People often follow the fashion and trends that are promoted by celebrities, it is a behaviour that has been passed by generations for years and it is how famous brands market their products, they rely on celebrities to wear or exhibit these products which ultimately leads to mass purchase from the public. Imagine if these famous figures were to use their platforms to promote books and reading?
We have chosen the favourite books of famous people to help you choose your next read.
Keira Knightley
“Jeanette Winterson—The Passion” is my favourite,” the actress told Glamour when asked about her favourite book. The novel follows a young French soldier in the Napoleonic army during 1805 as he takes charge of Napoleon’s personal larder.
Meghan Markle
The Wife of Prince Harry of Windsor, Markle has previously spoken about her love of “The Four Agreement”s by Don Miguel Ruiz. “My mum gave me a copy of this book when I was 13 years old. And to this day, I constantly circle back to the Don Miguel Ruiz classic for the simplest ways to simplify your life.” Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is also a fan of this one.
Michelle Obama
Michelle is a bestselling author in her own right thanks to her book Becoming, but she’s happy to shout out other authors, too. “One of the books that I loved – one of the first books that I loved and read cover to cover in one day – not because anybody made me read it but because the book was good – it was a book called “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison,” she said.
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway once said “there is no friend as loyal as a book,” and in a 1935 piece published in Esquire, he laid out a list of a few friends he said he would “rather read again for the first time … than have an assured income of a million dollars a year.” They included, he wrote, “Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman’s Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov, Hail and Farewell, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Vladimir Nabokov
During an interview with a French television station in the 1950s, the Lolita author shared a list of what he considered to be great literature: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, and “the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time.”
Jane Austen
The author of classics like “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma” was a voracious reader of books, poetry, and plays, including “The Corsair” by Lord Byron, “Madame de Genlis’s Olimpe”, and “Theophile”, and “The Mysteries of Udolpho” by Anne Radcliffe. A clear favourite, though, was Samuel Richardson’s book “Sir Charles Grandison.”
Mark Twain
Among his favourites, were “Thomas Carlyle” (The French Revolution only),” Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur”, and “Arabian Nights.”
F Scott Fitzgerald
In 1936—four years before his death—Fitzgerald was living at the Grove Park Inn in North Carolina. After he fired a gun as a suicide threat, the inn insisted that he be supervised by a nurse. While under Dorothy Richardson’s care, he provided her with a list of 22 books that he deemed “essential reading.” It included “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser, “The Life of Jesus” by Ernest Renan, Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, and “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson.
Samuel Beckett
Winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of “Waiting for Godot”, Beckett was always a private individual, even after garnering acclaim for his writing. In 2011, a volume of the author’s letters from 1941 to 1956 was published, giving the world a glimpse into his friendships and reading habits. Beckett wrote about many books in his correspondence: He described Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne as “lively stuff,” and that he liked The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger “more than anything for a long time.”
J.K. Rowling
The author of Harry Potter chose Jane Austen’s Emma. But one of her favourite books as a child was “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” by E. Nesbit, whom Rowling called “the children’s writer with whom I most identify … The Story of the Treasure Seekers was a breakthrough children’s book.
Maya Angelou
The poet and author had a number of favourite books, including Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities”, “the Bible”, “Look Homeward, Angel “by Thomas Wolfe, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, and Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”.
Virginia Woolf
Woolf often spoke of books she admired such as George Elliot’s “Middlemarch and William Wordsworth’s Prelude”.
Anne Hathaway
“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett is Anne Hathaway favorite book,”I wanted to be Mary Lennox so badly,” says Hathaway, pictured here in a scene from the film Becoming Jane. “I still have a soft spot for gardens and I’m always going off to see if I can find locked doors inside them.”
Will Smith
Will Smith mentioned that “The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho” is one of his favorites, “Coelho talks about the whole of the universe,” Smith says, “and it’s contained in one grain of sand. For years I’ve been saying that, and now it’s really starting to expose itself to me. My own grain of sand has been a story. The next 10 years will be my peak of innovation in film-making and just as a human being.”
Drew Barrymore
“Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E Frankl. “This book changed my life,” Barrymore says. “Frankl, a psychologist, and concentration camp survivor, shows how we can find the higher meaning in everything, even the most dire situations. He explains to the reader how to go about doing this, and he speaks with experience. This book defines inspiration.”
Other celebrities favorite books;
Stephen King: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
George Clooney : War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Steven Spielberg : The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Tom Hanks :In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
