Bert Kreischer's Reading List (From Ryan Holiday)

What It Covers

Ryan Holiday provides book recommendations to comedian Bert Kreischer at his Bastrop, Texas bookstore, selecting titles ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald's centennial edition of The Great Gatsby to Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, plus journaling strategies for tracking daily life and parenting moments.

Key Questions Answered

• •Literary rejection resilience: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by his agent and editor, leading to his suicide. His mother found the manuscript posthumously, got it published through Louisiana University Press via professor Walker Percy, and it won the Pulitzer Prize unchanged from its rejected form, demonstrating how subjective publishing judgments can be.
• •Daily journaling practice: Writing one sentence per day in a journal creates a sustainable ten-year practice that reveals life patterns and rhythms. Reviewing the same date across multiple years shows personal evolution, career milestones, and emotional cycles, making accountability manageable through minimal daily commitment rather than overwhelming long-form entries.
• •Reading progression strategy: Start with accessible narrative nonfiction like Pappyland by Wright Thompson before tackling dense historical works like The Fatal Shore. This warm-up approach builds reading momentum and confidence, making it easier to engage with challenging 600-page books that require sustained focus and have extensive contextual setup like 200-page prison system prologues.
• •Title creation methodology: The best book titles come from Hemingway works and Grateful Dead songs, with every phrase from the Gettysburg Address becoming its own book title. Building creative projects around compelling titles first, then developing content to match that concept, can drive more engaging work than starting with content and finding titles later.