The Authors Whose Work You Need To Read explores how Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment shaped the speaker’s rejection of moral relativism, while Chandler’s Marlowe offered a dignified anti-corruption ideal. Hemingway’s prose brilliance contrasts with his personal shallowness, and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby stands as his sole masterpiece despite flaws. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol became a transformative "fifth gospel," and Poe’s horror refined the speaker’s literary style. Marx’s truths were weaponized, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn tied to childhood nostalgia, and the Brontës—especially Jane Eyre—resonated deeply. Ultimately, reading isn’t just consumption but a rare communion with another mind, transcending mere entertainment. [Automatically generated summary]
This bonus video is about writers and how they have affected me.
And again, I did not make this list.
I'm just going to read the writer's name off and talk about him, if they had a major effect on me and what it was.
That should be interesting.
We will start with Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I've talked about him a million times.
He is one of the most important writers in my life.
Reading Crime and Punishment at the age of 19 convinced me that moral relativism was wrong.
And that was important because moral relativism, I was in college, and moral relativism, the idea that you think one thing is right and I think another thing is right and who can say which is right.
And that's why we have multiculturalism because any culture may be as good as any other.
That idea was wrong.
And that ultimately led me to God because I thought there has to be a moral measuring point.
And that moral measuring point has to be a consciousness because there is no good and evil without consciousness and without free choice.
And so Fyodor Dostoevsky changed my life.
He is a prophet.
He is a great writer, a great psychologist, and such a great writer and psychologist that he is a prophet.
He predicted many of the things we're seeing now, even though he was writing in the 19th century.
And I would recommend Crime and Punishment to anybody.
And The Brothers Karamazov is a novel of equal, if not superior, greatness.
And I would recommend that as well.
Raymond Chandler also had a huge effect on me.
I've written about this in my autobiography, The Great Good Thing.
I was looking for male role models, I think, in books and in the movies.
And Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's tough guy detective, was such a great one because he was a tough guy.
But what was tough about him was that he carried the idea of chivalry into corrupt 1950s Los Angeles.
From the first page of The Big Sleep, his first Philip Marlowe novel, he sees a stained glass window with a knight rescuing a girl.
And he says, if I had lived in this house, I would have had to climb up there and help her down because the knight wasn't working fast enough.
And we see the effect, the debilitating effect of trying to be a knight in a corrupt world.
And we also see a hero who can be beaten up and doesn't have to be a Schwarzenegger character who wins every fight.
He can lose the fights and still maintain his dignity and in fact enhance his dignity by the fact that he's willing to take punishment to be who he is.
And I wanted to, Raymond Chandler wrote of his hero, down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
And I modeled my life on that.
It's a beautiful sentence from which we get down these mean streets.
Ernest Hemingway, very important in my youth.
Somebody once said he was the greatest 16-year-old writer who ever lived.
He never really grew up.
He never really got past his earlier successes.
But what a prose stylist, an unbelievable prose stylist.
His short stories that he wrote in his youth are fantastic.
The Sun Also Rises is an amazing novel.
And Farewell to Arms is a novel that will just absolutely break your heart.
It's an absolutely beautiful book.
He was a brilliant, brilliant writer and stylist, but I don't think he was a brilliant man.
And after a while, you grow out of him, I think.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a wonderful writer destroyed by alcoholism.
His only truly great book is The Great Gatsby, but it is a very, very great book.
You can read it in, you know, a couple of hours.
It's very short.
It's a classic book.
And, you know, if you write one great book, you've done an amazing thing.
Not many people do it.
Shakespeare also, he became my role model.
Obviously, I don't think I am Shakespeare, but I think those, what I love about Shakespeare is that his plots are full of killing and screwing and chasing and running around.
And then his poetry is the greatest poetry ever written, as deep as it can possibly be.
If you only had, if you were on a desert island and you only had Shakespeare, you would know what human nature is.
And that is, in fact, the basis of the book Brave New World, is there was a character in it who has only read Shakespeare and he knows what human beings are and what they're supposed to be, which makes it very hard for him to live in the brave new world.
And I think Shakespeare maybe made it hard for me to live in this brave new world.
Charles Dickens is a great, great writer, possibly the greatest novelist in the English language.
If you've never read David Copperfield, it's 800 pages long.
Every page is absolutely brilliant.
The thing about Dickens is he's not just a great storyteller.
He's a storyteller on the level of Stephen King, where you just want to know what's going to happen next, but he is the greatest prose writer I can think of.
He writes such beautiful prose.
If you've never read David Copperfield, you've never read Bleak House, and obviously A Christmas Carol, those are books you're going to want to read.
And I just love him.
I don't know how much of an effect he has.
I think A Christmas Carol has had a huge effect on my life.
It has made me a better man.
There's no question about it.
It's a beautiful, beautiful book.
Some people call it the fifth gospel.
And I think there's something fair about that.
Edgar Allan Poe may have been the first writer I ever loved.
I obviously had a morbid sensibility.
I think I memorized The Raven when I was in sixth grade as a kind of just to show off how well I could memorize something.
I love Poe and I love his short stories.
The Telltale Heart is great, the Cascoval Monteado.
And he had a big effect on my worldview because of his, on my writing view.
Oh, and the Fall of the House of Usher is one of the greatest, the first two pages of that are some of the best writing in American.
And I just loved him for his storytelling and for his grimness and for the fact that horror writing, which is essentially what he writes, can be literature.
