Kate Winslet's Reading List

"This story seeps into your insides—the way Zola describes the intensity of the relationship between a woman and the man with whom she has an affair. When you meet Thérèse, she barely speaks. She’s so numb and stagnant. I think we’ve all been in those emotional places at one time or another. That lack of courage, lack of confidence, has always profoundly disturbed me. She is transformed through passion and desperation. She and Laurent love each other so much that everything else fades away. Th..."

"Food is one of the sexiest, most glorious pleasures that can possibly be had. I happen to love preparing it, I love eating it, I love sharing it. I cannot stand cookbooks that don’t have pictures. You want to have evidence that this is going to be delicious. I love Giorgio’s book because where there’s a recipe, there’s a picture of it. It’s full of his love of food, the various taste sensations he’s experienced throughout his life, recipes, and pages of ingredients. I actually know this famil..."

"Frank and April Wheeler meet in New York. He has bohemian ideas; she is a woman who believed that she was going to be something special among a group of special people. After they move to the suburbs, you see quite clearly the isolation they feel once severed from the city. In the moments when the two are happy, you see how happiness can be reignited in a relationship that’s starting to go sour, but they insist on seeing themselves as a kind of golden couple, destined for a more glamorous lif..."

"My copy is covered in splotches and coffee rings—it literally goes everywhere with me. I found it through my sister, whose son is two months younger than my daughter. He had allergies that manifested in chronic eczema, and Burney helped her figure out what he might be intolerant of. Then my daughter got whooping cough, even though she’d been vaccinated. So I thought, Hang on, I need to know more . I think every parent has a different theory about parenting, and we live in a world where one da..."

"This novel begins with two young boys playing at the edge of a lake, and one drowns. That event influences everything to come for the survivor—his relationships, his fear of love, his failure to trust. I read the book a long time ago, but one thing has stayed with me: the way a trauma in childhood—though the memory is so blurred and disjointed—can affect us deeply without our even realizing it."