Anna Karenina is also on the first on my winter classic list! I haven't read Jude The Obscure yet. But I love Hardy. I love the introduction to Jude The Obscure because he talks about how he never wrote another book because of the backlash. 'Jude began it's life being burned by a bishop in his disappointment at not being able to burn me' (paraphrase).

Thanks. I'll be reading most of these in the coming year. Really like your channel.

My winter classics recommendation are The Wind in the Willows, The Picture of Dorian Gray, anything Dickens, Middlemarch, and North and South. In general I agree that Russian lit is great during the winter. Also victorians.

I hope to get to Jude The Obscure and to some of Gogol next year.I am delighted to have recently read Middlemarch.💝

Excellent excellent list. The Brothers Karamazov is the best book I've ever read-there is something so special about its exploration of human nature. I'm planning to read Crime & Punishment this winter. I tried to read it earlier this year but was expecting something more similar to The Brothers Karamazov and it was an entirely different tone.

I haven't read A Winter's Tale yet and know little about it but you are making me want to. 'I have visited his grave. So it's not all bad blood' 😆 I have read Civil Disobedience and I have been meaning to read Walden.

I purchased a bunch of classics last year.. haven’t gotten around to them yet 😂

I'm a huge admirer of Hardy - it's the combination of naturalism and something very distinctively British in his writing for me. In that sense I've always seen a lot of parallels in his novels to Emile Zola's 'Rougon-Macquart' cycle, which gives a very naturalist picture of French society. In contrast to Hardy, Zola does not focus on countryside life only, though in 'La Fortune des Rougon' the story starts off in the fictional Provence provincial town 'Plassans'. But in later Novels of the 'Rougon-Macquart' cycle, the story shifts more towards politics, corruption and Paris - parallels to today's world are astonishing and sort of frigthening. Is Zola on your bookshelf, too?

I just started "MiddleMarch" this week.... I'm barely 100 pages in, and very curious to see where Dorathea goes in the story. I just couldn't get in to Tess Of The D'Ubervilles, maybe I'll try it again some time in the new year, but for now it's a nope for me.

PLEASE not the levin slander only two minutes in