Gwyneth Paltrow's Reading List

""Jane Eyre." I read it for the first time when I was 11 years old and have read it many times since. The longing and heartbreak and redemption. . . . Forget it."

"Roald Dahl's "Danny the Champion of the World" was the first little novel I read that I then read again and reread."

""The Catcher in the Rye," by J. D. Salinger, or "A Midsummer Night's Dream," by William Shakespeare. The former taught me how powerful a single voice can be."

""The Art of Simple Food," by Alice Waters."

"One of my all-time favorite novels is Crime and Punishment . I read it in high school, and for some terrifying reason, I really identified with Raskolnikov. It’s so funny, because he sort of behaves amorally, but he has an incredible sense of right and wrong. Obviously, I couldn’t identify with him as a killer, but I could understand what it means to know that something’s wrong but do it anyway. I was 17 when I read it, and the feeling of having betrayed one’s sense of right and wrong—and the..."

"The Catcher in the Rye was assigned reading for me in seventh grade. I think the reason everybody in the world connects with this book is because it’s about being isolated—just slightly outside of what you perceive to be the norm. It’s the ultimate story of being a little bit on the outside, and I think everybody sort of regards themselves as being that way. And the language! It was the first book I ever read that made me laugh out loud."