1. I adore that you have your wife read the questions!!! 2. YES to reading across genres I could not be more excited about that!! So looking forward to your recommendations 3. Is the Hobbit the gate way to a love of fantasy and lit fic? 🤩

Im going to watch again without sound because Im very interested in this but for some reason the...pitch?? Idk of part of the sound made me feel a lil panicked lol. But I see the intention and I tried to endure. Maybe you can do again with something slightly less high?? I hate to make you feel negative about your art but I also hope this comment helps you in the algo soup and I look forward to reading the captions 😅 your book collection has me wishing I could wander in it.

Habitual Blood more like Habitual Based. Love the channel, dude; keep up the great work.

I feel called out here. Now I gotta play drums on my channel!

Is Goodreads off the table for you? I need to follow you and I'm too old to figure out Discord. 😂

Difficult is a word often used by those too afraid to simply say... 'boring' for fear of being seen by the hipsters as philistines. Sometimes it's alright to acknowledge performative dogshit as performative dogshit.

*2 hour tier list* yer a real youtuber harry

I'm very interested in this video, but can't listen to it. The crackling background noise is too much for me. Could you please add subtitles? (The automatic ones mess up and it takes away from the experience).

okayyy whiplash 😌

Only halfway through, but I'm loving this video. My favorite thing to do when I go to a new person's house is peruse their book collection. I love just looking through shelves at the huge assortment of possibilities implied by titles and bindings. Lot's of cool stuff I've never heard of in the recommendations. I can see myself picking up at least a few of these books for sure.

This is so beautiful, are you writing a book? Ill read it! Love your writing

I love Memory, Sorrow, Thorn! I was really intimidated when I got to the third book, but I enjoyed every bit of it. It flies by with how interesting it is.

For years I tried and failed with classics and the like. Thought I was missing something. Now I just regard everyone who like that stuff as wanky show-offs. I bought The Odyssey and Iliad, Works and Days, Shakespeare and many more and all were awful, painful. I can only think about how many people were put off reading for life by idiot teachers thinking that thinks like this should be your gateway into reading. You don't have to read them and should't. I now windmill evey book that doesn't get me in fifty pages. Sometimes less.

I'll be reserving a copy of The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuko in case you haven't heard of it.

Harrier du bois is that you?

I’ve just stumbled upon this video and really enjoyed it. Love the editing approach and profound topic :)

Yes you should embrace challenge and complexity and step out into the unknown but NOT with the view to not caring if you understand it or not. The key to understanding things beyond your current level of competency is to go slow and re-address meaning, re-read in the case of texts. It works when reading difficult things and it works when learning a second or next language.

I recently read a novel, in English, that references and depicts many of Shakespeare's plays. The only play I have read is Romeo and Juliet many years ago in Spanish, didn't enjoy it and whatever little I know of other plays is what's around in pop culture. I enjoyed this novel so much, and while I'm sure the references and castings of the plays within the context of the novel add a lot of nuance, I didn't get them, and for the most part I don't mind. I recognize the old English I didn't understand and not knowing the plays might have tainted my experience, but it's okay. Having an enormous grasp of all kinds, genres, authors of literature must be nice, but you don't need in order to enjoy a book.

From Wikipedia: Ash: A Secret History is a fantasy novel by British author Mary Gentle, published in 2000. Set in the 15th century, the novel blends elements of fantasy, alternative history, and secret history. In the United States, it was published in four paperback volumes: A Secret History (in 1999), Carthage Ascendant, Wild Machines, and Lost Burgundy (all in 2000).

Wikipedia says: long list of authors have influenced and inspired Williams's work: Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Barbara Tuchman, Philip K. Dick, Ruth Rendell, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Patrick O'Brian, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), A. A. Milne, J. J. Norwich, Stephen Jay Gould, John Updike, Thomas Berger, Raymond Chandler, William Shakespeare, and James Thurber. Williams has also had an influence on other authors in his genre. His Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series was one of the works that inspired George R. R. Martin to write A Song of Ice and Fire. "I read Tad and was impressed by him, but the imitators that followed-well, fantasy got a bad rep for being very formulaic and ritual. And I read The Dragonbone Chair and said, 'My god, they can do something with this form,' and it's Tad doing it. It's one of my favorite fantasy series." Martin incorporated a nod to Williams in A Game of Thrones with "House Willum": The only members of the house mentioned are Lord Willum and his two sons, Josua and Elyas, a reference to the royal brothers in The Dragonbone Chair. In "Tad Williams: The American Tolkien?" Ash Silverlock observes that "echoes of Williams's work" can be seen in the works of Robin Hobb, Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan. Blake Charlton, Christopher Paolini, and Patrick Rothfuss have also indicated they've been inspired by Williams.

George in a large part got his ideas for A Song of Ice and Fire from Tad Williams Memory Sorrow and Thorn (politics included). You might want to try The Dragonbone Chair. (Oops, I posted this before I saw the next book).

Ill help you get to 500! (I'm number 494). I ordered The Iron Dragon's Daughter and The Unremembered, based on your description. Kurtz books are excellent!

What’s the music used underneath the chirping sound?

I have not read Iron Dragon's Daughter yet but it's been on my radar for ages. Swanwick is considered part of the new weird movement to some degree and also wrote a biography of Hope Mirrlees, the author of Lud-In-The-Mist. He clearly knows his fantasy so I expect a lot from it. I've rere the first Osten Ard series last year and made individual videos on them, I also read the bridge novel The Heart Of What Was Lost which was different and possibly even better and I will read the Last King Of Osten Ard series in autumn when the final novel comes out. The first subseries is very much methadon for Lord of the Rings addicts and perfect for autumn reading.

