Bookseller One Grand Books has asked celebrities to name the ten titles they’d take to a desert island, and they’ve shared the results with Vulture. Below is Enough Said and The Land of Steady Habits director Nicole Holofcener’s list.
The most unique, hilarious, lovable, hateable, and tragic leading man. Ignatius and his world, including all of the thoroughly entertaining, deranged characters, made me love this book very, very much. Ignatius in the Levy Pants factory is one of my favorite things in life.
A wonderful story about growing up with a severely limited, yet fascinating and eccentric family. It’s very funny and sad, and most of the scenes are unforgettable. Some of them are so hard to believe — but they’re real — and that makes the story even richer.
A surreal world of characters trapped in a house, the book felt more like a dream than a story. I loved it because it was so different from anything else I ever read. I was never particularly interested in opera, but this story swept me away.
So beautiful and intimate, written with such compassion.
I keep buying this book because I can never find my various copies (I think I’ve lent them all out). Thank you, Anne Lamott, for always making me laugh when I can’t write and my head won’t shut up.
A relationship between a brother and a sister that spoke to me in so many ways. They have a very unique relationship and I just love well-written books about a family’s unhealthy dynamics.
This book led me to all of her others, and for that I am forever grateful. Her stories are cruel and sad and funny and very hard to put down. Highsmith has a very original perspective on the world — and it’s not pretty. Her work is filled with fascinating sociopaths and lonely eccentrics, regular people like us revealing themselves to be sick or tortured in a variety of ways. She kind of feels like a sociologist; one who draws deeply dark and creepy conclusions.
It is rare to find a book about the current life of an old and dying man written with this much grace, beauty, and subtlety.
Yes, they’re technically three books, but not really. The trilogy introduced me to this brilliant and hilarious Buddha man, who was like no one else on this planet. His philosophy about life impacted me a great deal when I was in my 20s and trying to figure things out.
The darkest, most disturbing book that enthralled me as a teenager. Dostoevsky brings the reader inside the mind of a seemly normal person who becomes tortured and ultimately ruined by a single act. Also, I was in love with the poor, tragic Raskolnikov, and I think I still am.