books to read before you die 🥀📖 my reading bucket list 

I agree! Jane Austen is great and not as intimidating as some other class lit authors. Pride and Prejudice is an easy start

Agree. Frankenstein OTOH least fir me not so much.

Sense and sensibility.

As a Dutch person who has read multiple classics i personally found Jane Austen really hard and difficult to read lol

I found listening to an audiobook is more enjoyable.

Thank you dude. I needed this.

Thank you so much for this!

Thank you ! Hope u have a lovely day.

THANK YOU!!

@@chelli6555 hope you have a lovely day as well 😄

THANK YOU! This should be how books like that are taught. Maybe then teens/young adults (people in general really) wouldn't have such twisted ideas of romance

I'm going to be taking Wuthering Heights in my second semester for this year in AP Lit. I doubt my teacher is going to do the same because he's already romanticized it months before :)

I love the Hobbit and the fellowship. I start to get bored once we get to the two towers, but I love the characters in the books.

Thank you. Am tired of people acting like they weren't toxic. The book is good but that doesn't mean the relationship are good too

I really don’t think the author meant to make it romantic though ? Like it’s very clear reading it that Catherine and Heathcliff are bad people in a bad relationship causing problems to everyone and that their nonsense almost ruins the lives of everyone around them for multiple generations? Like I didn’t not get a vibe I was supposed to find Heathcliff being an absolute pile of trash to be sweet and endearing 😅

Loved that book I definitely cried

That is great book. Really sad.

I love that book so much!

OMG I just made comment like this lol Here are some reasons why I think Leonie would like it: - super character focused - you get to follow a generational story that ties together (but the focus is definitely on Ava) - explores themes of life, love, obsession and wasted youth - cozy and mystical vibes! (also kind of autumnal tbh)

omfg yes I loved that one

I've been meaning to read Emma since I rewatched Clueless...

si hard

@@ayesha36 Unpopular opinion but Clueless is better. Like Josh isn’t 16 years older than Cher. That helps. I do suggest Emma. the 2020 movie because it’s amazing and I love it.

But also … the step sibling thing 🫠

Agreed! Plus they're all for free on youtube Edit: also on Spotify :)

Great suggestion. Thanks!

ohhh thanks!!

Can you lend me some motivation to finish 100 years of solitude? I'm STRUGGLING. I'm in the middle of reading it and I feel like it's not at all what I expected. I guess I went into it thinking since this book is super popular, it would be easily likeable but it isn't. It's not the type of book I would think would have as much mass appeal as it does.

@@abbeyroche2983 I appreciate the comment, not a lot of people are willing to ask something like this, giving up or DNFing the book instead, so thank you for asking. (and apologies for the long replies! Im just really passionate about this book) I think the important things to understand are the following: 1st - *Let’s get something obvious out of the way: Yes, it is a hard book to read.* This is not because of its prose, which I believe to be elegant and charming, but because it doesn’t follow a familiar narrative structure, or a stable cast of characters to guide you through the story. Multiple time periods can be mixed within the same sentence even, as the opener _“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”_ That line is insane, it describes the future action of someone in the present, who will remember something that happened in the distant past. That’s an example of how *the use of time and memory* may entice you (as it did me) or may frustrate you, as it’s done to others. It will take time for the structure and prose to click with you, or hell, it may never happen, (and that’s okay, but keep in mind this seems to be the problem for 90% of people who DNF this one). 2nd - *The characters are, if im being honest, garbage people.* They are not good. They commit all sorts of disgusting acts, hell, Coronel Aureliano Buendia wants to marry a literal nine-year-old, and that’s the tip of the iceberg, they can be wretched people. There’s a lot of incest, there’s abuse, and though it’s not exactly explicit, it’s not easy to go through some chapters. Back to the topic of human memory and time, the generations of men and women with the same names, and in some cases the same personality traits and similar storylines, can be terribly confusing. Most editions do come with a small family tree on the first page, this helps, but it can still feel jarring. You’re reading a story about seven generations of a family that seems entrapped in a loop of terrible decisions, mistakes, and tragedies. If you don’t pace yourself it can be repetitive, and boring.

