Chris Pine's Reading List

"Dark, too. But it’s a bit like Apocalypse Now ."

"It’s so tremendous in its depth, and the layers of these people’s lives that it peels back. Mailer can’t help but fall in love a bit with the protagonist, who’s a killer. He finds the strange brilliance and charisma and perhaps sociopathy of his primary character, and how he twists the lives of the people around him, and he becomes both tragic and awful and worthy of compassion and empathy, like any normal human being. So, it’s really complicated. Brings up a lot as you read it."

"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."

"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. Maybe the best 40 pages I’ve ever read. Sinatra, Toots Shor, and fucking J. Edgar Hoover. It’s the weirdest trio."

"I love Dickens. I read Bleak House when I was like 14, and it always stayed with me. I hadn’t read Dickens since. And Tale of Two Cities I thought was going to be some giant book—which it’s actually not. He’s the master of the run-on sentence and the parenthetical, but also, he’s so fucking funny—still. Just like Mark Twain. But also, Tale of Two Cities is so relevant to America right now. I think we all need to read this book, because this is about how revolutions happen and how ugly they ar..."