John Cusack's Reading List

"They say Hunter walked the surface of the Earth looking for an honest man and came up wanting. I’d never seen politics approached with this kind of candor or insight or capacity for looking at the underbelly of it. During the 1972 presidential campaign, he did a series of articles for Rolling Stone that are collected here. His mixture of artistic sensibilities with journalistic excellence, all to find the core of truth—I thought that was pretty incredible. Mostly, I admired the ferocity of Hu..."

"I really don’t know what I could say about this book that hasn’t already been said. I read it in high school English class, and it was the first time I went to school and was interested in what anyone had to say. The story leaped off the page; it made me confront my own fears and prejudices. I went home and started reading and didn’t stop until the next morning. I’d never had that experience. I’d never been moved that way, felt that sort of pathos or compassion. That moment—the first time you..."

"When Bob Dylan’s memoir came out, I had a feeling similar to the one I had with Mockingbird , because I knew if I wasn’t careful, I’d read the whole thing at once. So I was like a drug addict—I would put it away, ration my supply, read ten or 15 pages, and then just stop. Here’s this guy who’s taking you through a history of pop culture and rock ‘n’ roll, giving you little glimpses into what it felt like to be looking from the inside out. As an extended piece of poetry, it’s wonderful. The bo..."

"Seldes had a fantastic integrity of character and was one of the great muckraking journalists; he wrote Witness to a Century. I put him with Studs Terkel or Howard Zinn, in that tradition of historians who speak truth to power. I read and reread this collection of quotes for years. It was a road map to the world of literature, to philosophers and thinkers, to poets and writers. If I saw a play or a film or a book about a certain subject and I wanted to know more, I’d go to this collection for..."

"I’ve been friends with Naomi for a while, and I was lucky enough to read this as a galley, before it was published. I think that she has the same ferocity as Hunter—a much different aesthetic and different goals, but they are both people who are going to look at hard truths. This is an alternate history of the past 35 years. Her position is that there has been a very open ideological war against the New Deal. She explores how ‘shocks’ such as Hurricane Katrina or political upheaval in South A..."

"It’s probably got as much insight and wizardry as any book I’ve ever come across. If you read nothing else, read chapter ten, ‘Spring Without End.'"