3rd - *This book is not 100% fiction. Technically. It is a sort of political fable that represents the history of Latin America as a whole, and Colombia in particular. The work is best enjoyed by those with, say, leftist or progressive sensitivities:* As a South American man I can vouch for this. People like myself, leftists who have studied the political and social history of our continent, can see that the work represents an exaggerated version of our collective history, from our relation to the US and its neo-colonialist policies, to how we relate to ourselves and our cycles of instability, revolutions and military dictatorships. South America, though I love it with all my heart, is a bit of a wild place, where reality sometimes is stranger than fiction; A way to represent this is to have magical events take place and be seen as normal, which relates to superstition and mysticism, while technological development will be seen as miraculous, or a sort of foreign witchcraft. That’s the true core of magical realism, a way to explain our insane reality to the world. If you happen to be American or European, you may not be familiar with our history, and a *huge* part of the novel may very well fly over your head. If you’re conservative, or any flavor of right-wing, engaging with this material may be a big challenge.

4th - *Garcia Marquez was heavily critizised in his time for basing almost everything in his books in some aspect of his real life:* Macondo is exactly how he remembers his home town of Aracataca, Coronel Aureliano Buendia is modeled after his grandfather and Ursula Iguarin even shares the real last name of his actual grandmother, and so. Garbriel used his work as a way to reflect and analize his own life. The other consequence of this is that the books he wrote, this one being the clearest example, are mainly descriptive, with very very few lines of dialogue. For some readers, having characters that they just hear about, but never actually hear, is, again, incredibly jarring.

Oh yes, I loved it!

I read it in high school and am rereading it now at age 47!

I second that

Actually yeah! I feel like it would suit Leonie's taste more, rather than P&P. The heronie in that one is just so much more interesting as well lol

Yeees it’s so good and funny

I’m about to read “into the war” by him.

I added it to my tbr list, thank you.

@@whateverbabe if you want to, let me know if you liked it when you're done with it :)

@@husseinsheekh6374 he was such an amazing writer! Hope you like it

Personally, I think that the English is not actually very complicated at all! I struggled enormously with Tolkien's writing style not so much in the structure of his sentences or his word choice but in his *relentless* determination to let the reader know where the characters are on the map in EVERY. SINGLE. PARAGRAPH. It was a Chekov's gun type thing for me, where I kept expecting all this detailed geography to become a plot point, and it never did. Also absolutely seconding the song breaks. So many song breaks. The book has fantastic moments and the overall story is a work of art, but prepare for the actual reading of it to be very exhausting, at least that's wht it felt like for me.

But Tom Bombadill was a gift for humanity, despite his singing. I wanna read a whole book about him. He was so above the whole The World Is Ending stuff. Same goes for the vegetarian bear man in the Hobbit that somehow just didn't make it into tlotr. I would read 1500 pages about him.

Lord of the Rings is also one of the only book series where I think watching the movies first was a good way to go. It made the books a lot easier to read because I didn't have to stretch my brain to picture what Tolkien was talking about.

I felt the exact opposite about Jane Eyre

@@victor_734 me too. i actually dnfed it :(

Yes! Totally my favorite Austen. And it’s so short and digestible. That second-chance romance is the best.

I need to become a vampire in order to finish my physical tbr list!!😂

@@barbara9315 well i still have a long tbr but last Black Friday I bought around 50 books and I just now finished them. Unless there is a big sale such as Black Friday I only allow myself to own 5 unread books at a time and I read what I’m in the mood for so I open 2-4 books at once as long as their different genres. Books are meant to be read ya know so I don’t buy if I think it will sit on my shelf.

nice! i'm excited to start it!

ohh good tip thanks!

"Left hand of darkness" is good, but I don't think I'd recommend it as a starting place because it has kind of a weird structure that I don't know would work for a lot of people. "The Birthday of the World" is a short story collection that really shows off LeGuin's ability to build a realistic-feeling world a short page count, as well as the way she likes to explore different cultural setups and their impacts. It includes a story that is a follow-up to LHD, where she tries to get across some things about this non-gendered society that didn't come across clearly to audiences in the original.

that sounds so wonderful!

I don't know why but I find that book so intimidating. Maybe because it looks so long.. but I keep reading amazing reviews and I know it's a beloved classic, yet I keep putting off reading it because I'm so so scared it will be super slow.

@@user-qu8zs7vs1x it is intimidating and tbh i only read it because I had to read it for school, but I'm glad they made me do it!

so good!