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My All-Time Favorite Novels · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to The Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've noticed a really interesting dynamic whenever you recommend books to people.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you have recommended books to people or recently received any book recommendations, but I noticed that there is an interesting dynamic.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what I'm talking about.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Most people don't get opinionated about nonfiction books on personal growth or business.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I can recommend a nonfiction book that I enjoyed, and most people will say, cool, I'll check that out.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: But there's something different that happens whenever you start recommending novels.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's a whole different story because people have very strong feelings about the stories and novels that they enjoyed.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the reason is because novels are really personal to us.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: We connect with certain stories and certain characters and certain novels because there's something very deep and significant within us that connects to those things.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Stories bypass logic and they get right to our hearts.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we will defend our favorite novels to the death.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's with some trepidation, I confess, that I share my seven favorite novels with you here on this episode.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe one or two of these will pique your interest.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Number one is The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, The Godfather is my all-time favorite novel, hands down, and it's very much a case where both the book and the movie that the book was based on are really, really fantastic and widely regarded as really, really excellent.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, most people think that The Godfather is a story about mobsters and crime and so forth, but that's really just the setting.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that The Godfather is really a story about family legacy, and that the central question that the book is asking is: are sons destined to become their fathers?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I will admit, and I will be the first to say this, that The Godfather is definitely not for kids.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And a couple of the storylines, and there are some scenes in the book that are unnecessarily salacious, and you can kind of tell that Mario Puzzo threw those in just because readers would want more of those things.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not really relevant to the story.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: But overall, The Godfather is a gripping page turner that somehow makes you sympathize with people who are doing really bad things.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that is storytelling at its finest because it makes you have empathy for bad people.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Novel number two is Last Night at the Lobster by Stuart O'Nan.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a funny story about how I came across this book.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Last year I went to Barnes Noble close to my house, and I wanted to scour the fiction section because I was looking specifically for a little short novel that would be kind of a palette cleanser because I read a lot of business stuff and I do a lot of ghostwriting for business clients.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so sometimes I just want something that's completely outside of the normal things that I read and think about on a daily basis.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I also wanted to read something by an author that I'd never heard of or read anything by them.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I picked up this book last night at The Lobster because the title and the cover art seemed to be really interesting.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And plus, the book was short.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I had no idea that the book would be this good and that it would put me in a funky mood for a couple days after I'd read it.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the story of this book focuses on the manager of a red lobster restaurant and the complicated thread of relationships that he has with his staff as well as his girlfriend.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: The restaurant's being shut down, and the whole story takes place basically in the span of one evening, and it's the last night in business for this particular Red Lobster.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it sounds kind of like a boring plot, but the plot is not really the point in Stuart O'Nan's books.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's really much more of a character study.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe this author has a real gift for setting the mood and making you empathize with quirky and damaged and eccentric characters.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And those are a lot of times the kind of stories that I love.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're up for a short book that is a great character study that is very melancholy, I think you'll really enjoy that book.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Novel number three is For One More Day by Mitch Album.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's interesting because I think that Mitch Album is in many ways the opposite of Stuart O'Nan.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas Stuart O'Nan spends a lot of time describing the settings that his characters inhabit.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Mitch Album is, I would say he's more of a sparse kind of storyteller.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate both approaches, I really do.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: For One More Day is a novel that asks the question what if you could go back and spend one more day with somebody that you've lost?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a really compelling premise that all of us can relate to because we we've all lost people in our lives that we truly loved.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this book really helped me to appreciate the people in my life that I get to enjoy in the here and now.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because one day, the truth is that we're all going to be gone and there won't be any more opportunities to spend time with them.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And just like the book Last Night at the Lobster, which was my novel number two, this book, For One More Day, left me in kind of a weird melancholy funk for a day or two after I finished it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, that's always a sign that a book impacted me deeply for some reason, and I need to spend some time thinking about why those themes move me so much.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I think you'll enjoy that book if you like short novels that are in that kind of parable or fantasy style.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Novel number four is completely different, and that is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I read this book for the first time back in 1995, not too long after it came out.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was on a summer-long mission trip to Ukraine, and I was in college at that point, and this fast-paced story about dinosaurs gave me some much-needed entertainment.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what was kind of a stressful summer because we were doing a lot of traveling and I was doing a lot of ministry stuff and so forth.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: We were in a foreign country, and you know how that goes.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of a recipe for feeling a lot of anxiety and stress.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was a wonderful mission trip, but man, I did need some entertainment that summer, and Jurassic Park gave it to me in spades.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the thing that I appreciated most about this story, and I appreciate this still, is that the science behind the concepts seemed really convincing.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, whenever you start Jurassic Park, you're not really sure if you're reading a novel or some kind of academic paper or report.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And even though it's been decades since this book came out, and science has advanced so much that parts of the book don't seem like science fiction anymore, I still think it's one of the most compelling novels that I've ever read.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking for something fun and entertaining, Jurassic Park is the way to go.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably seen the movie, but if you haven't read the book, I think the book's actually a lot better.