10 Essential Novels You MUST Read dives into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—a 1925 tragic romance about wealth and obsession—while dismissing its 1974 Robert Redford adaptation, then contrasts Twain’s Tom Sawyer (simpler, better-structured) with Huckleberry Finn. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is called a dense yet gripping allegory, later mirrored in Apocalypse Now, while Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) shines for its WWI love story and opening prose. Dickens’ David Copperfield (700 pages) offers moral clarity, Bronte’s Jane Eyre delivers gothic accessibility, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) features Sam Spade, though Chandler’s work is superior. Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867) explores guilt in a shorter murder tale, Kafka’s The Trial critiques bureaucratic absurdity, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) exposes WWI’s futility. Novels, stripped of Hollywood’s interference, remain raw, portable wisdom—transformative without effort. [Automatically generated summary]
So my producer Tom wanted me to do a video called 10 Novels You Must Read Before You Die.
And usually I just do whatever Tom says because he's got this crazy look in his eyes.
I'm afraid he's just going to go off one day and it's going to be a disaster, bloodshed.
I don't even like to think about it.
But at this time, you know, I was thinking about this and I was thinking, the problem I have is not what novels you have to read because there are no novels you have to read.
The problem I have is a lot of people don't read novels.
And especially I go on and I promote my novels on conservative radio, the only play, conservative podcasts and so on, the only places where they'll let me go.
And a lot of times people will say, you know, why should I read novels?
Conservatives don't really get this.
So to me, that's like asking why you should take a walk, why you should fall in love.
I mean, reading novels, appreciating art and great literature are part of the joys of life.
I mean, it's just so beautiful.
And they do, in fact, if you want to be practical about it, they increase your wisdom.
Reading novels, but not reading a novel.
See, that's why I didn't agree with that idea that reading a novel is not going to increase your wisdom.
Reading novels, great novels, increases your wisdom over time.
So let's start with The Great Gatsby, one of the greatest novels I've ever written.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, an American writing in part of the lost generation, the jazz age of the 20s.
And this is the story of a man who has never gotten over the love of his life.
He's lost her, and he can see her.
He lives in a house, a place where I grew up, and he can look across the water and see a green light that represents her.
And she represents all kinds of things to him.
He's a man who made his own way in the world.
We're not quite sure how, but we find out a little bit about that.
And she represents the kind of class and elegance and beauty that he is trying to attain.
It's a beautiful, beautiful romantic novel.
There's a mediocre movie of it with Robert Redford, but if you read, if you watch the movie, you'll get the plot, so it'll be even easier to read.
It's very, very short.
You can read it probably in a day or two.
Really worthwhile.
And you'll notice a lot of these books, probably a disproportionate of these books are American novels, and that's because Americans write more simply than the British and other countries.
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
I was going to say Huckleberry Finn because Huckleberry Finn is iconic and is one of the greatest American novels, but Tom Sawyer is actually technically a better novel and it's easier to follow and Huckleberry Finn bogs down a little toward the end.
It's a wonderful, wonderful story of boyhood in the 1800s America.
It is just a beautiful story.
And then if you like it, you can follow it up with the sequel, which is Huckleberry Finn.
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
It's funny.
It's wise.
It's written as if for children, but it's really an adult novel.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Conrad's prose can be a little bit dense, but if you've ever seen the movie Apocalypse Now, it was based on Heart of Darkness.
It is about a man who journeys into Africa to find somebody who has gone missing and finds something much, much darker and more disturbing than that.
It is a great, great adventure novel, very short, beautifully written.
If you can just, because it's so short, you can take your time with the prose and explore his beautiful, wonderful, complex prose.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
Now, Ernest Hemingway is great because he was the all-American American novelist in that he used very short, very clear sentences.
And I picked A Farewell to Arms because it's an absolutely beautiful love story.
I fell in love with the heroine of this book when I was a kid.
I just, my heart actually just lost my heart from an actual fictional character.
