There’s a particular intimacy to hearing about someone’s favorite book. Here, 10 actors, authors, and artists of all kinds share the 2024 reads—new and old—that they couldn’t get out of their heads.
LUPITA NYONG’O
ACTOR, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE
“I love that world,” says the actor of Brian K. Vaughan’s space fantasy comic, Saga—one of her frequent rereads. “He writes in such a clipped way, and there’s a vibe to his writing that I really enjoy.”
The Pod Save America cohost says Eric Klinenberg’s 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed gave him hope of regaining “the sense of solidarity and community we lost” in the pandemic.
The self-described “back catalog kind of girl” and founder of the editorial platform Service95 is “obsessed” with George Orwell’s 1984: “It could have been written as a comment on our world today.”
For the FiveThirtyEight founder, Ben Smith’s Traffic is “the best history I’ve read of the online content game and the personalities who are attracted to it, and the frequent missteps they’ve made” chasing “eyeballs and page views.”
AMANDA GORMAN
POET, “THIS SACRED SCENE”
Burnout by sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski served, for the country’s first youth poet laureate, as “a fun but deeply science-based book that can help transform your life and the decisions you make.”
How to “choose just one book?” the botanist asks. Still, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, a “powerful story” of Indigenous women’s identity and their cultural plants, “lifts me up.”
ANNA WEYANT
ARTIST, “WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLVES?”
“I adore Setsuko’s work,” says the painter. Into Nature shows “how she creates her beautiful sculptures and paintings” through installation images and personal photos.
KAVEH AKBAR
AUTHOR, MARTYR!
The poet and novelist says of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living: “The joy in Tuffaha’s poems is always a joy made wise by having known profound grief; their rage arises from a surfeit of tenderness.”
KAIA GERBER
ACTOR, SATURDAY NIGHT
In Dear Dickhead, Virginie Despentes “casually swings around big ideas of anti-wokeness, gender, addiction,” and more, says the cofounder of the reading platform Library Science.
LAURA RAMOSO
COMEDIAN, SIT UP STRAIGHT TOUR
Despite being “not typically a self-help kind of reader,” the comedian says Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is her “favorite book of all time.” It’s “kind of like my Bible…except with a lot more swearing.”
