Transcription
I think once and for all, this is the death knell for anyone that says that, you know, big classic books are a slog to get through cuz you will have whiplash from this thing, seriously. It is magnificently addictive. Should put, you know, a warning label. Will miss meetings. Will not show up to social events. Will cancel birthday parties. That's how addictive these books are.
I think there's a pervading myth in our culture that big books are, you know, dry and academic and hard to get through, that they're a slog, that they are a trudge, and that's just a complete myth. So, in today's video, we are going to talk about six of the most addictive books that I have in my library, and a couple of them are pretty mammoth in their proportions, but these are some of the most gripping, addictive, uh unputdownable books in my collection. Some of them are more entertainment, while others can really teach us something how to deal with the psychic reverberations of misfortune and calamity, and yet they're also, while being dark in places, they're also hopeful and, like I said, addictive, enthralling, exhilarating.
Let me know some of the most addictive books in your um or in your personal canon, in your, you know, journey through your reading life that you've encountered. I would love to hear from you. Let's get a conversation going about highly addictive works of literature. I think it's the healthiest kind of addiction you can have to be addicted to a book.
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First up, I've got Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I've got this Wordsworth edition. Ah, it's a little bit twee and quaint, this this cover, but this is a phenomenal work of literature, and I first read this book when I was 13 years old, and I was utterly spellbound by it, bewitched. And I reread it for the first time earlier this year or maybe at the tail end of last year. No, I think it was this year. I reread Jane Eyre this year, but around January, February, something like that. Uh and it was just magnificent. We follow the eponymous heroine of the story, Jane Eyre. She is a pretty abject figure. She is an orphan. She is considered superfluous, the dregs of society. It's a horrible predicament for her. Uh and then of course she winds up meeting Rochester and we have this famous, immortalized really, love entanglement and all of the ramifications, the implications of that. But it's so deftly wrought by Charlotte Bronte, in my opinion hands down the most gifted of the Bronte sisters, although we can have a discussion about that. Do let me know if you disagree. I think what makes this book so enlivening and so moorish is its beautiful meld of sort of high romantic elements, but also with a strange a strange realism. It's a kind of psychological realism, I is I think how I would describe it. Um but always with these kind of pagan, witchy dimensions, kind of shadowy and foreboding at the edges and sometimes even through the heart of the the narrative and the focalization of the story. I don't want to give away plot details, although I'm sure most of you have read it. Just um an an immensely engrossing book that at the same time will kind of leave you forever altered. You you you'll never see the world quite the same having read Jane Eyre. Have you read it? And do you agree with my appraisal of it or not? Let me know.
Now, the next book we have is something really unexpected in terms of the kind of standard fare of this channel. Um >> [snorts] >> this is a a novel called Black. Um it's book one in the Circle series by Ted Dekker. American writer. This is Christian fiction. It's not the kind of thing that I normally go for, but my mom gave this book to me when I was about Not this exact copy, as you can see, this is a really fresh copy, but she gave me Black by Ted Dekker when I was about 14. And I absolutely inhaled it. You cannot stop reading this thing once you start. It is just so absorbing. This novel is about a protagonist named Thomas Hunter, and we're kind of thrown into the story in medias res. Thomas Hunter is this kind of slick advertising executive with a um with a cushy job. Haven't reread it since I was 14, so I don't know all of the finer details anymore, but he is fleeing, you know, some kind of assailant and ends up on a building on a rooftop, and the only way to get away from there is to jump down into a dumpster full of garbage bags. And [snorts] he jumps down into the trash and sort of blacks out, and then he opens his eyes and he's in a completely different alternate reality or different dimension. And then he discovers that every time he goes to sleep or goes unconscious in one world, he then wakes up in the other. So, he goes back to his normal life when he goes to sleep in the alternate reality and vice versa. And it's it's a it's a really fun uh set up. It's got a Yeah, just a real zing and whip to it. And I I think I just like didn't do anything else for like the whole weekend when my mom gave me this book. I just read it absolute in absolute frenzy cover to cover. And then, like I said it's a series of three. So if you're looking for something, you know, not in the classics line, but just an absolute rollick, an absolute um roller coaster ride, then see if you can get your hands on the circle series by Ted Dekker, black, um red, white, and green. So there's actually four in the series.
And then back to our regular programming um with the classics again. I've got Alexandre Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo, this absolute gargantuan book. Um this one translated by David Coward. He's certainly no coward in in taking on this behemoth. It's um 1,100 pages long in this edition. Do not be deterred by the absolute voluminousness of this beast of a novel. It is spectacular. There is something almost narcotic about the excitement of this book. It's this famous story of comeuppance, vengeance. We've got a young sailor Edmond Dantès, uh who is falsely accused of treason. He gets severely punished, unjustly punished, and broods a long time in a dank dark cellar on his revenge. There are just an endless stream of implausible plot twists, but don't, you know, just just let go of the of the sense of veracity or verisimilitude to real life. This is a uh a book of it's highly colored. It's it's high romance. Um it's melodramatic. It's, you know, Byronic. He's a really Byronic figure, very apt cover there. It's got a lavish, fantastical force field to it, a magnetism that is like I said, that is just really unputdownable and proves, I think, once and for all, this is the death knell for anyone that says that, you know, big classic books are a slog to get through cuz you will have whiplash from this thing, seriously. It is magnificently addictive.