Also, nice name lol

Nice list, man. Love Tad Williams and feel his sequel series is even better than the first. It's interesting to see Williams and Martin bounce off of each other with their influence. Some others I think you should keep an eye out for: -The Dark Star trilogy by Marlon James -The Prince of Nothing and especially The Aspect Emperor series by R. Scott Bakker -The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb -The Court of Broken Knives and it's sequels by Anna Smith Spark (so underread) -The Fire Sacraments by Robert VS Redick (criminally underread) -The Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio (Sci fantasy with a bit of a conservative bent - - not that I agree necessarily, just an interesting bit of thematics on religion) -Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Sci fantasy) -Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman -The Dandelion Dynasty by Ken Liu Love the channel and would like to talk more about 'literary' fantasy. Wish it was more prevalent and considered

*decides to read Finnegan's wake

I really wanted to watch this video. But the audio is hurting my ears.

Vaxxed??

you deserve a million subscribers!!!

Thank you. Clarice is my favorite brazilian writer. <3

The chirping sounds are pretty annoying. The rest of the videos is great 👍

One year I read Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow and The Recognitions. Rather than feeling completely disheartened by the density and (often) the lack of a concise plot, I embraced all of it and realized that, maybe, the writer wanted to show the reader how our train of thought and the dialogue noise (typical for postmodernism literature) often interrupts our attempts at constructing a linear narrative (both in life and in literature. In short: I accepted and connected with the “vibe instead of story” concept and found value in constructing my own corresponding vibe while reading, realizing that it really isn’t about the plot from the very beginning. I couldn’t tell anyone very much about the plot in Gravity’s Rainbow, but I vividly remember being shocked by certain lascivious depictions, being amazed at Pynchon’s spot on definitions of war and enamoured by his poetry in the 2nd half of the books. After all, post WW2 and during the cold war, people began to be all in their heads and I think that challenging literature is challenging mostly because it mirrors it back to us.

Excelente. Sin saberlo, fue así como me enamoré de los libros de Borges, tan llenos de cultura, filosofía y mitología, siendo muy niño y con tan poco conocimiento de esas materias. Has abierto una enorme biblioteca para la cual pensaba que no estaba preparado.

Thank you for this 🖤

I prefer to think of them as uncomfortable Books. Cause when I read them I usually end feeling deep anxiety and discomfort. Because a lot of the time I likely don't understand what I am reading a lot of the time. So now I enjoy them for what they are whatever that may be.

Well reading a book is a journey ain't it? Some journeys are more challenging than others, but that same challenge can make the experience better in the long run. I recall struggling through Les Misérables as a young teen because I liked the musical. I cannot say I retained all that Victor Hugo intended the reader to come away with. It was still a very memorable experience for me though.

I really like this video but just want to raise my hand and say the background grinding noise took away from it

I loved the video. Thank you for putting so much effort into making it.

What a beautiful video, first time I see your channel, your usage of that ambient music is I think what caused me to find this video so mesmerizing, about that what is the name of the piece of music you used as background throughout the video? I feel it very moving

This was an incredibly wonderful video! You did an amazing job editing it👏... hope to see more videos soon 🥳

Man, your channel is a goldmine of conscientious content. I'm so happy I found it. Also, House of Leaves. That's a book that goes nuts with form. Dracula too, for that matter(just to provide both a classic and contemporary example).

Thank you. There's seldom I come across a video essay about literature that resonate with me as much as this did. As a person who greately enjoys "getting lost" and being disoriented, to the point one of my favorite things is journeying alone to unfamiliar places where the locals speak languages I don't know and have oblique cultural practices I don't recognize. Life is a puzzle, and trying to figure it out is the greatest fun. Whether you succeed or not, that's just an afterthought.

Subtlety is not dead, even though it feels like it is these days.

I didn’t understand Agua Viva AT ALL. I tried to a couple years ago when i read it but it mostly flew over my head. Oddly enough i couldn’t help but like it and feel compelled by the book. But i will give it another shot regardless perhaps a few years from now. Thanks for the video. It was an interesting perspective.

Is that Harry from the hit game Disco Elysium?

I've never thought about this aspect!

The background chirping noise is too high pitched and grates against my ears, making this video unwatchable for me.

Interesting! I use Libib to catalogue my books, but you can use it for games, movies etc. And you can easily manually add books that don’t show up & easily add the covers of the editions you might have! Think you can import from other apps with a csv file if you wanted to switch…

you made me understand more about my not understanding moments and feel less stupid, thanks keep going. “He opened his eyes only to see that he was in a mid 20th century theatre, the night sky with all its stars was the only roof the theater had, which made him feel naked and defenseless. there was no one else there, so he thought whatever will be played on the stage will be for him, or he is the actual stage. The play started but his breathing stopped, eyes wide open like they try to escape from the prison of his skull, he saw a man. He could see him hoping from leg to leg, enjoying himself, physique like a thin man, but the curvature of his spine, the dark hairy hands and foot could tell you that this build is a mixture of man and monkey, a white T-shirt that tucked into a black tracksuit pants would make you think of a generic employee or an accountant, but the head was a fish that played the flute which he was dancing so warmly to it. In his left hand he held a doll, except the head looked like of a human baby that stitched to the body of the doll, Then in his chest through the T-shirt came out a snake, long and upside down with two very very small humanoid hands, it smiled a venomous smile. He tried to stand up and run, but he was shocked of his doll like body that did not follow his command, he could feel stitches on his neck, imprisoning his mind in this body.”