i'm currently reading my first classic(The Picture of Dorian Gray) and i have fallen in love with reading again. thank you for the recs

This is a good list for beginners, it is interesting to see where people begin! For whatever reason I skipped all the rings and began with The Brothers Karamazov- which still to this day is my favorite book.

Some great books there. Best wishes with your reading choices in 2024. I hope you get some great reads.

you're so gorgeous! also the recommendations are amazing

20,000 leagues is a masterpiece. Absolutely loved it

Excellent. A hidden gem would be n.galilea's books. Modern classic LEAD ME where the light is ours .... on blurb !~

You’re so lovely ❤ you kind remembering me of Rory Gilmore I’ll make sure to read

Hey Victoria 😍 Stumbled upon this video through KZfaq recommendations ✨ and absolutely loved the way you presented the classics ❤️ Looking forward to more of such videos 🥂😇

I love Austen and have read almost all of her works (except for Mansfield Park & Sanditon), but I did not love Northanger Abbey sadly haha. I adore Emma and Sense & Sensibility though!

I've read every one of those books. All great

Nice to meet you Victoria. Five good recommendations there, I've read all but Crime and Punishment it is on my list for next year. Love 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I am a big fan of 19th Century adventure and they are usually good places for people to start their classics journey.

Might start reading again jesus

Hiiii new subsciber here :)) you are so pretty.

If you love feminism undertones. Inspiring and perfect for fall ~ N.Galilea check that author out. Jane Austen is always a good call! ⭐🤩🌃

Don Quixote Victoria, Don Quixote. The Nobel Prize got it right when they voted it the greatest book of all time. :-)

MAKING IT OUT THE 6IX WITH THIS ONE 🗣️💯🔥‼️🔛🔝

Ivanoe is a cool classic. Much better than Jules Vernes whose style is a bit cold.

" I would like to tell you one of the most beautiful parables that has been written down the centuries. Parables have almost disappeared from the world because those beautiful people - Jesus, Buddha, who created many parables - have disappeared. A parable is not an ordinary story, a parable is a device - a device to say something which cannot ordinarily be said, a device to hint at something which can be hinted at only very indirectly. This parable is written in this age; a very rare man, Franz Kafka, has written it. He was really a rare man. He struggled hard not to write because, he said, what he wanted to write could not be written. So he struggled hard but he could not control the temptation to write, so he wrote. And he wrote in one of his diaries,”I am writing because it is difficult not to write, and knowing well that it is difficult also to write. Seeing no way out of it, I am writing.” And when he died, he left a will in the name of one of his friends to say, “Please burn everything that I have written - my diaries, my stories, my parables, my sketches, my notes. And burn them without reading them. Because this is the only way that I can get rid of that constant anxiety that I have been trying to say something which cannot be said. And I could not resist so I have written. Now this is the only way. I have written it because I could not control myself. I had to write knowing well that it could not be written, so now, without reading it, destroy, burn everything utterly. Nothing should be left.” But the friend could not do it. And it is good that he did not. This is one of Kafka’s parables. Listen to it, meditate over it. “I gave order for my horse to be brought from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call. I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking,’Where are you riding to, Master?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘only away from here. Away from here, always away from here. Only by doing so can I reach my destination.’ ‘And so you know your destination?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Did not I say so? Away from here - that’s my destination.’ ‘You have no provisions with you, ‘ he said. ‘I need none,’ I said. ‘The journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything along the way. No provisions can save me because the journey is so long, I cannot carry enough provisions for it. No provisions can save me because it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.'” Now this is the parable. “The destination,” he says, “is away from here. Away from here is my destination.” That’s how the whole world is moving: away from here, away from now. You don’t know where you are going but one thing is certain - you are going away from here, away from now. The parable says it is an immense journey. It is really endless because you can never reach away from here. How can you reach “away from here”? Wherever you will reach, it will be here. And again you will be trying to go away from here. There is no way to reach this destination. If away from here is the destiny then there is no way to reach it. And we are all escaping away from here. Watch. Don’t allow this parable to become your life. Ordinarily everybody is doing this - knowingly, unknowingly. Start moving into the here, start moving into the now. And then there is tremendous happiness - so much so that it starts overflowing from you. Not only you delight in it, it starts overflowing, it starts becoming your climate, it becomes like a cloud around you. So whoever comes close to you becomes full of it. Even others will start partaking of it, participating in it. And the more you have, the more you will be drowning into the herenow. Then a moment comes when you don’t have any space left for yourself - only happiness exists; you disappear. But of two things - the past and the future - be alert."