Next, I've got Philip Roth, American Pastoral. This is the massively divisive figure of Philip Roth. Do you like him or do you loathe him? I don't think anyone can make a very strong claim that he's not an astonishingly masterful writer. But, do let me know if you if you feel like making that claim in the comments, do let me know. But, um this is I think Roth's longest novel. I've read quite a quite a bit of his oeuvre and uh haven't come across a longer novel than American Pastoral. But, it's his most ambitious novel. It's one of the Zuckerman novels. For those of you that don't know, he has this alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who is a writer, Jewish-American writer. I think in the neighborhood of nine Zuckerman books. This is one of the Zuckerman books. This narrative is not about Zuckerman himself. It's about an old schoolmate of his nicknamed the Swede, who was this um a kind of epitome of the American dream, but through the the Jewish lineage. Um he represented to second and third-generation American Jews this star of the football team. He was blond and chiseled. He was uh he married Miss New Jersey, took over his father's um prosperous glove-making business. He bought a a large tract of land and moved out into the countryside outside of Newark. He seems to have it all made. He's like the manifest destiny of of the American dream. Um but of [snorts] course, the premise is that beneath all of this immaculate polish, there is a human being uh struggling to to make sense of his life and struggling with the the massive expectations that other people put on him thinking, "Oh, you've got a perfect life. Therefore, why should I be sympathetic or generous towards you?" So, he actually is in this kind of golden cage of or or high up on a pedestal. Philip Roth through the eyes and through the pen of Zuckerman then imagines uh this terrible catastrophe that befalls the Swede. Uh Roth is so good in poise and in balance. He can draw in, you know, various elements. Edith Wharton delineated kinds of novels, novels of situation, novels of character, and novels of manners. American Pastoral is a book that encompasses all of those. Of course, it's a character study of the psychology of the Swede and his life and his family and the calamities that befall him, but it's also very much based around a particular utterly abominable event that occurs, and it is also about American society. It's a it's a novel of manners. So, it's the all of those things wrapped into one, but it's it's very very gripping, and you just find yourself flying through it wanting to find out what happens to him. Um I Yeah, I don't want to kind of spoil it or or give too much away at this stage. I have a lot more thoughts about this novel, and I actually it it's not my favorite Philip Roth novel. He it's a very very ambitious project, the premise and the way that he unfolds the novel, and I think he almost sets his goals too too audaciously. For me, he doesn't quite pull it off. For me, it's got a little tinge of the implausible to it, a tinge of melodrama. For that reason, it just falls short of Roth's finest work, although I think probably a lot of uh Rothians would would disagree with me about that. But, it fits in this category because it makes you think. It makes you it floors you. It awes you. But, and it might even irritate you at at certain points in his critique of of American culture. Um he makes some good points, but I think he's a little irascible. He leans a little too heavily into the vitriol at times. but nonetheless, it is an absolutely addictive read. So, yeah. What do you think of this one? Have you read it?
Woo, it's an absolute heat wave here. I'm sweating. I don't know if you can see the literal perspiration running down my face. It's It's very hot here. I hope that you guys are keeping cool wherever you are.
All right, then I've got three novels of New York by Edith Wharton. We just mentioned her in connection with her definition of various kinds of novels. Um we've talked about we've talked about this volume a few times on the channel, so I'm just going to mention it quite briefly here. Three novels of New York in this Penguin Classics deluxe edition, but I want to talk in particular about uh the best of these, in my opinion, which is The House of Mirth. This is the story of a heroine named Lily Bart. She is the belle of the ball. She's very popular. She is adored by everyone. But, she doesn't have uh an independent income. She doesn't have a fortune. She And she's kind of overwhelmed by choice of romantic partners. She's also got a dazzling wit and intelligence about her that is so alluring, but also contributes to her downfall. Um it's You can't stop reading The House of Mirth, and you just see this inexorable downward spiral unfolding. The the formal architecture of the book and of the plot is so elegant and symmetrical. You see impending disaster. You see it coming. And it that makes it all the more white-knuckling to read. It's like seeing a crash unfolding. You You know, you want to um you you want to shut your eyes to it, but you but you can't. Edith Wharton's books are salty and sweet at the same time. There are moments of hilarity and some of the darkest human depths are plumbed, you know, all in the same book. And I don't want to give away what direction or what sort of finality this book lands on in terms of Lily Bart, but it is so engrossing. It is so electric in its pace and crackling atmosphere and sensuous, sumptuous extravagance of language and of setting and of human emotions. Really, really recommend that if you want to start with Edith Wharton that you start with The House of Mirth. There's a lot more we can say about Edith Wharton. There's a lot more we have said about Edith Wharton and other books of hers, but let's leave it there for now. Absolutely addictive novel, really. Um The House of Mirth.
And then to end off, um there is one here that's a bit of an outlier. It's It's not a big weighty tome at by any stretch of the imagination and it's really quirky, otherworldly, and this is um Haruki Murakami's Super Frog Saves Tokyo, translated by Jay Rubin, the perennial Murakami translator. So, this is just a slim thing and it's actually a short story from uh a book of short stories of Murakamis. I think it's either After Dark or After the Quake, one of those two. Um and but they've they've turned this into this really lavish full color affair. I mean, it's it's they've given it the full treatment. Um and it's addictive because it's just such a sort of explosion of color and quirkiness and it's surreal, it's it's wry, it's and hallucinogenic all in one. And if you're just looking for something that will probably take you half an hour to an hour to read, but will kind of ping in your subconscious long afterwards, then I recommend this addictive little snack of a book, Super Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami.
So, those were my six extremely addictive should put, you know, a warning label will miss meetings, will um you know, not show up to social events, will cancel birthday parties. That's how addictive these books are and that those were the six that I've chosen from my library. It was a hard It was hard to narrow it down. There There was a lot more Uh there were a lot of contenders for this list and I would love to hear what suggestions you guys throw out for addictive books. The most healthy kind of addiction you can have or up there with the most health healthy addictions.
If you would like to follow more of my content, check out my Instagram Bren Booth Jones. Yeah, let's leave it there. Thanks for watching. Hope you're all keeping cool or having a good weekend. Um speak to you soon.