Andrew Klavan ranks 24 books, calling The Iliad and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter so gripping he nearly missed a cruise—foundational to literature despite flaws like Homer’s dull ship list or Dumas’ melodrama. Heart of Darkness earns his praise as essential, while Atlas Shrugged and Madame Bovary (which he hates but admits is brilliant) are dismissed for repetitive speeches or French cultural bias. He adds missing classics like Dickens’ David Copperfield and Dante’s Divine Comedy, defining "essential" as works shaping imagination or culture, though his final say applies only to books—not humans. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, today we're going to take a look at what people believe are essential books that you should read.
This is from a penguin publisher's website, but it's the readers who are putting in these essential books and they're now going to reach their final judgment, which is me, obviously, the person who's read every book and who knows which ones are essential.
That's a very important word.
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All right, so it starts off with The Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, a 1960 novel.
And of course, this is the famous novel of a black man accused of rape in the South.
And this novel is such a, I would say, essential read for an American.
This has had such a huge effect on the American imagination.
I think anyone who reads has read it.
And it's quite good.
I mean, would I compare it to the greatest novels of all time?
Probably not, but I would say it is a very, very sound, solid, moving novel that shows you a real thing happening.
And I think it's been, you know, it's inserted things into the imagination that weren't there before.
So I would say, yeah, if you want to understand America, it is an essential read.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, I think it's an excellent book.
It's a true life novel.
It's a true story that Capote turned into a novel, kind of inventing that form.
I can't think of anyone who did it before him.
You know, Norman Mailer did it after him.
But it is a riveting book, I have to say.
And I, again, I would call that, it falls below the level of essential, but a great, a terrific book, and certainly a terrific American book.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is an essential modern read.
It is a brilliant book.
And it is a book about a future in which babies are genetically created to stick into their classes.
And people are on SOMO, which is a drug which keeps them happy.
And what is brilliant about the novel, I don't want to give it away, but there is a surprise in the novel when they go back to visit places that are not in this kind of hellish dystopia.
It's a remarkably intelligent and wise novel.
And yes, I would say for a modern novel, it is an essential read.
Persuasion by Jane Austen.
Jane Austen is an essential read.
Probably Pride and Prejudice or Emma is her most essential book, but Persuasion is quite good.
She is a great novelist.
And when I say a great novelist, I don't mean a novelist who has written a great book.
That's very hard to do.
But what I mean by that is she is a novelist so great that everything she writes is worth reading, even the lesser stuff, just because her vision is so great.
The only female novelist I can say that about Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
I don't like Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
I see why it's exciting and brilliant to intellectuals and critics.
I think it's a 130-page, great, it's a great 130-page adventure novel squeezed into about 500 pages.
And I'm not into all the transcendental philosophizing in it.
It just seems ridiculous to me.
I've read it three times because I want to know why everybody thinks it's so great.
Most people would say it's an essential book.
I would say pretend to read it.
Okay, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is not only not an essential book, it's only essential if you have a short egg on your table.
Virginia Woolf, very overrated.
I think it was Julian Barnes who said he was saving her from when he was dead.
And I think that that's a good decision.
Ilium by Homer is the essential book, is the most essential book.
This is the book on which, you know, if you built a Jenga Tower of our literature, it would be the bottom thing, if not the Bible and the Eliot would be the bottom thing.
Why Middlemarch Matters00:06:56
And it's great.
I mean, there are certain things in the epic, like the list of ships, you know, that are just really dull.
It's one chapter at the list of ships.
But other than that, it's just a great adventure novel, war novel with fantastic characters and beautifully written.
Another country by James Baldwin.
I'm going to skip it.
I haven't, I've read Baldwin, but I haven't read that book.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
I've read, not essential, but a good book.
Middlemarch by George Eliot, an excellent book.
Talk about a woman who wrote a great novel, and she's a good writer, terrific writer.
But Middlemarch is a classic novel and one of the greatest of English novels and just a very complex, people call it Charles Dickens for grown-ups.
My name is Charles Dickens and I am here for the food.
