Mark Klavan ranks 23 books and films, dismissing Beloved as "overrated" due to Morrison’s identity while praising Crime and Punishment (S) for its life-altering moral influence. The Count of Monte Cristo (S) tops entertainment, 1984 (A) critiques authoritarianism but lacks readability, and The Godfather (S) earns acclaim despite its unrealistic good vs. evil framing. Classics like Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace secure S-tier status, while Moby Dick and Lolita (both B) face sharp critiques for digressions or disturbing themes. His rankings reveal a bias toward Western literary tradition, questioning modern values through foundational works that shape his worldview. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm having a great time, but you are absolutely miserable in the clavenless eternity.
So I've rated some books and movies.
These are the best books and movies chosen by the internet.
I've rated them on tiers of my own.
Take a listen.
All right, now usually on these bonus videos, we do something to torture me.
I don't know why that is.
Maybe it's me.
Maybe it's something I said.
Maybe it's a strain of masochism.
I don't know about.
But today, we're going to do something different.
The internet has gathered 23 works of literature that the internet thinks are the best pieces of literature ever.
Now, I'm different than the internet because I've read a lot of literature.
So they're going to show me these books, these 23 books, and I will rank them.
They are ranked on tier rankings of S, which stands for spectacular or superb or I have no idea.
But then it's A, B, C, D, F. There's no E.
This is so confusing.
We need some artificial intelligence in here.
Or I can rank it I didn't read, which maybe I will if they're, you know, politically correct or anything like that.
All right, let's start with Pride and Prejudice.
Author Jane Austen, definitely S, one of the great novels ever written by one of the greatest novelists, the only female novelist in the top 10 of novelists.
She actually virtually invented the novel, taking a kind of entertainment for ladies and turning it into art.
And Pride and Prejudice is one of her greatest works.
So S. 1984, author George Orwell.
I would make that an A. Is that the second one?
I would say that's an A.
It is one of the greatest political novels ever written.
It is incredibly insightful about the Soviet Union.
That's what it's about.
It is about leftism.
Those are the villains.
But it is such a good novel, a great novel, that even so some of the tropes like Big Brother can be applied to the right and the left equally.
And it is one of the great understandings of the authoritarian mind.
I rank it below S because it's not a great novel in that you just can't put it down, but it is a wonderful novel and incredibly insightful.
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, an S.
That is one of the classic novels.
That's a novel, kind of the first novel almost.
It's written before there were novels, and it is just absolutely amazing.
It's not an easy read necessarily, but it is amazing.
The latest is a new translation of it that is great, and it creates the modern world like Shakespeare does.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, I would give that an A. One of the, these are good books.
I'm surprised the internet did so well.
One of the greatest of American novels, very small, a novella, but a wonderful, wonderful romance, a wonderful look at the upper classes and sort of something about the inherent class system of America, which we don't like to talk about, and just beautifully, beautifully written.
Ticler Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
I would put this a B.
I think it is a really wonderful novel.
It's a great piece of Americana.
You know, everything gets overgraded if you give it anything less than a top grade.
People think you're dissing it.
I'm not.
It's a really good novel.
It's a good read.
I don't think it's up there with the great classics like Pride and Prejudice and 1984, but it's definitely really good and it's strong and everybody who reads it loves it and I think it's lovable.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, again, an S, one of the absolute classic novels of all time.
Any list of great novels that is limited to say 10 is going to have crime and punishment on it.
It is the most important novel in my life.
It is the novel that turned me against postmodern philosophy, moral relativism, materialism.
You cannot read it and not believe that there is both evil and good.
It is the book that ultimately, over 30 years, led me to Christianity.
I love it.
It's absolutely terrific.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
I will put this at an A.
It's my daughter's favorite novel, so that almost gives it an S.
It is a great novel.
I'm saying an A is still a great, great novel.
I'm just putting only the very, very best in top S.
I don't think it's a brilliantly written novel.
It's written in a very gothic style.
It has some kind of quirks to it, but it's the essential Gothic novel.
It is the essential Gothic novel, and it's a wonderful, wonderful story and as romantic and loving as it possibly be.
It's essentially Beauty and the Beast turned into a novel.
It's great.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
Some people are Jane Eyre people.
