On January 1, 2026, Andrew Klavan published a reflective episode of The Andrew Klavan Show titled “The Authors Whose Work You Need To Read,” a New Year’s message that doubles as a call to rediscover the books that shaped Western thought. The episode, available through Klavan’s podcast feed and Daily Wire channels, sketches how literature forged his convictions about truth, freedom, and moral seriousness.
Klavan walks listeners through the writers who changed him—men and women who wrestled honestly with the human condition instead of vending fashionable grievances. He discusses how those texts informed his worldview and why, at the start of a new year, turning back to solid books matters more than ever.
The author names Klavan cites are not woke-era self-help pamphlets but the heavyweights: Dostoevsky and others who probe conscience, along with modern thinkers like Douglas Murray who refuse to bow to the latest herd mentality. Klavan even admits to reading exceptionally widely — finishing roughly sixty books a year — a practice that stands in stark contrast to the skim-and-scroll culture the Left promotes.
This episode is more than literary recommendation; it is a rebuke. Conservatives who care about the survival of our culture should hear Klavan’s point plainly: serious literature habituates the mind to deliberation, courage, and responsibility — virtues that are being hollowed out by institutions that prefer political slogans to moral formation. That decay didn’t happen by accident; it’s the predictable consequence of elevating ideology over character.
Klavan’s platform gives him reach because he is not just a commentator but a proven writer who has spent decades in the trenches of storytelling and cultural criticism. His career spans award-winning crime novels and a steady presence at outlets that resist the cultural left’s capture of publishing and academia, and he brings that credibility to his plea for literary seriousness.
Listen to Klavan and you’ll notice another conservative truth: the right still produces thinkers who know history, beauty, and the moral imagination matter. While legacy media churns out hollow spectacles and lecture-hall dogma, alternative voices like Klavan’s keep a tether to the literary tradition that made Western civilization worth defending. If you love your country, you should love the literature that made its virtues possible.
So on this New Year, don’t surrender cultural ground to the grifters and commissars who traffic in outrage and forgetfulness. Pick up a substantial book, support honest commentators who lift the conversation, and teach the next generation to value truth over trendiness. Klavan’s episode is a reminder and an invitation — one conservatives should accept without apology.
