Julia Roberts's Reading List

"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended..."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman . It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that pap..."

"Jeanette Winterson has written many fabulous books, and I just think, ‘ How does this woman sleep?’ This story is so intriguing. One of the things that’s amazing—I don’t know how far into the book I realized it—is that one of the main characters is referred to in a really unspecific way in terms of gender. But I don’t know if Winterson intends for people to know this before they read the book. It’s kind of like you choose what gender the narrator is. And she actually pulls this off without th..."

"This book was a gift. And when I first started reading it, I thought, ‘This is what happens when someone who doesn’t know you very well gives you a book.’ After the first two pages, I thought, ‘This is a little, um, different , taking place more than a thousand years ago and all.’ And then I was hooked. It was riveting—the wives of Jacob, telling biblical stories from their perspective. This isn’t my standard pick, and I don’t know if everybody would embrace it, but it’s just wonderful."