" Just a single man, Fyodor Dostoevsky, is enough to defeat all the creative novelists of the world. If one has to decide on 10 great novels in all the languages of the world, one will have to choose at least 3 novels of Dostoevsky in those 10. Dostoevsky’s insight into human beings and their problems is greater than your so-called psychoanalysts, and there are moments where he reaches the heights of great mystics. His book BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is so great in its insights that no BIBLE or KORAN or GITA comes close. In another masterpiece of Dostoevsky, THE IDIOT, the main character is called ‘idiot’ by the people because they can’t understand his simplicity, his humbleness, his purity, his trust, his love. You can cheat him, you can deceive him, and he will still trust you. He is really one of the most beautiful characters ever created by any novelist. The idiot is a sage. The novel could just as well have been called THE SAGE. Dostoevsky’s idiot is not an idiot; he is one of the sanest men amongst an insane humanity. If you can become the idiot of Fyodor Dostoevsky, it is perfectly beautiful. It is better than being cunning priest or politician. Humbleness has such a blessing. Simplicity has such benediction."

Kafka and Dovstoevsky are gret but not begginer friendly

" When you go in, you may find the Kafkan cockroach. There is a parable of Kafka: One morning he wakes up and he finds that he is a cockroach Must be dreaming, must have awakened in a dream. And not only that: the cockroach is upside-down - just legs, and he can see those legs moving in the air, and he cannot put himself right, and he is on his back. And you can think... the misery of the man, the agony, and the nausea. And he tries hard, but there seems to be no way to get up. A big cockroach, filling the whole bed. The modern man is even more afraid: Who knows what you are going to stumble upon inside you self? Nightmares, monsters... who knows what is there?Why open Pandora's box? Keep it tightly closed and sit upon it. That's what everybody is doing. And, in a way, the fear IS right - but only in a way. In the beginning you will find cockroaches and rhinoceroses and reptiles and all kinds of horrible things you will find - because THESE are the things that you have been repressing in yourself, these are the things that you have not allowed. Anger you have re-pressed, jealousy you have repressed, possessiveness you have repressed, hatred you have repressed. Violence, murderousness, you have repressed. ALL these things are there! This is the cockroach inside you. Violence has become one leg, and possessiveness has become another leg, and jealousy has become another leg.... When you go in, you will have to face these. Of course, this is not the whole story. If you CAN FACE the cockroach, if you can go deeper and deeper without any fear and watching all that is happening, and remembering that "I am just a watcher, a witness to it all. I cannot be the cockroach because I can see.... " Whatsoever you can see you are not. Make it a key, a constant remembrance: whatsoever you see, you are not. Anger you see? then you are not anger. Hunger you see? then you are not hunger. Sexuality you see? then you are not sexuality. You are the one who witnesses all this. Remember the witness, and slowly slowly all cockroaches disappear, and all rhinoceroses disappear - and all that is ugly disappears. Witnessing is such a phenomenon that it dissolves all that is ugly. Slowly slowly, only the witness is left. But that witness is not going to be you: that witness is God. That witness cannot be confined as I - it is pure amness. Just the other day, I had told you that there were two inscriptions engraved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know Thyself" and "Nothing in Excess." These admonitions were not unrelated. Man was advised to know himself, yet in his knowing he was to avoid extremes. What are the extremes? Two are the extremes: the hell and the heaven, the ugly cockroaches and the beautiful butterflies. You have to remain a witness to both. You are neither the cockroach nor the butterfly with psychedelic colors - you are neither. Neither this nor that - NETI NETI. You are just the watcher, the mirror that reflects the cockroach, that reflects the butterfly."