Some people are Wuthering Heights people.
I am a Jane Eyre person, but Wuthering Heights is a great and complex novel.
So what did I give Jane Eyre?
I gave it an A. I'll give this an A as well.
Anna Karenida by Leo Tolstoy.
S.
It is, again, one of the top 10 novels of all time.
You know, people don't read Tolstoy because his books are so long.
I think Anna Karenina is 800, 900 pages.
Warren Peace is closer to 1,200 pages.
Both are incredibly readable, like reading comic books.
They're so entertaining.
I don't even know which one to pick as being more entertaining.
Warren Peace has some philosophy in it that slows it down, but Anna Karenina, great from beginning to end.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
You can read all about it in my book, Truth and Beauty.
It is a wonderful book.
I would give it a B, put it up there with the really top-notch novels.
It's not one of the greatest of great novels, but it is a top-notch novel, an essential piece of reading about what it means to create life without women and the hostility toward women we see today, which I think Mary Shelley saw coming.
Hello, Lita by Vladimir Nubokov, a book about a pedophile.
Basically, it really is.
And it's a beautifully, beautifully written novel.
I will give that also a B.
It's close to an A novel.
It's a great novel, but there is something about it that's off-putting even to me.
But it is terrific and the language is beautiful.
And I think it's a really, really, really good novel.
This one's a tough one for me.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
People love Moby Dick.
And I don't want to dis, but I will.
I give it a B.
It is a great 130-page novel written over 500 pages.
I just, the thing that everybody feels makes it great is the maunderene.
Herman Melville was deeply affected by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a trans, what do they call it, Transcendentalist.
And he puts all this Transcendental philosophy into the story of hunting the whale.
The whale stuff is great.
The adventure stuff is great.
Some of the philosophizing is great.
But I've read it three times, trying to get the goodness of it, why everybody loves it so much.
I'm giving it a B anyway.
I just don't think it's as good as people say it is.
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, I will give this an A. I'm just about to reread Lord of the Rings.
I found it wordy.
I like the movies better.
I enjoyed the movies better, but I'm going to reread it and see if maybe I missed something.
It's just so much, but you got to give it cred.
It started a genre.
Every trope in the genre of fantasy comes from Tolkien.
It is an insanely brilliant piece of social engineering.
The things he created are great.
I think it could be cut in half, but it's still, people love it.
It's people's favorite novels.
So what did I say?
A?
We'll put it on A. Warren Peace, Leo Tolstoy, also an S.
He gets to in the, he's one of the top.
There aren't that many novelists at Leo Tolstoy's level.
Warren Peace also belongs in the top.
I know it's 1,200 pages, but every page of it is great.
Beloved by Toni Morrison.
See?
And overrated.
She's overrated because she's a black woman.
I'm sorry.
That's why she's overrated.
You know, it's good, but it's not that great.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens is a Tolstoyan-level author.
This is not one of his greatest books, so I'll give it an A.
But everything he writes is beautifully written.
One of the greatest prose stylists who ever lived, great storyteller, amazing characters, great expectations.
From anyone else, it would be the best novel ever.
It's just he's written better.
The Catcher on the Rye, J.D. Soundser.
I haven't read that in a long, long time.
I'm going to give it a B.
It's very, very popular.
People love it.
Maybe it's better than I remembered.
I remember reading it, thinking it was good, but not great.
But like I said, it's been a long time.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.
The most entertaining novel ever written.
1,400 pages.
I am an extremely slow reader.
I read 400 pages of it in one day.
I just could not put it down.
It is as entertaining as anything.
I'm giving it an S just because it's the most entertaining novel ever written.
The Odyssey by Homer, S, it's foundational.
There is no literature without Homer.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Good book.
I give it a B.
It's an interesting book, an interesting look at America and its time, especially from a black author.
I think it's good.
It's a top-notch American novel.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
I'm going to give it an, ah, wow.
It is the foundational American novel.
It's got flaws.
I'll give it an A. If A's are still great novels, I will give it an A.
It is not one of the greatest novels ever written, but it may be the greatest American novel ever written, but it is terrific.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets an A.
The Iliad by Homer, it's an S.
I mean, come on, there's just no, there's no thought without Homer.
Homer is, you know, the foundational author.
