I'm not a recommender of biographies either. Being successful at something doesn't qualify you for anything else. Why'd would a CEO or actor or sports start be able to suddenly write a great book? They wouldn't... unless they got a ghost writer in. Why would they know how they are successful? They wouldn't... unless they were being honest and said "it just happened, I had nothing to do with it" but that would be a short book.

I've read a few books by Dostoyevsky but not The Brothers Karamazov... it's long, but I'm a big fan of Russian literature, so it's on the list. He was a very clever dude and foresaw a lot of what was coming in the 20th century and wrote it into his stories. Everything I've read by him so far has been worth it.


I wouldn't recommend all the books I read in the past year to a random person. I had reasons for reading most of them.

Like the first two Fathers and Sons, and What is to be done. I only read them because I started reading Notes from the underground and didn't understand it without context. Turns out he wrote it in response to What is to be done, which in turn was written in response to Father's and Sons. So I stopped reading Notes from the underground and went back in literary time to get the context (no one else I've spoken to who read Notes from the underground has done this, so they are either Russian, have studied Russian history or are just pretending to understand it). And, honestly, they are awful books. Fathers and Sons is so long winded and in What is to be done the author is angry with you, the reader, and keeps chastising and belittling you... it's weird.

The Buddhist texts I'm reading to see if there is any wisdom there that can help me be slower to aggression. The ear of art and On writing I read because I have been on and off writing fiction over the past year or so.

That leaves:

The Gulag Archipelago - This is a very important document, is crazy long and also a great read. It goes into great historical, philosophical and psychological detail to demonstrate that communism, by design, always leads to the same place.

12 rules for life - Jordan Peterson is always engaging.

Fight Club - It's fun. Exactly like the movie. There's nothing new in the book that you don't already get from the movie.

Snow Crash - Really fun sci-fi. Weak ending. Was his first book, will probably be a movie starring Tom Cruise or some douche soon.

The foundation series - I never really enjoy Issac Asimov books. The ideas are great but he was a fucking terrible author. He relies so heavily on dialogue, in the end the whole thing is a series of longwinded unreslistic conversations. The only stuff by him I've actually enjoyed reading are his short stories, where you just get the cool idea in a story format but condensed into a few pages... Plus, so far in The Foundation Series he is writing checks on plot devices that I seriously doubt he can cash and will probably just leave them as brute danglers he expects the reader to simply accept.

I also read Slaughterhouse 5 recently. That's fucking amazing and set me off into reading Kurt Vonnegut stuff. He's great. Just watched a cool adaptation of his short 2081 that's available on YouTube.


But there are other books everyone should read that are simultaneously great literature, enjoyable, emotionally rich, deeply affecting and that contain concepts that have become a part of the lexicon of modern intellectuals like 1984 or The Catcher in The Rye or Catch 22 and so on.

Reading great works will hardly compare at all to reading self help nonsense.


Peace,

kowalski