Johnny Carson 1984 Confession of an Economic Hitman Kicking Through the Ashes Feed The Beast The Chitlin' Circuit Callus On My Soul Cheat: A Man's Guide to Infidelity Among the Thugs The Count of Monte Cristo The Westies Sweet Child of Mine: How I Lost My Son to Guns N' Roses My Appetite for Destruction: Sex & Drugs & Guns N' Roses Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN Becoming Richard Pryor The Bible Flag of Our Fathers

Falling Upward by Richard Rohr Everything Belongs by RR Love Wins by Rob Bell What We Talk About by Rob Bell Be Here Now by Ram Dass Grist for the Mill by Ram Dass The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment by Golas The Power of Myth (the book) by Joseph Campbell and Richard Moyers

Most books back then were awful and most books now are awful. The classics stayed on. Reading modern books is like you went panning for gold and had to go through a bunch of rocks to find one single lump of coal. Or, the way I do it, you just go into the store and they give you big bars of gold from the old days and you read those.

The best non-fiction I've read is anything by Joseph Campbell. And probably the best fiction I've ever read was a Pulitzer Prize winning book called INDEPENDENCE DAY by Richard Ford.

The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter I watched the Watergate hearings while I was a boy in Canada. They said Nixon was the ultimate politician, but no: He was stiff, he’d sweat, he was human, a tragic figure who got caught up in his own insecurities. My favorite part [in these tapes] is the banality: Nixon talks about his mother-in-law making this pie he f—–g hates, and all these guys going, “Yessir!” Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell I love oral histories. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer who’d go around a city and write about interesting people he’d met, from the mayor to the lowest bum. He was probably the first to do New Journalism, [before] Gay Talese. Hi...[Read more]

I loved the Great Gatsby. I can’t believe they did it in 3D. What the fuck? Dahrma bums. these are just random. My Travels with Charlie. Grapes of Wrath. Crime and Punishment. Slaughterhouse 5. All vonugut when i was a youngster. Catcher in the Rye. 9 Stories. SOmething by Thomas Mann I can’t remember. Heart of Darkness. I claudius. The Golden Ass. Hercules my shipmate. Fire from Heaven. Persian boy. The chronicles of narnia when I was a kid and now my daughters. TR biography. lots others.

The Marx Brothers book is a great book. Before that, I read another book about comedy — I think I’m doing this because it gives me that feeling I’m missing, of being around. When you’re in comedy, you’re like a tropical fish in an aquarium, or at least I am. That’s my life. If you said to a tropical fish, Would you like to go anyplace else, he’s going to go: You know what, I think I’d like to just stay here, I like the aquarium. So I am a tropical fish in an aquarium. And since I can’t go onstage and hang around other comedians, I read about them. So there’s this other book I just found on my bookshelf — I bought it, and never read it — it’s called “Seriously Funny,” by Gerald Nachman. This ...[Read more]

Read Sam Lipsyte's The Ask.

Well, my favorite author is Mark Twain. He’s smart, and funny. Huckleberry Finn, especially the chapter all the purists hate, in which Tom Sawyer stages an elaborate rescue of Jim, is a writer having as much fun as possible. But my favorite book is a two-parter by Laurens Van Der Post, A Story Like The Wind and A Far Off Place. My favorite book used to be The Plague by Albert Camus.

Chester Himes! Thomas Pynchon (obviosuly) john o'hara..John Steinbeck...George Orwell....Shirley Jackson! Caroline Blackwood

Cervantes. I found Don Quixote transformative. I mean, I never read anything like that before. Well, I'm reading this norwegian guy and I can't remember his goddamn name. I'm trying to remember! I know what it's called, the book is called My Struggle. By Karl Ove Knausgaard. No wonder I couldn't remember it. The title is even very daring, but it's an unflinching look into mortality, which I like to do. I like to look into mortality, in an unflinching manner. Some days, I'll flinch. Some days I'll be honest with you Victoria, I'll stare into my own mortality in that abyss. I'll flinch. But I can't say the same for Horgalveyeysbadlobad. I'm sure he flinches too, but he writes it down and pret...[Read more]

1. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. 2. Sabbath's Theater, by Philip Roth. 3. Candy, by Terry Southern & Mason Hoffenberg. 4. Mating, by Norman Rush.

Well, I read 2 books at once. I just started a biography of John Wayne and it's terrific. And I read every crime novel by Michael Connelly, who I think is the best. And a brilliant book I just finished was One Summer. It detailed life in America in 1927. It's an amazing read, One Summer.

I like to read funny books. I said Confederacy already but Don Quixote is funny and Lolita is funny. Just read Richard Price The Whites (not funny) but it was great.

codependent no more, leaving the enchanted forest, the language of letting go, drama of the gifted child, IM FINE...AND OTHER LIES

My favorite memoir is Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up.” I think that’s the best book about being a comedian, written by a comedian, ever done.

The stack next to my bed is embarrassingly High. the one on my desk right now is "3 Ingredient Cocktails" by Robert Simonson. Great Read!

I have an obsession with books about kids with Asperger’s syndrome. I like the way they think — it suits me. The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon is great. That and [Jonathan Safran Foer’s] Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close — they’re on a separate bookshelf. They don’t understand what the other books are saying by their facial expressions, but they’re perfectly lined-up.

Well, I like anything that's written by Leo Tolstoy, or Gogol, my favorite is War & Peace.

Bonfire of the Vanities.