The first page or two is one of the greatest pieces of American writing, as the first page of Huck Finn is one of the greatest pieces of American writing.
Hemingway was a beautiful, brilliant stylist, and A Farewell to Arms is his most approachable book about the love between a wounded ambulance driver in World War I and the nurse who takes care of him.
And it's just got some great scenes.
This is the only book.
The next one is the only book I'm recommending that is long, long, long, but it is great, great, great.
And I think if you have time, if it's the summer and you want to take time to read what must be, I don't know, six, 700-page book, it is great.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
You know, Charles Dickens, my son-in-law said this to me, and it's funny, he said it to me at the same time, almost at the same time I was thinking it because we were both looking at the same Charles Dickens story.
Charles Dickens understood one of the most simple but deepest facts of life, that nice people do nice things and bad people do bad things.
And the reason that that's important is we're all so different and we have different philosophies and we think if we have different philosophies, you must be evil.
But he understood that that's not always true.
David Copperfield is just the story of a man's life.
It's the book he liked best because it really represents himself more than any.
You notice that David Copperfield, the initials of David Copperfield, the Charles Dickens initials backwards.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful story of trial and tribulation and triumph.
And it is just the characters you will never forget that will become a part of your life.
And I know it's long, but it's just worth it.
It's just great.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
And I picked that one over Jane Austen, who is a better novelist, but a far more complex novelist.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is just a great read.
It is a gothic read.
Right now, something called romanticy is very popular with women.
They love the romance of women and dark men and all that.
That is the story.
It is a beauty in the beast story.
It's just terrific.
If you have trouble with the language, you can listen to my daughter's show, Storytime for Grown-Ups by Faith Moore.
She reads it and explains it as she goes along, and she has a wonderful voice, and you will like that.
The Maltese Falcon by Doshel Hammett in my genre, the hard guy, the tough guy mystery genre.
Raymond Chandler was the greatest, greater writer, a greater writer than Doshel Hammett, but The Maltese Falcon is an almost perfect mystery and just iconic.
And just that character of Sam Spade, later played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie, is one of the great American characters of all time and just a fantastic read.
You won't be able to put it down.
It's just great.
Therese Racam by Emile Zola.
I wanted to include a Zola book.
This is the shortest one I've ever read.
In some ways, it's kind of the poor man's war and peace, terrific murder story, a really riveting book, and just explores the conscience of a murderer in a great way and much shorter and easier to read than Crime and Punishment.
But if you like it, you can move on to Crime and Punishment.
It's a good place to start.
The Trial by Franz Kafka, a really, really great modern novel.
And it'll drive you crazy.
It is just, if you've ever dealt with the DMV, this is Franz Kafka imagining a world in which the whole world has become the DMV.
The trial about a man who is accused of something, but he never can find out what.
It is just a tremendous, tremendous book.
And I think you'll really like it.
It's the most modern of these books.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Ramarck is a great, great war novel.
I picked it because it's very, very simple.
It is about the German side of World War I and what that is like.
And the prose is absolutely simple and straightforward and solid.
And it is just the experience of being in one of the truly most meaningless, most destructive.
It was almost, World War I was almost as if Europe just died of old age.
There was no reason to fight it, and it wiped out a generation of men and ultimately led to the destruction of the greatest culture that had ever existed on earth, the European culture.
All Quiet on the Western Front just captures both the heroism and the idealism and the stupidity and the craziness of it all.
A terrific novel.
Why Read Novels?00:00:45
So I recommend these novels because I recommend novels.
I think reading a novel is the most direct, if you think of art like a drug, a drug that actually makes you better instead of worse, the novel is, to me, the mainlining that drug.
It's no actor gets in your way, no director gets in your way, only one mind making a story in the language he wants to use and transferring that story from his mind to your mind.
That is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
You can read it at 4 o'clock in the morning when you can't sleep.
You can read it on the beach.
You can do anything you want with it.
But these are great novels.
Great novels that are easy to read and fun to read.