Response Video: Top 10 Modern Classics You MUST Read!

I am so ready for this onslaught 🍿

“You can’t write a better book than you have in you” that is really interesting to me and something id lobe to hear you expand on. Glad you made another response to Kieran! Was especially curious what you would say about Captain America. Also loved your list. A couple i need to get to still. I have already filmed my modern list and our only overlap was Kafka. Thanks for a great video

My Top 10 Books from the 20th Century You MUST Read (that I actually enjoy), no particular order: 1) Hundred Years of Solitude 2) The Snow Leopard 3) East of Eden 4) Dune 5) Nostromo (1904, I checked) 6) The Gulag Archipelago 7) A Bend in the River 8) Book of the New Sun ( they're all short books so I'm counting as 1) 9) Satanic Verses 10) The Hero with a Thousand Faces I love comics and may make a Top 10 just for them!

15:08 OMG YES 😂 The comic book industry rocking 2 top 10 MUST reads. I never thought I would see the day

The contemporary list is going to be carnage and I CAN'T WAIT 😄

It was great to see so many personal favorites reflected on your list (not just Tolkien, but Christie and Grahame)! I was baffled by his choice of Captain America as well; if he wanted to emphasize Marvel, Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four would have been better choices, but if you're just picking a comic book character, the one to pick is the one on your list. I like the film Metropolis more than you do, but putting the novelization into a top 10 of anything is absurd.

I will be patiently biding my time till the ‘Top 10 Nonfiction Classics you MUST read’ video Steve!

A great list! And so much I've not read! I do love Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I really need to reread it!

I had my fingers crossed that you would include House of Mirth! Great choice. And I find your choice of Wind in the Willows surprising but really fascinating. Still, I wouldn’t include many of your other choices on my own list…

Even non readers have heard of Agatha Christie. She is who I go to for a cozy fun read.

Surely coming soon somewhere, sometime, "Top 10 Twenty-first Century books you MUST colour in"....

I agree with The Wind in The Willows being quite sad. It's one of my favourites, it was one of the first novels i ever chose to read.

Love your list, but I do also love MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN. Additionally, I've read most Agatha Christie books many times over. She is someone whose stories I can return to again and again with no loss of appreciation. I agree her influence is wide and deep, and she deserves more scholarly consideration. Thank you for pointing this out. I work in a bookstore, and even today (many decades after her prime writing years) we have whole shelves dedicated to her titles.

Magic Mountain? You really are old school..... Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman Children of Gebelaawi - Naguib Mahfouz I Served the King of England - Bohumil Hrabal Red Sorghum - Mo Yan The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek My Antonia - Willa Cather A Bend of the River - VS Naipaul Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Doblin The Death of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes Runners Up: Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole Graveyard of the Angels - Reynaldo Arenas The Leopard - Giuseppe de Lampedusa The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro Got a lot to get to still...

Do you think these first couple of decades of the new century (now) also have a similar quality to them that you mention about the last one? That people now also FEEL some kind of "beast" moving, some groundbreaking wheels turning? I don't know if this feeling is caused by the crises of the pandemic, wars, political polarities, or if it's something even bigger. But I definitely feel it now, so much so I had to pause this video and point it out immediately.

Re Thea von Harbou. I haven't watched Metropolis in its entirety (but the excerpts I've seen are brilliant) and I didn't know she wrote a novelization of the screenplay, but I have seen a later work of hers: M, and I read the screenplay. M was about a child molester/ murderer on the loose. So far as I know M was not novelized. The screenplay was simply amazing. Without question it is a masterpiece. It uncoils like a beautiful, poisonous snake. Von Harbou may have been a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer but that does not detract from her talent as a writer.

Now I want to read Akira!

Some interesting views on this subject from both Kieran and Uncle Steve. There probably needs to be a separate discussion and/or bunfight on whether genre fiction can be a classic, or a must read. So parking all the genre stuff the list below is in chronological order. The pedants amongst you will point out that the Conrad was serialised in 1899 and only published in 1902… Heart of Darkness Ulysses Great Gatsby The Sound And The Fury The Naked And The Dead Lolita Herzog The Magus One Hundred Years Of Solitude Money

If you find Lang's 'Metropolis' to be overrated, and can tolerate anime, I highly recommend Rintaro's 'Metropolis' from 2001. It is exceptional, and exceptionally underrated

I can see in cold blood being of relative importance as it did help a bit with a new genre, of course I dont everything.