Damn, I'm reading Brothers K right now (and Anna K too as it goes) and wish I'd known there were spoilers going into this. I mean I've read them both before, but over 30 years ago and I've forgotten the plost for the most part. Booo to Shapiro for the spoilers. I don't know what the next books are after BK as I clicked off there in case there were more spoilers.
Thank you Cams for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
You can try more reaction vids, you have a very positive energy and you have good literature knowledge! Also if Ben sticked to criticking arts ( books/movies/songs etc. ) instead of dumb culture war stuff he would be more sympathetic .
I actually was so impressed by Ben’s book list and agree with this! He has a good literary sensibility. Will do more reaction videos, glad you enjoyed :)
Thank you Rogers for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
Such a fun and entertaining video chocked full of literary insight and knowledge, Liza! You have such great energy in it and exude charisma and a boundless passion for literature! I've never been a Ben Shapiro fan, but this was an excellent video by him. All his recommendations are pretty great. I also had never heard of Every Man Dies Alone, hopefully Ben's video will give it more exposure in the broader public. My favorite part of the video was your excitement over Ben picking East of Eden for his list. To be honest, I actually was not aware for a long time that East of Eden was a book. I first became acquainted with the story through the film version of the book with legend of the silver screen James Dean. On a side note, James left us too soon and his untimely death in a car accident was a terrible tragedy. Returning to the book, it truly is an all-time classic, and John Steinbeck was a genius.
Your definitely right about the Russian people's mastery of the arts. Just to name a FEW of the great Russian writers: Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fydor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexsandr Solzheinitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Joseph Brodsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Lermontov. Great Russian artists like Ivan Aivazovsky, Leon Bakst, Karl Bryullov, Pavel Fedotov, Konstantin Flavitsky, and Konstantin Korovin created works that will last a lifetime. Composers like Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and Modest Mussorgsky made music that audiences will treasure a millennium from now.
Ben's list is great, but I would add to it some recommendations of my own. I'm not expert on literature by any means, but I do know from when I was in school that there is vast array of classic literature that everyone ought to be reading. Here would be the books I would add: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Lost Paradise by John Milton, Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer, Beowulf by Unknown, The Promise by Chaim Potok, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Night by Elie Wiesel, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Odyssey and The Iliad by Homer, 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
Please ignore Katrina’s rude comment left on the video. You were not intending an in-depth video about the books, you were just trying to make a fun video and introduce viewers to great literature. Doing an in-depth dive of each these would’ve made for a VERY long video a couple hours at least. It is also in my view, very insulting to reduce Liza to being an “influencer.” Liza is so much more than that. She is a creator, poet, writer, thinker, and patron of the arts who works extremely, extremely hard.
On another note, I wanted to say Liza, I noticed that you seemed a bit upset/frustrated about the political compass test video's audio cutting out yesterday which is understandable. Please don't give it another thought! It was an annoying technical glitch that happens all the time and it wasn't your fault. It was still a great video, and this one had no audio issues at all!
Thank you Noah for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
I haven't even looked at Ben's list because I'm from Shangri-La, so know very little about American politics and figures like Ben.
However, I've been following your posts and notes and I've learned a lot from it. It has helped me as an unpublished, serious writer, still learning after many years.
Your video and comments on this post, with yet more insights is worth it a thousand times. That would exclude the "flames", no comment on RE that.
Thank you for sharing your own path as a writer, including your "wars" with the literary agents. It's actually quite weird, even funny, at times!
Love never fails 🌾
PS: I'm a former addict, that's where that life motto comes from....
My Minimalist Western Canon List: Homer (Iliad & Odyssey), Virgil's Aeneid, Plato (at least Republic), The Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare (at least Hamlet, Macbeth, R & J, Midsummer, Lear, and the Sonnets), Goethe's Faust (and maybe Werther), Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov, Proust's In Search of Lost Time (at least Swann's Way), and Lord of the Rings. There are many more that are worth reading, but reading this list gives you a foundation to understand all those other books and talk to just about anyone.
Thank you Sam for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
"Influencers" like Liza and Ben are presenting books for the uninitiated or the very young or those for whom hand-holding for even the most basic reading habits is a must. There is no depth in this video in terms of analysis or insight. Platitudes don't enrich a review - they just make us aware that life experience coupled with reading experience and intellectual discernment are really really important. This review drives home the sharp pain of skimming the surface of great literature when there is a magnificent unexplored ocean beneath.
Okay, you try to condense 6 800+ page books into a 20 minute video. I did not claim to put forth a seminar on the depths of every single page. This was just for fun. The more you complain, the less I will be inclined to make a video like this in the future, and the more those who enjoyed this video will suffer.
👏👏👏 You tell ‘em Liza! People on the internet have no manners. They feel the need to be as nasty and condescending as possible and think it’s okay to do it because their behind the safety of a faceless icon. This was like you said, FOR FUN. I think Liza even said that in this post. But Katrina didn’t bother to read it. You don’t comment under a person’s Substack post and in a very snooty and standoffish tone proceed to lecture them about what YOU think THEY ought to be doing in THEIR video!
Damn, I'm reading Brothers K right now (and Anna K too as it goes) and wish I'd known there were spoilers going into this. I mean I've read them both before, but over 30 years ago and I've forgotten the plost for the most part. Booo to Shapiro for the spoilers. I don't know what the next books are after BK as I clicked off there in case there were more spoilers.
