📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
There are sooo many nonfiction books that are fantastic, and a great many of them have fundamentally changed my entire life. So obviously I have nothing against nonfiction.
But any one of these ten novels I’m going to recommend tonight will teach you so much more than Atomic Habits or The 5-Second Rule or How to Win Friends and Influence People ever could.
About life. About the universe and your place within it. About morality, kindness, honor, bravery, self-worth, personal responsibility, ethics, happiness, death, beauty, friendship, and everything else that makes life worth living.
It’s all here in these ten books, and you can live and learn from 10,000 lives just from reading them. I honestly can’t recommend these books highly enough - I stand by each and every one of them (though of course there are hundreds more I could have mentioned), and…and I just can’t wait to tell you about them!
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
“You have lived a successful life if, as you grow older, the people who you hope love you actually do.
I have never known anyone who does not feel like a success when they have gotten close to my age and have a lot of people who love them.
I know enormously wealthy individuals who have dinners held in their honor, hospital wings named after them, and all that sort of thing, but the truth is that no one thinks much of them.
I have to believe that at some point they realize it, and everything gets quite empty after that.”
“If the best in the world are all doing the same thing in order to get strong or improve, then why aren't you?”
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This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.
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After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,470 books, including 16 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
Crime and Punishment is a major Russian novel about Rodion Raskolnikov, a young, impoverished student in St. Petersburg. It’s the story of how he comes to murder and rob an old woman in what he convinces himself is an altruistic act, and of his subsequent complete psychological disintegration. And it also plays a part in the story of how I would eventually come to read more than 1,000 books.
This particular book is one of Dostoevsky's most significant works, and it’s a layered literary masterpiece that set the standard for psychological thrillers ever after.
The central moral question of the book, in my view, is whether a brutal act (in this case the murder of an old woman with an axe) can ever lead to good.
You might not think that’s even a question! Of course that’s terrible and wrong and could never be justified…read the book.
You can also make a connection between the character of Raskolnikov and a kind of underdeveloped “Overman,” as described by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Raskolnikov believes that most people simply aren’t capable of taking drastic, courageous, aggressive action to change their lives or effect real change, and that only a relative few people throughout history have possessed the qualities necessary to radically alter their circumstances.
Would I murder an evil old woman and redistribute her ill-gotten wealth to people who were more deserving? Would you? What’s stopping us?
Crime and Punishment was also the very first book I finished, ever since I decided to track the number of books I read, beginning in 2014 and continuing up to the present day.
It started me on a path to read more than 1,000 books before I turned 30. And after engaging with it, pondering it, pushing through it to the end, Dostoyevsky’s brilliant philosophical novel helped give me the confidence to imagine that I could read 1,000+ books: difficult ones, the greatest ones; and that if I could finish this masterpiece, there were also potentially thousands of others that I would eventually come to love too.
Difficulty Rating: Hard
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: This entire list could just be Dostoyevsky novels. Truly.
But in this particular case, this book will teach you about moral ambiguity, cowardice, how hard it is to gain self-knowledge, how hard it is to live with that self-knowledge, how to be a good person…there’s very little about life, existence, and the greater world that isn’t dealt with in this book.
I love nonfiction too, of course, and James Clear’s work is helpful and all, but this book ain’t no Atomic Habits, understand?
“There is nothing you know less about than yourself.”
After you’ve read The Alchemist (and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it!), the natural next step is to slip into Siddhartha, which is exactly what I did back in 2015.
It’s quite a bit deeper and more subtly complex than Coelho’s book, but that’s not to take anything away from The Alchemist! Both books shaped the course of my life, and still do.
Again, the story here is simple. A wealthy Indian Brahmin ditches his life of wealth and ease and goes off in search of spiritual fulfillment and identity. Nothing about this search turns out to be easy or straightforward, and Siddhartha makes many mistakes.
It’s astonishingly difficult to become who you are, as it turns out, and he makes something of a mess of it occasionally - you may be able to relate!
But he eventually finds that the perfection he was seeking already exists - has always existed, and will always exist forever and ever. All he has to do - though, paradoxically, it’s the most difficult thing of all to do - is to become completely and totally and fully himself.
He has to walk his own path and allow others to walk theirs. He has to learn and experience and become transformed by a deep appreciation and reverence for life. And he has to travel the entire path to find that he’s arrived at the very beginning.
