Jennifer Connelly's Reading List

"This is not particularly highbrow; it’s a little soap opera-ish. Thérèse has a dreary life with her husband and his mother in 19th-century Paris. She starts an affair with her husband’s coworker, and together they conspire to kill her husband. Toward the end of the story, the pair have exactly what they wanted—except now they can’t bear to be alone together. They feel as if her husband’s corpse is with them all the time. It’s just devastating, that discovery. I’ve always found Thérèse Raquin..."

"I would say I understand maybe three of the zillions of allusions in this book. Still, I find it such a remarkable thing. Ulysses is an epic that loosely follows The Odyssey , but it’s populated by modern people with all their foibles and misdemeanors. It’s so intricate—and as I said, so much of it is over my head—but I love the way Joyce talks about the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible.’ You shut your eyes, open them again, and find the world continues without your witnessing it. It’s a..."

"I am a huge fan of Virginia Woolf. I love the way she puts words together, and especially the way this book is structured. Two characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, are struggling with the aftereffects of World War I and, in a way, both searching for meaning in their lives. Early on, Clarissa thinks, ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ She uses all these exclamations and has this girlish way about her. For his part, Smith is running around rambling about universal love. He’s pass..."

"I think it’s important for kids to read, and Dr. Seuss’s books are great ones to start with. The Lorax is a cautionary tale about a creature who regrets having ruined the environment after inventing the Thneed, ‘a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!’ It’s about production and consumerism, and to me, it has really good politics for a children’s book."