and you can't look away from paired with that writing that kind of introduces you into this world of early and mid 19th century writing and ideas and stuff like that i think is really helpful frankenstein's also really really interesting in the way that it's presented because it's very much a box narrative in which we have victor recounting to this man who's writing it down there's very much a lot about truth and ambiguity and how memory distorts things and how each retelling in each narrative messes things up into the point where we're not really sure what actually happened that's a theme that's very much present in money classics and just this whole way of recounting a book i think frankenstein is really good at showing you different ways that it can be done and how cleverly it can be applied and just really honestly just so mind-blowing mary shelley i love you next up we have giovanni's room by james baldwin also one of my favorite books of 2020. i just adored this this book is set in paris mostly and we follow a man called david who has just moved from america to paris and he's there waiting for a girl who is in a relationship to come back from spain and potentially get married however while he's waiting he forms a relationship with this bar man bar man bartender with this bartender named giovanni i think giovanni's room is a really really good classic to read because it focuses so much on emotion and how suffocating certain emotions can be i think giovanni's room is amazing if you want to see like the power that a book has and what effect it could potentially have on you how affected you could be by a book like giovanni's room because james baldwin is just so good um at suffocating you and smothering you and just covering you with like his words and his emotions um our protagonist david is very much dealing with so much guilt um and so much disgust and there's so much going on with his sexuality and his relationship with his family back home his relationship with giovanni it's just a very impressive study of real life and it's so good i think classics like giovanni's room just bring us closer to ourselves and not that books like frankenstein or brave new world or even dorian don't but they're very much fantastical and when you get a classic that kind of just stares you in the face it makes you examine yourself and you have all of the rules and patterns and regulations of the real world that you live in reflected at you from a book it can just like literally just change your life james baldwin also has stunning writing beautiful imagery um the main image that would probably be like really good to study and look at in giovanni's room is just giovanni's room is anyone surprised but just what james baldwin can do with like four walls that he's writing about they're not even a real four walls they're four walls on a page that he's writing about is so impressive and like there's so many scenes in giovanni's room as you can imagine um and each time there's just like different lighting there's stuff going on from the windows there's stuff going on with the dirt and the things in the room adding to the atmosphere and what he's really trying to say and obviously people's emotions change in the room the conversations that are had in this room the architecture of the room itself where the room is located on what floor of the building it's just like insane and in that and then this presentation of sexuality and relationships and history and paris and france we get like such a good insight into what one person can do with literally one image and it's just so impressive because it's just a room how much can you really say about four walls a very small four-walled enclosure like what can you really say you can write a whole book about it and it's just so good next i would like to recommend the wind and the willows by kenneth graham this is a children's book um and i think that's also a really really good place to start and i would love to start there honestly if i could redo it all over again i would maybe start with children's like classic children's life i think children's literature and middle grade stories and whatever else you'd like to call it it's just so valuable because um taking children's lit and really breaking it down it just provides you so simply with what classics do but it's such a grander scale and such more infinitely complex depth but with children's literature i think just being able to analyze that and sometimes children's literature is so incredibly rewarding and there's so much going on in it but often the author does try to present it in a more simple way um it's very much allegorical and there's very much a moral and like a theme and certain consequences from certain things that you can very much see and so like having those morals very much blatantly presented to you sometimes in a book and usually by the end of the children's book in question or classic you'll very much know like what has been told to you what has been said why it's been said in the way that it's been said how it's been presented and how it's led you to see how this moral can be extracted from the story classics don't give that to you classic literature as a whole i think doesn't really give that to you at least um i guess adult classic literature not for children that makes you work so much more but i think like knowing a very simple step towards that goal is just so important and so valuable and oftentimes like authors do write children's life for children but we all know that adults enjoy it just as much if not more so i think the wind in the willows is just so wonderful it's an extremely cozy little book following four animals we have a toad a badger a mole and what the hell is that what animal is that oh it's a rat a water rat a water rat this book follows these four animals as they go on strange adventures misadventures um and get into all sorts of trouble for example toad gets obsessed with motor cars he just wants to drive he gets completely run over by the industrial revolution pardon my pun some of our friends get lost in the woods and some of them have to go and break towed out of prison it's just like really good fun and kenneth graham's writing is just so cozy it'll make you feel like you're just at home like you want to get so cozy um the wind in the willows is just such a magical little story there's so much value in every single feeling that you get from a book every single feeling is valid and valuable and the magic and the just wonderful joy that the wind in the wills can provide i think is so valuable and just so much fun so that is that one next i would 100 recommend snow country by yasunori kawabata i recently did a whole review on this book so i'll leave that up above but this one is just so good for a number of purposes first of all cowelbots's writing is so blunt so precise so to the point you aren't going to get those run-on sentences you aren't going to get huge words that you don't know you aren't going to get people saying super pretentious things that like you have no idea what has just been said to you kawabata is just so transparent with you it's so nice it's so refreshing it feels like a cold bucket of water in the face and that's pretty much what snow country the book feels like as well because this is the tragic love story of two people shimamura and komako who meets at a hot isolated mountain spring in one of the snowiest regions on earth in japan shimomara is a very wealthy man from tokyo and komako is a geisha who is working at this hot mountain spring so this chronicles their doomed romance snow country is an extremely extremely extremely extremely visual novel there is so much play on colors and different colors and the contrast that colors can provide especially the color white with the color red i think this is like such a good place to start because cowbot is like very simple blunt economical writing describing these scenes like of color it's just like a very easily entered metaphor and a very easily entered contrast that the reader can take because what is being described to you and what is being told to you is just so simple it's so natural