That's wonderful.
You know, many people look at me and say, how do you look so beautiful?
Many others just say, how come you're not dead yet?
And the reason is I make sure to get all the food ingredients in my diet that I need.
Our sponsor, Balance of Nature's Whole Health System, makes it simple.
With their convenient blend of fruits and vegetables and easy to take capsules, I can ensure I'm getting essential nutrients every day without the hassle of prep work or meal planning.
It's an effortless way to support my wellness goals while maintaining a busy lifestyle.
Balance of Nature's whole health system supplements are incredibly versatile and easy to work into your daily routine.
The fiber and spice supplement blends smoothly into your favorite drinks, adding a warm aromatic depth from its spice blend.
And if you prefer, you can even open up the fruits and veggies capsules and mix the powder directly into a smoothie or sprinkle it over your meals.
I don't know how it gets any easier than capsules, but that's what they say, so I'm reading it to you.
What makes these supplements special is that they're packed with 47 ingredients from 100% real whole fruits, vegetables, spices, and fibers.
Everything from xylem husk and flaxseed to cinnamon, turmeric, mango, pineapple, wild blueberries, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, kale, cayenne pepper, and so much more.
It's a simple way to give your body the nutrition it needs every day without getting a lot of juice in your beard.
New and existing customers can get 50% off the whole health system for life with this limited time offer.
Go to balanceofnature.com to claim this offer.
Jane Austen Preferences00:04:01
Jane Austen, I think, is wonderful.
As I said, she is the only great female novelist.
And that is not to say she's the only female who has ever written a great novel.
There are many women who have written great novels, but she's the only one who, like Dostoevsky or like Tolstoy, or like Dickens, every novel is in some way great.
And she's just, you know, you want to read a Jane Austen novel, not this specific Jane Austen novel.
She's just wonderful.
And I love her.
I understand why girls love her, but I also think men could love her because she's incredibly and insightful.
The Marquis de Saud, I can't recommend to anybody.
He writes sadomastochistic.
That's where we get the word sadism is from DeSade.
But he had a big effect on me because most of my life I was an agnostic.
I didn't care whether there was a God.
I didn't know whether there was a God.
But I went through a period of atheism.
I read all these atheist writers and they didn't make sense to me.
They didn't hold together.
But the Marquis de Saad, who basically said there is no God, so everything is allowed and nature loves destruction and pain and men love to women.
And so that's what you should do.
And he was a literal psychopath, by the way.
All those movies in which he shows up as kind of a wicked, naughty, you know, S ⁇ M guy who goes to clubs.
No, he was a literal psychopath.
And his books recommend murder as sexually fun.
And when I read that, I thought, oh, that's atheism that makes sense.
I'm out of here.
I'm not an atheist, but whatever else I am, I'm not an atheist.
I do not ascribe to that because it sounded like hell to me.
And I guess it is hell to me.
So I don't recommend him, but he had a good effect on my life.
Mark Twain, a lovely writer.
I loved Huckleberry Finn.
My mother, not because I was Jewish, my mother would call me Huckleberry Fine because I was also a kind of scrappy, wandering kid who would come home all dirty and bloody and all this stuff.
Just to say, Andrew Clavin, you haven't got the brains God gave a goose, which I think is probably true.
Karl Marx, you know, I've never been as impressed by him.
I was impressed when I read Thomas Sowell on Karl Marx, who explained him to me.
Like a lot of these philosophers like Sigmund Freud, he says things that are true, but he uses them to false purposes, I think.
Anyway, he didn't have a big effect on me.
Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley.
If you read my book, The Truth and Beauty, these are all romantics.
They're all in that book.
And I love the Romantic poets.
I think next to Shakespeare, they are my favorite of the English poets.
And Percy Shelley, I've never liked him.
His great biographer, Richard Holmes, wrote a long biography, which I loved called Shelley the Pursuit.
And he really was impressed with him because he was a guy from the 60s and Shelley was a revolutionary figure.
I thought Shelley was a jerk, but he, what a poet, what a poet.
If you've never read Ode to the West Wind, you should read it.
It's beautiful.
Ozzy Mandius, you probably know.
Look on my work, See Mighty, and Despair.
And Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a wonderful book.
Lord Byron, never my favorite.
But I did love all of those people because I loved that time.
The Bronte sisters, like them.
My daughter loves Jane Eyre.
She loves Jane Eyre.
I like Jane Eyre too.
I think that's a good book.
They say there are Jane Eyre people and there are Wuthering Heights people.
My wife is a Wuthering Heights person, but I'm probably more of a Jane Eyre person.
But they were good writers and I like them.
Not a big effect on me.
Jonathan Swift, very funny.
Gulliver's Travels is still a good read, but still not much of an effect on me.
That's a good list, though.
Those are very talented writers.
They've all meant something to me in my life.
I've read them all.
They were all worth reading.
I don't have to agree with someone to love them.
And I don't have to agree with someone just to have been taken into his mind.
The beautiful thing about reading is more than any other art form I can think of except maybe music is that it takes you directly into the mind of the creator.
And there is no feeling like that.
Movies can't do it because they're a collaboration and they impose too much on your imagination.
No other form can do it except maybe music.
But I think the novel poetry, there's just nothing like it.
It's like having another soul walk with your soul down the road.
And so all of those people, I'm grateful to all of them for being that soul for a little while.