Now, his life can begin again. And, after reading Siddhartha for the first time, mine did too.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Nonfiction books can teach you a lot about how to emulate the best qualities in other people, but they can’t teach you anything about how to become yourself. At least not really. Siddhartha, on the other hand, leads you right there.
"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
This is a philosophy book disguised as a science fiction comedy-adventure novel, and I am here for it. Incidentally, it’s also one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and one that I recommend to everyone who thinks they might enjoy science fiction but don’t really know where to start. Start here!
In this “five-part trilogy,” Arthur Dent wakes up one Thursday morning to find that his house is about to be demolished to make way for a new hyperspace express route, one that the Earth will have to be completely destroyed in order to build.
Oh yeah, and his best friend suddenly reveals that he’s an alien and that they have to leave right now.
What follows is an absurd adventure of galactic proportions, as they hitch a ride on an alien spaceship, get ejected from that spaceship and picked up by another spaceship, run into the President of the Galaxy, make friends with the only other surviving human (a girl named Trillian), and a depressed robot named Marvin…
Yeah, I know, it makes about as much sense as Vogon poetry, and yet this book (well, five books) allowed me to see our own universe with fresh eyes and helped me feel like I actually belong here.
Douglas Adams loved life, the universe, and everything as well, and the book is full of these sensible-yet-hilarious conservationist messages, epic passages describing the beauty of the universe and its precious rarity, and warnings against its senseless destruction.
He’s never heavy-handed about any of this either, by the way. It’s more like a gentle, “Hey this place is actually pretty nice! Let’s not blow it up?”
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: It’s almost a shame that this book is so funny, because I feel like it might cause people to miss how profound it is too.
It’ll teach you about the endless, awesome mystery that is this spectacular universe, it’ll teach you humility in the face of all that we just don’t know, and it’ll teach you (help you?) to lighten up a little bit and not take it all so seriously.
Adams (and Alan Watts, too) encouraged people to take life sincerely, but not seriously. It’s a profound difference.
“‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said. ‘Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.’”
I can’t imagine Fahrenheit 451 ever being pushed out of my top ten favorite books of all time. Never, ever, ever. I’m made of this book.
Just like with other formative books that I’ve read, I remember exactly where I was when I first read this one, and it’s been top of mind for me ever since whenever people ask for a fiction book recommendation, or something that could “get them into reading.”
The basic storyline is that, in the future, all books are banned, and instead of fighting fires, firemen burn books. The main character, Guy Montag, is one such fireman, who unconsciously enjoys his work (“It was a pleasure to burn”) until one day, he starts reading one of the banned books, and finds that he develops a taste for it.
Since it’s illegal even to possess a book, much less read the damn things, Montag has to keep this double life a secret, developing in feeling, consciousness, and intellect while pretending to be illiterate and hiding his newfound inner life from the fire chief, Captain Beatty, who seems suspiciously well-read for someone so devoted to burning and destroying the collective wisdom of humanity.
One woman in the novel is even burned alive with her books when she refuses to give them up, prompting Montag to ask himself what it is in books that could make someone do that. Why would she stay? What am I missing?
I, for one, know exactly how that woman felt, and Ray Bradbury says so many things about reading in Fahrenheit 451 that I wanted to say about reading but didn’t know how.
He gave me the words for what reading, books, and literature have added to my life - have done for me - and I wouldn’t give up my books without a f***ing fight either.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Bradbury’s short classic will teach you what’s missing in a person’s life - in a society’s life - when they stop reading books, and about what gets ripped out of you when curiosity, imagination, and wonder are stamped out of the human soul. It’ll wake you up, shake you by the shoulders, and never let you go back to sleep ever again.
“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
Usually, I finish a book every two days, but I strung this one out for weeks and weeks because I was loving it so much. It is, in no uncertain terms, a masterpiece, and now it’s one of my absolute favorite books. A look through my notes on the book might give some indication why, but it’s partly because of the unique structure of the narrative itself.
The book is arranged in six interlocking parts, told from six different perspectives, first going forward in time as usual, until the middle section, at which point it folds back on itself and goes back through the time periods in reverse order, completing each narrative.
Starting from a character traveling aboard a slave ship in the 19th century, we move forward to the early twentieth, the late twentieth, the near future, a little further into the future, then the late future and back again, with the actions and lives of each character affecting and influencing each other across time and space.
The storylines are funny, nail-biting, vicious, exhilarating, suspenseful, deep – and sometimes several of those at once.
The literary references will keep lifelong readers searchingly engaged, the cliff-hangers will keep most readers up way later than they should be, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll read this book more slowly as you approach the final page, just so you can keep the book going and it doesn’t ever have to end.