We all stand on him and the Bible.
Ulysses by James Joyce.
You know, I'm going to put that at the S level.
It's a very difficult novel, a modern novel.
It's the end of novel writing.
Art forms always reach the end of their pinnacle by having a hyper-intellectual piece that is not for everybody.
That's Ulysses, and yet it is that one great novel.
Everything written like it is below it, so I'm going to give it an S.
That was an excellent list.
I was really expecting it to be really less than that.
You know, I don't have a favorite novel because I've read all of them.
But I will say there's no question that Crime and Punishment is the novel that affected me most in life.
To me, the worst writer who ever lived is Gertrude Stein.
There are many, many, many bad, bad writers, but Gertrude Stein is the worst writer.
I don't think she ever wrote a novel, but it doesn't matter every word she wrote.
Some of her periods are bad.
The spaces between her words are bad.
She looks bad.
Everything about her is bad.
That was actually pretty interesting.
I was surprised at how many of those books were among the actual greatest books, greatest novels ever written.
So good for the internet.
You're not as stupid as you look.
Great Films and Directors00:13:24
All right, let's find out what the internet says are the best movies ever.
Are these movies being sent to me in the ranking of the internet?
Like the first one will be their first?
They're in no particular order.
Okay.
Number one, The Godfather, 1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
One of the great American movies, not just one of the great American movies, but possibly the last truly great American movies.
Now, I don't use the word great easily.
I mean, to me, a great film is a top, top-tier film.
This is an S and absolutely in the top tier of movies.
There is nothing else quite like it.
It's a myth.
It's not an actual, if you want to see good fellows, you want to see the real mob.
That's what they look like.
The Godfather is a myth, but it is a brilliant myth with an actual thematic line about how good and evil are sort of turned upside down.
It is absolutely terrific.
And of course, it launched a million stars because all the acting in it is great.
That's an S film.
Casablanca, 1942, directed by Michael Curtis, but really just directed by itself, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
That is the best American film ever made.
There is no other one.
Anybody who says it's Citizen Kane doesn't know anything about movies, they only know that they don't like conservative people.
Casablanca is the greatest film ever made and kind of a miraculous film, greatest American film ever made.
It is kind of a miraculous film because they hardly knew what they were doing as they wrote it.
They didn't know where it was going to end.
They didn't tell Ingrid Bergman what the end of it would be.
She hardly knew how to act the part.
But everybody in it is perfectly cast.
Everybody in it is brilliant and it breaks your heart.
And it's elevating.
It's a wonderfully elevating movie without being false, without being idealistic.
It's an actual cynical look at mankind and shows that mankind can rise above itself and do something beautiful.
It's a great film.
The Shawshank Redemption.
I'm going to get killed for this.
Overrated film.
Directed by Frank Darabont.
Not a bad movie.
Not at all a bad movie.
I don't want to say it's a bad movie.
I just think it's a false kind of silly movie.
The story on which it's based, which is something about Rita Hayworth, the Shawshank something in Rita Hayworth, very harsh story, full of terrible stuff.
Stephen King, obviously.
And the movie, I just have never understood why people love it so much.
I would give it maybe a B minus.
You know, I'd say it's a good film.
I would watch it again, but I just don't think it's a great film in any way, shape, or form.
And I don't know why it's so loved.
12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lummett, kind of a liberal, you know, stalwart.
It's a good movie, a strong movie.
It's dated.
I've never thought it was one of the top, I would never have put it in the top 25 movies.
I will give that all.
I'm being kind of nice after they've dropped below A because I really would have put the Shawshank Redemption in a C, but a C sounds mediocre.
It's not.
Shawshank is a good film.
Angry Men is a good film.
I would give this also a B. Star Wars.
Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back.
This is the second in the first trilogy, if I'm correct, right?
It's the second in the first trilogy.
All right.
Not a big Star Wars fan either.
And I'll tell you why Star Wars is a film that comes along at the end of the great period of American films.
It is the film that turns American films into, what should I say, spectacles.
It is not that well written.
It's not that well acted.
It is not that well imagined, but it is fun to watch.
And it's certainly rah-rah and exciting and interesting.
And so, you know, if I'm literally going to have people showing up at my house with protest signs if I give it below an A, but I can't.