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the book is, I mean, the movie is fantastic, but the book is even better.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Novel number five is Pet Cemetery by Stephen King.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is one of those Stephen King novels where you can read it on repeat and it really never seems to get old.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And even though you know how the story is going to play out, it's so fast-paced and so engrossing that you don't really care, you know, where the story's going.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I do want to admit that Stephen King has always been kind of hit or miss for me.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I really could not get into his Dark Tower books and and a lot of his more, I would call them his more bloated novels, which, you know, are like these big, huge doorstop type of novels.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think he's actually been as good of a writer since he had his accident.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Probably, what was it, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, something like that.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some people will vehemently disagree with me, but I really think that his best novels were the ones that he wrote in the 70s and 80s, you know, quite a few decades ago.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Just my opinion, your mileage may totally vary, and you may think that I'm wrong, and that's totally fine.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I do believe that Pet Cemetery is really a perfect novel because it's kind of creepy, but it's not too gory.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the ending of the novel is absolutely perfect.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I just love the way it ends.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's so absolutely perfect, and it is classic Stephen King.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking for something kind of creepy, but not crazy gory, and you like some of Stephen King's other stuff, but you've never read this, I think you'll really enjoy it.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Number six is No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, just like The Godfather, No Country for Old Men is one of those rare gems that's not only a great book, but it's also the basis for an equally great movie.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we could say the same for Jurassic Park, I think, as well.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe some of the, you know, a lot of these novels here on my list have something in common, which was uh I like the movie, but I also like the book quite a bit as well.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, No Country for Old Men, if you've never read it or seen the movie, it is a really weird off-beat story about a killer who takes people out with a cattle stun gun.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as weird as that sounds, it actually makes sense in the movie.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: You just kind of have to see the movie.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: But the plot of the movie is not really the point.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's really the way that Cormac McCarthy sets the mood and the tone, and he makes eccentric characters really, really compelling.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the odd things about this book, and he does this, I think in all his novels, is that he does not use traditional quotation marks for dialogue.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that really agitates some readers.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like it would be really frustrating, but it's funny how fast you actually get used to it.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And even when the dialogue is very short and it goes back and forth between characters, you don't really have any trouble following it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very interesting convention, or maybe I would call it a non-convention that he has in his writing.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I would say the central theme of No Country for Old Men, both the book and the movie, is it's all about the encroaching darkness of the world over the passage of time.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe this is more relevant than ever today because a lot of people feel like oh, the world's getting a little bit darker these days.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's what makes great books great, is when their themes are timeless.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I also want to say that just like Pet Cemetery, the ending of No Country for Old Men, where you have Sheriff Bell's monologue, is one of my favorite passages of dialogue in any novel that I've ever read.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's just fantastic.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've seen the movie, you know what that is because I'm pretty sure it's either verbatim from the book or it's very, very close to what's in the book.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just really, really perfect.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm going to wrap up here with novel number seven, which is not really a novel in the conventional sense, and this is Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Alan Moore was the writer, Dave Gibbons was the illustrator.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is not a traditional novel, as I mentioned, but this is rather a graphic novel that came out in the 1980s.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Watchmen is considered the most influential graphic novel of all time because it has mature storytelling, it has incredible writing and really, really complex themes.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really a quite a um quite a big break from the comic books as people had known them, you know, from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: This was a very, very mature kind of a comic book that was um 12 issues in total and was really, really complex in its storytelling.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the basic story here centers on a group of superheroes who changed the landscape of American history.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the deeper significance of Watchmen is that it's a brilliant deconstruction of the superhero genre.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So while it talks about superheroes, it's really deconstructing the whole idea of superheroes.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Watchmen, which I think came out in 1985, if I'm not mistaken, or somewhere right around there, this gave birth to the more gritty portrayals of superheroes that we've seen over the last few decades, particularly in comic books and the movies.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what I really appreciated most is how the main story is interwoven with other pieces, such as pieces written by the characters.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it also has this really interesting story within a story called Tales of the Black Freighter that takes place in a comic book that one of the main characters, well, that one of the side characters is reading.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the story that takes place in the comic book also ties directly into the main story, and in a way, it's a commentary on the main action of the story.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very multi-layered meta kind of a thing, which I find to be absolutely brilliant writing.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say that Watchmen is one of those things that you can read multiple times because you see more and more connections every time that you read it.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: So don't be fooled by the fact that this is a graphic novel, because um, if you like good writing, I think you'll really enjoy Watchmen.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there you have it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: These are my seven favorite novels, for better or for worse.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope that one or two of these seem interesting to you and that you check them out.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to spur your creativity even further, I have another book that I think you're going to enjoy, which is one of my own books.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's called The Artist Suitcase: 26 Essentials for the Creative Journey.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is a very short practical read about the qualities that sustain the creative life.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, in one of the chapters, I talk about old things, which refers to books and other things that were created decades ago, even hundreds of years ago, but still can inspire us today.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find a link for the artist suitcase book in the show notes.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I really hope that you'll check it out.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as always, my friend, thanks for listening.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Keep writing and keep showing up, and I'll see you tomorrow.