Thank you Cams for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
You can try more reaction vids, you have a very positive energy and you have good literature knowledge! Also if Ben sticked to criticking arts ( books/movies/songs etc. ) instead of dumb culture war stuff he would be more sympathetic .
I actually was so impressed by Ben’s book list and agree with this! He has a good literary sensibility. Will do more reaction videos, glad you enjoyed :)
Well, I would like to put a word in for “War and Peace,” which is the greatest novel ever written—because it has everything in it.
I read War and Peace because of the troop movements and military tactics, and I read Moby Dick for the whaling parts.
If anyone felt the desire to read the following I think they’d get something out of it:
1) Austerlitz, Sebald
2) The Habit of Being, O’Connor
3) The Raven, Marquis James
Thank you Rogers for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
Such a fun and entertaining video chocked full of literary insight and knowledge, Liza! You have such great energy in it and exude charisma and a boundless passion for literature! I've never been a Ben Shapiro fan, but this was an excellent video by him. All his recommendations are pretty great. I also had never heard of Every Man Dies Alone, hopefully Ben's video will give it more exposure in the broader public. My favorite part of the video was your excitement over Ben picking East of Eden for his list. To be honest, I actually was not aware for a long time that East of Eden was a book. I first became acquainted with the story through the film version of the book with legend of the silver screen James Dean. On a side note, James left us too soon and his untimely death in a car accident was a terrible tragedy. Returning to the book, it truly is an all-time classic, and John Steinbeck was a genius.
Your definitely right about the Russian people's mastery of the arts. Just to name a FEW of the great Russian writers: Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fydor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexsandr Solzheinitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Joseph Brodsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Lermontov. Great Russian artists like Ivan Aivazovsky, Leon Bakst, Karl Bryullov, Pavel Fedotov, Konstantin Flavitsky, and Konstantin Korovin created works that will last a lifetime. Composers like Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and Modest Mussorgsky made music that audiences will treasure a millennium from now.
Ben's list is great, but I would add to it some recommendations of my own. I'm not expert on literature by any means, but I do know from when I was in school that there is vast array of classic literature that everyone ought to be reading. Here would be the books I would add: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Lost Paradise by John Milton, Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer, Beowulf by Unknown, The Promise by Chaim Potok, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Night by Elie Wiesel, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Odyssey and The Iliad by Homer, 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
Please ignore Katrina’s rude comment left on the video. You were not intending an in-depth video about the books, you were just trying to make a fun video and introduce viewers to great literature. Doing an in-depth dive of each these would’ve made for a VERY long video a couple hours at least. It is also in my view, very insulting to reduce Liza to being an “influencer.” Liza is so much more than that. She is a creator, poet, writer, thinker, and patron of the arts who works extremely, extremely hard.
On another note, I wanted to say Liza, I noticed that you seemed a bit upset/frustrated about the political compass test video's audio cutting out yesterday which is understandable. Please don't give it another thought! It was an annoying technical glitch that happens all the time and it wasn't your fault. It was still a great video, and this one had no audio issues at all!
Thank you Noah for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
I haven't even looked at Ben's list because I'm from Shangri-La, so know very little about American politics and figures like Ben.
However, I've been following your posts and notes and I've learned a lot from it. It has helped me as an unpublished, serious writer, still learning after many years.
Your video and comments on this post, with yet more insights is worth it a thousand times. That would exclude the "flames", no comment on RE that.
Thank you for sharing your own path as a writer, including your "wars" with the literary agents. It's actually quite weird, even funny, at times!
Love never fails 🌾
PS: I'm a former addict, that's where that life motto comes from....
My Minimalist Western Canon List: Homer (Iliad & Odyssey), Virgil's Aeneid, Plato (at least Republic), The Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare (at least Hamlet, Macbeth, R & J, Midsummer, Lear, and the Sonnets), Goethe's Faust (and maybe Werther), Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov, Proust's In Search of Lost Time (at least Swann's Way), and Lord of the Rings. There are many more that are worth reading, but reading this list gives you a foundation to understand all those other books and talk to just about anyone.
Thank you Sam for pitching in on this. English is not my native language so not sure if "pitching" is appropriate, but I tried! Your comment gave this writer some further though, to learn from. I appreciate that...
"Influencers" like Liza and Ben are presenting books for the uninitiated or the very young or those for whom hand-holding for even the most basic reading habits is a must. There is no depth in this video in terms of analysis or insight. Platitudes don't enrich a review - they just make us aware that life experience coupled with reading experience and intellectual discernment are really really important. This review drives home the sharp pain of skimming the surface of great literature when there is a magnificent unexplored ocean beneath.
Okay, you try to condense 6 800+ page books into a 20 minute video. I did not claim to put forth a seminar on the depths of every single page. This was just for fun. The more you complain, the less I will be inclined to make a video like this in the future, and the more those who enjoyed this video will suffer.
👏👏👏 You tell ‘em Liza! People on the internet have no manners. They feel the need to be as nasty and condescending as possible and think it’s okay to do it because their behind the safety of a faceless icon. This was like you said, FOR FUN. I think Liza even said that in this post. But Katrina didn’t bother to read it. You don’t comment under a person’s Substack post and in a very snooty and standoffish tone proceed to lecture them about what YOU think THEY ought to be doing in THEIR video!