It's just not, it's not a great movie as I think what I think of as great movies.
I'm going to give it a B as well.
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski, starring Jack Nicholson, Fabe Dunaway.
You know, Chinatown is a really good film, and the score is one of the great scores in American filmmaking.
But obviously, this is a list that favors modern films because Chinatown is a riff on old films that are better than it was and much more, much more central to American movie making.
You know, films like, well, I won't say Castle Mongolia, but The Big Sleep, certainly The Maltese Falcon, which is a far, far better film than Chinatown.
But it is a good movie.
It has a wonderful interweaving of history with fiction.
And again, great score.
I'll give this one an A minus.
Yeah, I'll put it A. Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, which I have seen.
I thought it was okay.
I'll give it a C.
I thought it was an interesting look.
You know, we don't get to see Korea all that much, and we don't get to see Korea make, you know, South Korea, obviously, parodying itself, satirizing the injustices in the society.
And so I liked it.
I thought it was good.
But it's not a great movie.
I'll give it a C.
This list is weighted far too much toward the modern.
It is bigoted toward the modern.
Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles.
Citizen Kane, which I've watched again only recently, is certainly a brilliant piece of technical work.
The filming of it is brilliant.
The staging of it is brilliant.
And would I put it in the top 10 movies?
It's close.
I'm going to give this either an A or an S.
I would just barely put it in the top 10 movies because of the performances.
You know, the script is what gets touted and praised so much, but go back and watch it.
You don't really know what is wrong with Kane.
You don't know why he is being beleaguered and belabored so much, except for the fact that he's based on Hearst and Hearst was a conservative.
And just like Trump, just like Reagan, just like all the other conservatives, they hated him.
They just hated him.
And Orson Welles was basically being praised for this and never did anything to match it.
Well, that's not true.
Wells was a fantastic talent.
So I'm going to put that in the S category.
It's up there, but I always get annoyed because it's not number one, two, or three.
But it is a great film.
So we'll call it an S.
The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan, a wonderful superhero film, probably the best of the superhero films, and certainly a really interesting, fun movie to watch.
This is a harsh, it's a harsh grade to give it a B, but to me, that's still a good film.
But I'll give it an A-.
It's certainly an exciting, deeply, darkly political film with great visuals and probably the best version of Batman there is.
2001, A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.
C. Do I even want to give it a C?
Much, much overrated film.
Good ideas in it, interesting ideas, but so slow that by the time it ends, you're hoping Hal will just kill everybody.
It was touted for the genius of its insights.
I don't find it that way at all.
I think Stanley Kubrick, who started out as a great director with films like Paths of Glory and Two Rote, I think it's Two Wrote Together he made, started out as a great, great director.
Then he took himself seriously, and I never thought he made as good a film as people said he did.
I'm giving this a D.
I don't think it's that good a film.
Moonlight.
I mean, it's fine.
It's a good acting, interesting little subject.
What it's like to be a gay guy in the black hood.
I mean, that's kind of a weird little interesting subject.
So, such a sliver of a tiny little film.
For the acting, I'll give it a C.
It is S-A-B-C.
Yeah, so I'll give it a C.
But come on.
Alien.
Well, certainly one of the great horror movies ever made.
Certainly as great as any horror movie.
Not as great as any horror movie, but certainly in the top tier of great horror movies.
Great for its story, wonderful for its set design.
Its set design is unlike anything.
Terrific for its sexual anxiety.
I got to get, I'll give it a B, and that's high for me for a film like that, but it is a good one.
And it's, how can I put it?
It's kind of essential to that genre.
So yeah, I'll give it a B. City Lights, directed by Charles Chaplin.
I think Chaplin is hilarious.
And I think City Lights is wonderful, really just balancing it between an A and an S. Chaplin is one of the few people who remains funny.
Humor dates in a way that drama doesn't for some reason.
But Chaplin just doesn't.
He's just funny.
The guy was, you know, my father was a comedian.
He used to say, funny is funny.
And Chaplin was funny.
Let's put it up there.
It's a S.
It's an S because if we lost it, we would have lost something classic.
So that puts it in the S category.
Lawrence of Arabia is an S film.
Lawrence of Arabia is a wonderful film because that's Peter O'Toole as the great Lawrence of Arabia by David Lean, one of the truly great directors.