Difficulty Rating: Intermediate
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Cloud Atlas will show you how responsible you are for your own future and the future of every single person you come into contact with, each and every moment of your life. It’ll show you the interconnectedness of all things, all people, all times, and all places, and it’ll teach you that are an absolutely essential part of everything that exists.
“Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.”
Occasionally I’ll read massively popular books and find out that there was a good reason for their being so popular. This was one of those instances.
The main character, Nora Seed, takes her own life at the beginning of the book and wakes up in The Midnight Library, where each book on the shelf allows her to live some other version of her life; to go back and undo her regrets.
There’s enough depressing shit out there today that you could expose yourself to if you really wanted to, but if, on the other hand, you want to read something that’s going to make you feel really good and maybe help move you further away from death and closer to life, then this book would be at the top of my recommendations.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: The Midnight Library will teach you that it’s never too late to live the kind of life you’ve imagined, and it’ll also teach you that you’re not any less deserving of that life than the next person.
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
This is one of the most famous existentialist novels ever written, and it explores the theme of the "absurd" character of existence, of life itself.
Things happen for reasons we can't figure out or get a hold on, our lives drift on, mostly without our ever being able to draw a convincing narrative arc, and then we come to the moment of our inevitable death, not really having understood anything that has happened to us.
Bleak, sure. But Camus is definitely NOT a pessimist, this story is brilliant (in a sentence, it's about a man who has just lost his mother, who murders an Arab man for no reason on the beach in Algeria), and it's well worth reading.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: You’ll come away from reading The Stranger knowing that your life is completely your own, and that since nobody is going to die your death for you, nobody has any right to tell you how to live your life either. It’ll teach you that you’re free, you’ve always been free, and that you’ll be free forever - and that the value of your freedom is in how you use it.
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
I hated the first half of this book and I almost didn't finish it. It was so boring, I thought, but I persevered because everyone seemed to think it was a classic and I wanted to find out why. The last quarter of the book turned it into one of my absolute favorite books.
Seriously, it’s incredible.
In short, it's about a dystopian society where everyone is happy all the time (because of the drugs they take) and no one experiences any hardship whatsoever. Or really feels anything at all. Until one day...
Until one day everything changes, let’s just say that.
Brave New World is brilliant because there’s no terrible, evil villain oppressing the population, no Great Enemy threatening the peace and serenity of the people. Life is just…flat, and uneventful, and meaningless, and just…there. And that’s the real evil. It’s not that the people feel oppressed, it’s that they feel nothing at all.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: This book teaches you that real life has crests and troughs, ups and down, light and dark, and that one is meaningless without the other. If we didn’t know sadness, we wouldn’t know what joy felt like. If we couldn’t feel hurt, we couldn’t feel happy. If we didn’t have the capacity to feel fear and pain, then our peace would feel like nothing at all.
“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”
Here we have a time-traveling anti-war book that only Kurt Vonnegut could write. The main event of the novel is the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, but obviously with the whole “time travel” thing, the story jumps around a bit!
It's sort of a wild ride because of the literary device of the "unreliable narrator, " meaning that we, the reader, are never really sure whether the narrator knows what he's talking about, or is leading us astray in some other way.
But here, Vonnegut is as funny as ever, tearing down the whole idea that war could ever, possibly, be a good idea for anyone ever, and holding a mirror up to ourselves and what we've let ourselves do to each other.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: Slaughterhouse-Five teaches you humanity, plain and simple. It teaches you that nobody has any idea what’s going on (because in the grand scheme of things, even 80-year-olds pretty much just got here), and that because of that, we may want to deal a little bit more kindly with one another.
"Do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over.”
The Brothers Karamazov is the last novel Dostoyevsky ever wrote, and one of the absolute best books ever written, I believe.
In fact, I took the pseudonym "Karamazov" from this very book, mostly because of the quote above, which is a thought that has guided my thinking from the very first time I ever read the book.
The book itself is about the three Karamazov sons and the murder of their father. Each brother is wildly different from the others, and each personifies disparate themes that Dostoevsky explores in the novel, including love, religion, nihilism, free will and morality.
It’s a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, a sociological study, and an earnest, brutally honest existential search for the answers at the core of human existence. It’s all of those thing. It’s more than that. It’s everything, and it’s incredible.
Difficulty Rating: Hard
Why It’ll Teach You More Than 1,000 Books: What won’t this book teach you???
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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