it's so easy you don't have to work for it he will just say there is a red berry outside the window there is a green moth on the door the snow was falling darkly and stuff like that and it's just like very easily receivable language it's terse it's tight it's short but then in that the challenge that you can kind of receive and get from that is that metaphor like yes you have what is being said to you in the scene it's there you'll have to work out what is being said to you but now your job is to work out what's underneath that what's being said under it if he's describing a red ribbon and come echo's hair against the white snow he's not just describing a red ribbon in comeco's hair against the white snow so like snow country is just such an opportunity to grab on to symbolism and color and the play of color and contrast and potentially the haiku and what's really going on what the color red can stand in for what the color white can stand in for what the snow can stand in for what a moth can stand in for so much of classic literature is just substituting things for other things and then figuring out what has been substituted for what and i think snow country is just such a good place and such a good puzzle to try and work out because i think it's very very simple but so devastatingly so and there's so much you can actually like go in deeper and it just tells you like how much detail and how much meaning we humans can put into something as seemingly simple as a snowflake or as seemingly simple as a red berry on a branch and how things aren't ever only things they're always so much more and they always mean so much more and it's just like snow country is oh my gosh it's a damn masterpiece guys another very snowy book is ethan from by edith wharton i'm recommending this one because this one i actually read in my last year of high school for my english class and i wrote a paper on ethan from combined with far from the madding crowd by thomas hardy because it was like a compare and contrast essay which don't make any sense but that's fine yes so snow snow country come on ethan frome is set in very snowy new england and we're following a group of extremely unhappy people our main character is ethan and he is struggling he is struggling me too me too ethan he's working on his farm but it's very much it's not going well this man might not know how to farm he struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult suspicious and hypochondriatic wife xena the trouble really starts when xena's cousin maddie comes and stays at their house and ethan starts to develop a feeling towards her yeah so this book is great it's also super short it's so intense like things happen in a very short amount of time and as you can imagine once again the snow plays a really big role in here this book's really good at defining and outlining people's relationships to each other and how much gets misunderstood between people what life really looks like yeah i think ethan from is just really really good at relationships if you want to explore that more in classic literature i think ethan from is just a really good place to start it's not the happiest place to start for sure because this is another tragedy but i think it's just really well done this book also deals with the american dream in a very blunt realistic lens um edith wharton wrote this a little bit kind of in contrast and um kind of right writing back at a lot of the writers who were depicting new england as like this very glorious place they were seeing it through these very much rose-colored spectacles and edith wharton wrote ethan from a little bit as like a reaction to this even from also has a lot of other really small things going on in it for example um it's a very like little secretive book that hides a lot and i think because it's so short it might be like a good place to try and get a little bit um of those secrets like out of it there's a lot in ethan from like i said there's a lot about the american dream there's racism there's sexism there are a lot of hidden ideologies in here and i think a lot of it like it does come from edith warden herself but i think this is a book too in classic literature where you can see a lot of the author's own belief seeping in and a lot of what they want and what they think and i think ethan from is the easiest place to get that out of like what the authors thinking what they want what their goal is with the story what their emotions are what their political views are but i think in a story like this when maybe it tries to hide those views that edith wharton might have i think it's all the more important to kind of get them out and pick them out and examine them and see and i think in a short book like this it might be easier at least to start doing i know when i read this in my last year of high school i definitely did not see everything and so to come back to it now i would definitely see so much more and so i'm very much looking to read this a second time around all right and this last classic i'm gonna recommend is just so interesting i believe this is required reading in europe like i think it's a classic on maybe it's a high school syllabus i'm not really too sure but i've seen a few people talk about it and that is perfume by patrick suskind the story of a murderer this one is so interesting this is one i have not yet read but oh my goodness in the slums of 18th century paris a baby is born clings to life with an iron will growing into a dark and sinister young man who although he has no scent of his own possesses an incomparable sense of smell so because he has such a good sense of smell but he himself like has no smell about him he apprentices himself to a perfume shop a perfumer so he wants to create the ultimate perfume and this leads him to murder not only is this super interesting super compelling i've heard it's a really quick fast creepy crazy read um i think it's also really helpful and sometimes really cool to start with classics that might be published a bit later in the future this one is very much a modern classic i believe published in 19. yeah so first published in 1985 but i think it's just so helpful when maybe some more modern classics or even like classics talk about um certain time zones and certain time zones certain times in history and certain historical events that precede them so they take maybe a bit more muddled and a bit more foggy landscape and difficult language times in history if you were to go and read like an actual book from the 1700s and then they plopped that down in their modern book from 1985 for example and it immediately becomes so much more accessible um and so like then you have that to be able to go back and maybe read other books from the 1700s and you know along that route so i think that's what this book is really valuable for as well on top of just being super interesting there's so much you can do with that and it focuses on very much like smell which is so interesting all right we finally got through all 10 classics i hope this was helpful if you like more of these videos in the future please let me know if you do read any of these books as well i'd love to know if like they were a good place for you to start or if you have if you guys have any recommendations for like anyone who wants to get into classics or any classics at all please feel free to leave them down below i always love when there's like an explosion of book recommendations going on in the comments because it makes me so happy um so thank you so much for watching and yeah i hope you're having a wonderful day wherever you may be i'll see you very soon on my next video ciao but did i have to talk for an hour do i have to talk for an hour i always do this i always geez do this oh i always say i'm gonna keep it short i'm gonna keep it sweet i'm gonna talk you know maybe make like a 20 minute video and then time just goes by and we've been here for an hour [Music] i'm very hungry

Channel: * e m m i e *

Views: 273,164

Rating: 4.9773469 out of 5

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Id: RqRLC4vnJEc

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021