Love hear you talking about books, is there going to be a part 3 👀
@brenboothjones
29 күн бұрын
There is indeed ❤️
@ReadingIDEAS.-uz9xk
28 күн бұрын
Plenty to keep you out of mischief there. Happy reading.
@brenboothjones
28 күн бұрын
Hah! Indeed. Literature has saved me from myself many times over.
@jennymcevoy8961
28 күн бұрын
Love your videos
@brenboothjones
28 күн бұрын
Ah thank you so much!
@lilyshares4
27 күн бұрын
Congratulations on the 1000subs🥳🥳 Such a fast growth. I'm happy to have been here at the beginning 🌷
@brenboothjones
27 күн бұрын
Thank you so much Lily! Happy to have you along for the journey:)
@klauslispector
29 күн бұрын
Congrats on 1000 subs!
@brenboothjones
29 күн бұрын
Thank you so much!
@1russodog
28 күн бұрын
Love the erudite reviews. Hope you go beyond just penguin edition
@brenboothjones
28 күн бұрын
Thank you so much! Yes, planning to discuss all the books in my collection in due course.
@ToReadersItMayConcern
28 күн бұрын
Perusing books with you feels like one's thoughts echoing back, so considered and calm, non-intrusive as if pre-integrated with one's own sense of literary drifting. Hmm, Flann O'Brien sounds fascinating the way you describe it. Then your reflection back on A Clockwork Orange-"I do struggle to enjoy books that have unsympathetic characters"-makes me wonder why I feel precisely the opposite: discomfort and disgust are fascinating feelings for me, made all the more curious when spurred by words on a page. I'm enchanted by that strength of language. Do we think we have read what we read as children? There's a quote from the playwright Alan Bennett: "The books one remembers best are the books one has never read." When I return to books from youth I find myself reading something wholly new, and the feel of what I felt before remains distinct, as if something no longer in those pages. I've had to confront this feeling many times as I teach students books from my past. It's odd how much like strangers we can be to ourselves.
@brenboothjones
28 күн бұрын
Your comments are always treasure-laden. I love the way you describe the doubleness of rereading cherished childhood books. I’m sometimes almost scared to revisit truly beloved childhood texts-like I don’t want to taint that halcyon glow or something, which probably sounds ridiculous. Louise Glück’s oft quoted line comes to mind: “We glimpse the world once, in childhood; the rest is memory” (might be paraphrasing slightly). Maybe literature augments that remembered glimpse, channels it through the cold flame of metaphor and the contours of syntax to provide that ineffable sublimity we crave. As to unsympathetic characters. I’m trying to think of a truly malevolent character that I like. Truly misanthropic….okay I mean Satan in Paradise Lost is pretty likeable. “Me miserable!” he howls and one feels some of that chilling desolation. Who are some of your monstrous favourites? Thank you for stirring such interesting discussion.
@ToReadersItMayConcern
28 күн бұрын
@@brenboothjones In the category of monstrous faves I think now of the narrator of Butterfly Stories by Vollmann or of Humbert Humbert from Lolita by Nabokov: they both disgust me and yet I am riveted by the pathetic horror of their addictions. They are molded by fixation, motivated by their own clever self-justifications, and thus cast and constrained by inertia-all too human and all too common. I try not to separate myself from monsters. I see them as metaphors for who I could be if not so lucky. I am lucky to be where I am and who I am now, and yet there is so much of both I could not have chosen: no choice of parents or disposition or pressures or desires. I want what I want prior to thought, and to think a thought otherwise is to want to think otherwise; here I loop in on myself and to the luck of being myself. I am lucky my desires fit ethically with others. I appreciate text that toys with the psychological horror of being otherwise. Always, always I feel deep sympathy for monsters (and I've known monsters in life and seen them grow, rationally, into horrors, including toward me, and I have felt that rational tug in response to external stimulus, toward self-preservation and thus other-alienation; I've seen myself, my young self, with bitterness and violence at the margins of my self-definition; it is so close to who I could have been and yet I escaped by sheer momentum beyond me). That has never escaped me, that feeling of heartache and sympathy for the unlucky, including for their victims-one can feel sympathy and pain for both.
@brenboothjones
27 күн бұрын
Well said, my friend! Planning a Nabokov video soon. Would love to hear more of your thoughts about him.
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