Pine: Berlin Noir I read a little while ago, but I fucking love it. Bernie Gunther—he’s a detective in Nazi Germany. It’s interesting to get a sense of what it’s like to be a normal person inside a fascist thing.

Pine: And then Colm Toibin [points to The Master and The Magician.] I read these back-to-back. These are fictional accounts—one’s of Thomas Mann…

Pine: And then Colm Toibin [points to The Master and The Magician.] I read these back-to-back. These are fictional accounts—one’s of Thomas Mann…

I read Bleak House when I was like 14, and it always stayed with me. I hadn’t read Dickens since.

Pine: And in the same vein, A Tale of Two Cities. I love Dickens.

Pine: Master of Souls, Irène Némirovsky. I think she was a Polish emigre to France, pre-World War II, and then got swept up in the camps and died. She wrote the Suite Francaise, these two novels that were rediscovered after her death. Master of Souls is a great parable about greed, the need for more, ambition. It’s beautiful and short and quite good.

Pine: Master of Souls, Irène Némirovsky. I think she was a Polish emigre to France, pre-World War II, and then got swept up in the camps and died. She wrote the Suite Francaise, these two novels that were rediscovered after her death. Master of Souls is a great parable about greed, the need for more, ambition. It’s beautiful and short and quite good.

Pine: I went from that to Underworld. DeLillo’s language is like a really, really dense luminescent spiderweb. It can go particular and then it can go into graphic abstraction in the course of a paragraph. The first forty pages, where they’re at the baseball game, are unbelievable.

Pine: And then Capote’s In Cold Blood. Which is a fucking masterpiece, in the same vein—it humanizes these awful people in a way that’s difficult for your brain, your moral brain, to deal with. So that was great.

It was just a trip to Skylight Books, in Los Feliz. I found The Executioner’s Song. I saw that it won the Pulitzer. And I was like, well, I need that.

Pine: I just went through a huge Norman Mailer phase. I read The Naked and the Dead, which he wrote when he was fucking twenty-five. His insight into the human mind and the psyche, and insight into a soldier, is profound.

Pine: Michael Herr’s Dispatches is dark, too. But it’s a bit like Apocalypse Now.

I haven’t read it. I’ve heard it’s bleak.It’s really an interesting story, until it just doesn’t end up anywhere you want it to end up. After spending some time with this protagonist, you’re like, “Please succeed, please succeed,” and then—no. It didn’t get me as angry as A Little Life, which left me apoplectic in my anger—it’s just so unrelentingly dark. Copenhagen—at least it’s shorter.

He wrote a nonfiction book called What It Is Like to Go to War, which will blow your fucking mind. But Matterhorn is a seven-hundred-page novel about Vietnam, and the drudgery and the impersonalization of war. Essentially, it’s about how we live alone, and we die alone.

Pine: It reminded me, oddly, of this book, Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes.

Pine: I bought this a long time ago at my favorite bookstore in London—Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk. She won the Nobel for Books of Jacob, which I have yet to read.

Chris Pine: This is what I’m reading right now. Lady Joker, Volume 2, by Kaoru Takemura. She’s like the grande dame of Japanese detective fiction.