11 celebrity-approved books to add to your autumn reading list

Ever wondered what titles are stacked up on your favourite celebrity’s nightstand? I have. Probably a bit too frequently.

Whether you look up to them in awe or have developed a somewhat worrying parasocial relationship with them, you’re going to gravitate towards their recommendations. Given that they’re known for creating great art, it makes sense that the art that informs their own is of an exceptional standard.

Since not everyone has time to helm their very own book club, one literary lover has dedicated a whole Instagram account — celeb book recs — to scoping out celebrity-approved titles that have either been mentioned in interviews or shared in photos online. Not all heroes wear capes.

So, here are 11 titles carrying an A-list seal of approval to add to your autumn reading list…

Just Kids, by Patti Smith

This particular title appeared a lot. Last summer, the account ranked the most popular book choice featured so far, and Ms. Patti Smith had been name checked by everyone from Kristen Stewart and Florence Welsh to Dakota Johnson and Anya Taylor-Joy. The title was also picked as the Service 95 — an editorial platform founded by Dua Lipa — September book club title, and you simply have to listen to the conversation between Lipa and Smith.

Perhaps one of the most popular memoirs ever published, Just Kids documents Patti Smith’s relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. “I didn’t write it to be cathartic,” she noted. “I wrote it because Robert asked me to… Our relationship was such that I knew what he would want and the quality of what he deserved.”

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

In the same round-up of most-recommended titles, A Little Life came second only to Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Kaia Gerber, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Dynevor are among those who recommended it, with Sex Education’s Emma Mackey being quoted as having said it’s “a book to get lost in”, while Chris Pine says it made him cry, which are both, from what I gather, extreme understatements.

I picked this one up about a month ago, and BookTok promptly scared me out of continuing with it, with many citing it as one of the most emotionally distressing books they’ve read, and others saying it’s about 800 pages of pure trauma porn. Now, as I said, I haven’t gone back to it just yet, but if all these celebrities can make it through, surely I can too. The story tracks the lives of four classmates from a small Massachusetts college as they move to New York and begin their lives.

The Idiot, by Elif Batuman

According to Phoebe Bridgers, The Idiot is not a book to be judged on its plot. “The story [is] of a girl who has a crush at school,” the singer said. “But the writing is better than Salinger.” Extremely high praise indeed. The Bear’s Ayo Edibiri says it’s one of her favourite books, and Greta Gerwig says: “[Elif Batuman] accomplishes in this novel what I’m always trying to do in film: make the mundane extraordinary not by adorning it but by telling it as it is.

Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann

According to an instalment of Elle’s ‘Shelf Life’ series, Ms Aubrey Plaza never returned Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls to her local library. An iconic novel that was made into a film the following year, and as of 2016, it sold more than 31 million copies, making it one of the all-time best-selling fictional works in publishing history.

Dolls: red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight for Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, it doesn’t matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three women become best friends when they are young and struggling in New York City and then climb to the top of the entertainment industry — only to find that there is no place left to go but down — into the Valley of the Dolls.

“It combines deadpan humour with romantic yearning and makes you want to read more novels and maybe also try to learn Russian.” I am immediately sold. It’s described as a semi-autobiographical novel following a college freshman, Selin, attending Harvard University in the 1990s.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

Celebrities are obsessed with recommending Joan Didion books, and while The White Album and Blue Nights both appeared semi-regularly, it was The Year of Magical Thinking that was recommended most frequently. Mr Harry Styles says it was the first book he read twice, which will give us something to talk about when we inevitably meet, and the rest will be history.

The book is an account of the year following the death of Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, that was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. It deals with grief and healing so incredibly beautiful. This will be an extremely poignant read for anyone who has lost someone close to them.

The Girls, by Emma Cline

As any Midsommar fans may have figured, it seems like Florence Pugh is quite intrigued by cults. Of The Girls, she said: “I really loved the way bodies are described and the difference that one summer can make when going through puberty.”

Set in Northern California at the end of the 1960s, the book follows a teenage girl as she is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, she doesn’t realise how close she’s coming to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo

If you were wondering what Natalie Portman and I have in common, it’s that Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other was our top book of 2020 on Good Reads. Well, that and our incredible beauty and rapturous talent, of coures. Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones also loved it, saying it’s “one of the most powerful, honest, funny, and moving pieces of writing” she’s ever read.

It follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades, and was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. Incredibly good company to be in.

Amateur, by Thomas Page McBee

Of this book, Elliot Page says: “This memoir is such an important piece of trans literature to support and one that spoke to me deeply.” Described as a “no-holds-barred examination of masculinity”, this is one piece of writing that we all ought to add to our reading lists.

Thomas McBee, a trans man, sets out to uncover what makes a man—and what being a “good” man even means—through his experience training for and fighting in a charity boxing match at Madison Square Garden. A self-described “amateur” at masculinity, McBee embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of gender in society, examining sexism, toxic masculinity, and privilege. As he questions the limitations of gender roles and the roots of masculine aggression, he finds intimacy, hope, and even love in the experience of boxing and in his role as a man in the world – despite personal history and cultural expectations.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Another tome that comes highly recommended is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi believes it to be the author’s best work, saying that he would simply “die to see that as a movie.” Described by many as essential reading, the novel was first published in 1992 and has lost none of its original zeal.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality, they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

Helter Skelter, by Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi

Barbie herself, Margot Robbie, said that this true story of The Manson Murders has a special place in her heart. Following the release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in conversation with director Quentin Tarantino, the actress told Vogue that she and a friend “used to drive up to Cielo Drive [where the Manson Tate murders took place] and read Helter Skelter out loud.” Eerie.

The Helter Skelter scenario is an apocalyptic vision that was supposedly embraced by Charles Manson and members of his so-called Family. At the trial of Manson and three others for the Tate–LaBianca murders, the prosecution presented it as motivating the crimes and as an aspect of the case for conspiracy. Through interviews and autobiographies, former Family members related what they had witnessed and experienced.

Dante’s Inferno

Last month, Hozier released his latest album entitled Unreal Unearth, and revealed that he followed the framework of Dante Alighieri’s famous poem Inferno — part one of the 14th-century epic Divine Comedy narrating Dante’s journey through Hell and its depicted nine circles — for the record.

“It’s a way that I could process some of my personal experiences in that period of the pandemic and to credit walking through a very changing time, a very challenging time for me,” he told Rolling Stone. “I think we all walked, individually, our own path through that pandemic, and we all found ourselves in very strange circumstances where things changed or we were confronted with things that weren’t working for us. We lost something, whatever it is, and we came out the other side.”

Featured image via @dualipa on Instagram