- Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time.
And I should also give a shout-out to an excellent podcast he did with Sonia
Walger, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast.
She has guests pick their five favorite, most impactful books and so on.
You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life.
For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation.
But you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome.
Second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
Then Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Thin Red
Line by James Jones, and Middlemarch by George Eliot.
But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think,
if an alien came, what are some candidates for books
that you would recommend to them?
- Middlemarch. It's the best novel written in English.
War and Peace is one of the best novels written in Russian, I would argue.
I think both of those are...
Because if you've only got one book, you want a long book.
- Yeah, true.
- And then they're both books that kind of...
It's something I was always trying to put into games, and you know, that feeling
of all of life is here. You know, you've got love, death, violence, romance,
the whole human experience in different ways. So I think there's something amazing
about, you know, Vanity Fair, I used to love the novel, not the magazine.
Because same thing, all of life is here.
- You also spoke highly of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
- I was obsessed by them in my 20s.
- Yeah.
- Completely obsessed.
- As one must be.
- Yeah.
- Absolutely.
- At that age, and I think them as a double act is so amazing.
You know, one helped discover the other and then died first, and then suddenly
died in obscurity and then was rediscovered as a genius
while the other one was still alive and falling into decline,
I think their relationship is itself very novelistic.
- That, by the way, is a phenomenon of writing maybe no
longer, maybe still, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity.
All these writers who die in obscurity. Nobody knows them and they
become famous later. That is just so interesting. That's such an interesting...
You know, Franz Kafka.
Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burned,
like destroyed. So that, speaking of the critical
voice, and I think he's one of the,
one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course, the
dystopian novels are really interesting: 1984, Brave New World.
- Love 1984. Had never listened to it or read it, and then I
think I did it on Talking Book, or I maybe read it, I can't remember, during COVID.
I think I did both, became obsessed by it. And it's got the elements of that
creeping into A Bed of Paradise. But it's so good.
I hadn't realized how good it was.
- Yes.
- And it's so of the moment.
- It's almost like because of its fame, and...
it's almost like cliché, and you take away the character-
- Yeah, if it were English... And I remember the year 1984-
and you're like, "This is..." I remember the song. You know? It's just too much.
- Yeah. Too much.
- It can't be that good. And then it was that. I came to it completely cold, just, "Oh, I
should work my way through this 'cause it's another classic I haven't read." And then
it's incredible.
- And the book I've read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George Orwell.
I don't know why exactly, but the childlike fairy tale-telling of totalitarianism.
- Well, you grew up in a communist country.
- Yeah. Maybe that's it. The roots of it.
- You know, I remember, I was a kid in the Cold War in
London. And we were always terrified of Eastern Europeans, "You're gonna come and kill
us all." And then I ended up marrying a Pole. And I was... We were... And we had
Ukrainians, you know, who worked for us and worked with
us. And I was... We were sitting, a few years ago, sitting around a
campfire in Upstate New York, with the campfire built by
our old nanny's husband, who's Ukrainian, and he'd been in the Red
Army. I was like, history is so strange that you end up... The Red Army used to be the ultimate
enemy. And like, we're now just hanging out with... It's like, everything changes.
You think these things are permanent, and they're really not.
You know, and we face some of that now, where you think these structures are permanent, and they're
gonna change.
- And you also mentioned that the three great World War II books are The Thin Red
Line, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.
And The End of the Affair, Graham Greene. What makes for a great war book?
- I think World War II
is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously. And so you can get all these different
kinds of stories. And there's so many good... I was just trying to come up with a range
of one American, one British, one
Eastern European just to get different perspectives. But there's so
many amazing World War II books around all kinds of stories. I think
the most complete one, because it is this all of life being there,
probably is Life and Fate, which is amazing.
- It was written by Vasily Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand.
And there's also just a deep philosophical component.
- And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever
read. And it really, almost more than any other piece of art around the Holocaust,
made me feel
what you would feel like at that moment. I mean, it's just incredible piece of humanism.
- And also, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
- Yeah. Oh, yeah.
- It seems like that context reveals, in the most
pure way, human nature and like what kind of... You know, in Man's Search for
Meaning is when everything is taken from you, you know, the little
remains of love for, in this case, his wife...
is the thing that is a little flame that burns.
And let's say your Grossman is small acts of kindness,
is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.
- I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get... Obviously, it's in this
Stalinist period, and so they're all
losing... They all know that what they thought was going to be
wonderful about the revolution isn't going to happen. So everyone's
scared of being killed by Stalin 'cause it's post the purges. But then you get these
guys and they're trapped in a building, fighting in
Stalingrad. And so they know at this moment they're dead
anyway. And they get to live like pure, perfect
Marxist communists away from Stalin and all his nonsense. And I thought that
section's incredible 'cause you realize in some ways, in all of its horrors,
the most disappointing thing about the 20th century, in some ways, was the absolute
failure of communism. You know? 'Cause it was such a, you know, quote-unquote
beautiful idea and it just did not work time and time again.
And these people who fought for it and then saw it not
working, I think they're sort of fascinating characters. You know,
all of the revolutionaries from
1917 that were then killed by Stalin, which was all of them apart from
him, him and Lenin.
- And that was, you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism
like it's trivial, it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities.
But I don't think it's that trivial. It's this idealism of humans.
It's like, why, you know, why can't... Basically, why can't we all
get along? There's a real compassion behind it. There's real love. And what you realize is
there is... It's a real study, the 20th century, of human nature.
that, unfortunately, at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by
centralized power. So there's a dictator always, in that context,
given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and does the opposite
of what the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.
- Well, I think I thought a lot about that
then because I was taught by all these disappointed communists, you know?
After '89, all of these English communists, you know, were all like having to
access, discovering all these atrocities that happened. You know, so it always
fascinated me. And then you think about complexities or where one's own values are
in the modern moment. And I say, you know, without from every
and whether either of them, what we would call left now or call right now, does it
have any bearing on the sort of communist era of those words? And I would say probably
not. I think things have changed. But fundamentally, the one value that
I would think is worth fighting for is, whenever
either side starts to move towards thought control, move away.
That's never the right outcome. The never right outcome is, "Oh, you've
said the wrong thing. You should be removed now." That should never ever be
a thing we should lean towards.
- Yeah, it does seem like freedom, individual freedom, is a prerequisite for
- for happiness
- for happiness, and the flourishing of a larger society.
So there's, like you said, 1984 is pretty. I mean, it's a caricature.
- But it is brilliant.
- It's quite, it's actually also just a good story. That's my criticism of
Brave New World, it's just poorly written. But I like
Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century than does 1984. So,
- I don't know. I think 1984, with the fake wars, and the way that it revealed
everything in it was a setup for him.
There's something that if he could've seen the Internet. There's something of, it's like an
analog internet, that world they build around the main character.