What it is, is it is the movement from the old days when epics were epic to a new day when the epics became romantic.
So it's an epic.
It has wonderful action sequences, brilliant, brilliant cinematography, but it's an inward film.
It's a film about the inner man.
And it's, you know, it's not true, but it's a film about the inner man.
He's trying to get at something about Lawrence.
He's trying to get us why, you know, Lawrence was not just a gay, but he was involved in the sadomasochistic scene, and it kind of hints at that, but it puts it as part of the story and part of his engagement with violence.
It's a deep film, and that's really rare.
I mean, most films, even great films, are not always deep.
I wouldn't call Casablanca a deep film.
It's just a film of great feeling.
But Lawrence of Arabia is a deep film and a deep look at an important complex man.
So let's put that in the S category too.
Pulp fiction.
Another overrated film directed by Quentin Tarantino.
It's too long.
It goes off into this weird Tarantino fascination with people dressed in leather doing gay S ⁇ M stuff.
It's good.
I'll give it a B. Vertigo, an S film, one of the greatest films ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest directors who ever lived.
Almost a silent film in a deeply, an era deeply committed to sound.
Absolutely brilliant.
Its major flaw, and this drove Hitchcock crazy, is that Grace Kelly should have been in it, but she had gotten married and she'd left show business.
But just a brilliant, haunting nightmare of a film, a bizarre plot.
I could talk about that forever.
It's just one of my favorite films.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the closest we have come to a great movie since The Godfather, just wonderful to watch, takes a kind of overlong novel, just a very dense novel, and turns it into a riveting story.
I'll give it an A. Inception.
Christopher Nolan.
That's a C movie.
It doesn't really make sense.
It's like, it's good.
It's interesting.
You know, I don't want to give it a C. I'll give it a B minus because it's a good film.
I liked watching it.
It's not a great one.
Psycho.
This is sometimes recently the Hollywood Reporter variety named it the greatest film ever made.
It is not, but it is as great a film as has been made.
Another Hitchcock film transformed the movies.
The slasher genre, unfortunately, comes out of it, but it is that the first 45 minutes of it are as good as anything on screen, deeply psychological, deeply insightful, terrifying.
The shower scene is as great as anybody says it is, but also just a sad movie because Anthony Perkins turns in a performance for the ages, never did anything like it again, but it's just a brilliant, brilliant performance.
And every scene is riveting for that first 45 minutes.
And the rest is, you know, still iconic.
It's an S film.
It's one of the greats.
Black Panther.
That was a D.
It was boring.
Cardboard.
You know, everybody said, you weren't allowed to say it.
I said it, but obviously, you weren't allowed to say it at the time because everybody called you racist.
But it was my, I don't like superhero films anyway.
They're stupid.
And Black Panther is one of them.
Goodfellas.
That is an, you know, I hesitate to put that on the S level with The Godfather.
The Godfather is the romantic myth of the mafia, and The Goodfellas is the true story.
You know what?
It's still great.
I'm making it an S.
It's a great film.
It is Scorsese's great film.
It's the culmination of everything he did.
He's never done anything better.
The acting is great.
It is riveting.
You can watch it again and again.
That's an S film.
No Country for All Men, directed by the Cone Brothers.
That's a very good film.
That is a really, really solid film.
You know, the Cone Brothers come as close to the great directors as anybody working.
I'll definitely give it an A.
It's powerful.
It's riveting.
It's terrifying.
And it's smart.
Yeah, it's an A film.
Raging Bull, overrated.
It's the same scene over and over again.
You slept with my wife.
You slept with my halving wife.
Did you sleep with my head and wife?
On and on and on.
It's a B. What is your favorite movie of all time?
The best movie of all time is Casablanca.
It's one of my favorites.
And the next question is: what is one movie that's not on this list that belongs on this list?
Oh, there's so many, so many films that were not on this list.
But The Third Man is one of the greatest films.
If you haven't seen The Third Man, watch The Third Man.
If I leave you with nothing else, watch The Third Man.
Not as good as the book list.
The problem with that list was just, it was they'd never seen any old movies.
That was the problem with that list.
So they just didn't know enough about old movies, and they overrated a lot of modern stuff.