And I think that that's a fair assessment of it.
A really, really insightful, interesting book.
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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
It's funny that that is on there because I'm rereading it now after many years.
And I was just talking to my son Spencer about it, and I said it is the greatest book I hate.
I dislike it because I dislike French, certain parts of French culture that Flaubert inhabits.
It is a book about a woman and her adultery and famously.
And I just find it very cold and drab and disdainful of ordinary people's lives.
A much better book about adultery is Anna Karenina, which is warm and alive and vibrant.
However, I have to say, it's essential if you want to understand European literature because it's a great, great piece of work.
It's a brilliant piece of work.
It's terrible but wonderful at the same time.
It's like freedom in the cup!
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, the most entertaining book ever written.
I think it's about 1,200 pages.
I once almost missed an entire cruise on which I was supposed to be the entertainment.
I was supposed to be working.
I couldn't leave my room because I couldn't stop reading The Count of Monte Cristo.
Certainly essential, just brilliant.
Ulysses by James Joyce.
That's an interesting question.
I think it's a great book.
I've read it twice, and it's a difficult book.
It's an intellectual book.
It's a book from that period where literature, where, you know, art forms, as they fall apart, they separate into intellectual work and trash, you know, popular trash.
At the peak of the pinnacle of an art form, the entertaining work and the greatest work is the same work.
It's Hamlet.
It's, you know, Romeo and Juliet.
But as it's starting to end, it separates into critical darlings and popular stuff.
Ulysses is a critical darling.
I think it's a great book.
I think it has insights that are worth reading.
I think if that's not your deal, you can live without it.
Brothers Camerazo by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
If you haven't read it, you are missing out on one of the most brilliant examinations of culture and life and morality and Christianity ever written.
Essential, yes.
The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett.
I'm not a big fan of children's literature, but that's a good one, but no.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, I would say no.
I would say read one speech because it's just the same stupid speech over and over again.
Ayn Rand was really good at noticing how money works in a society, and that's it.
And it's a million pages long, and the characters are wooden, and the situation is okay.
It's absurd.
It could have been a hundred-page book.
It's not an essential book to read.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu, you know, it's a famous book.
It's got some classic stuff in it, but I wouldn't call it essential for your life.
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, one of the greatest novels ever written, but is it essential for your life?
Probably.
It's the beginning of modernism.
It's the beginning of saying, well, here's all this literature about knighthood and chivalry, but what's it have to do with reality?
So I think it's a great novel, and I enjoyed it immensely.
And I would say if you want to understand literature, it's essential.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene, excellent novel, essential no.
Of human bondage by Somerset Mont, excellent novel, not essential.
His book, The Razor's Edge, is essential.
It's a great book.
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, a great idea, an absolute icon of the imagination.
The book itself is not that great, but it's not essential, but it is an essential idea.
The Castle by Franz Kafka, that's not the book I would say of his that's essential.
I would say The Trial is an essential book, essential to the modern world.
Franz Kafka is the guy who basically invented bureaucrat or noticed bureaucratic paranoia.
So something's Kafka-esque.
That's where you learn from the trial.
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O-Tool, I think it is.
Is it tool?
But anyway, it's Confederacy of Dunces is entertaining and kind of conservative, and that's why people hate it.
Not essential, but good.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Yes, an essential book, a really wonderful book.
White Knights by Fyodor Dostoevsky is not one of his essential books.
Is that it?
I've went through it that fast.
That's amazing.
But you left out a lot.
David Copperfield, essential.
All of Shakespeare, essential.
What else?
The Aeneid, the Roman epic by Virgil, essential.
And I would say the one thing that Michael Mowles is right about is the Divine Comedy is essential.
All right, those are some essential books, and some will just, we're just throwing, they were all good books, we're just throwing good books overboard.
But those are the essential.
I said essential is a specific word.
It means something.
And so we judge them.
And of course, we are the final judge of all these things.
Next week, we're going to have human beings.
I'm going to judge them, but I'm not the final judge of them.