Michael J Fox's Reading List

"Amor Towles's prose, pacing and character development are unrivaled. His work evokes a rare and unfailingly beautiful sense of longing."

"I have to point to Jack Finney's books, especially Time and Again, in which the low-tech Dakota-building-as-time-machine device is particularly genius."

"Matthew Perry's Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was heartbreaking and terrifying."

"The Book of Sheen was an equally gripping cautionary tale, and surprisingly one of the funniest memoirs I've ever read. Charlie's just that good and deliciously twisted."

"In Just Kids, a document of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, she proved that she's a writer of towering talent."

"It’s kind of surprising for someone who’s a self-described optimist to love this apocalyptic road story so much. But McCarthy captures the step-in-front-of-a-train, protect-at-all-costs mind-set of a father and transfers it to the starkest possible context."

"This is a book I wanted to option for a film. The narrator is a young man in early 20th-century Newfoundland who has killed an evil lighthouse keeper. He’s such a gentle soul that he never participated in the local custom of hunting birds, but instead chose to paint them. His story is one of redemption through art, and it’s helped get me through some tough periods. Norman’s hero, faced with a difficult situation, reacts badly, but it gives him the opportunity to evolve in ways he otherwise wo..."

"Chabon is so brilliant. I don’t often fall for epics, but Chabon’s award-winning novel about two comic-book artists is a story about two very personal odysseys, told on an epic scale."

"This book was my ­introduction to the idea of a journalist responding to people and situations we couldn’t trust by deliberately delivering writing you couldn’t trust. To me, as a teenager, Thompson seemed dangerous, and the things he was writing about were dark and twisted. Yet there was something reassuring in the fact that the book existed."

"A celebration of human dignity, and an examination of loyalty and grace in the face of persecution and ignorance. Though I’m obviously no giant, I always identified with Lennie more than with George. We’re all both, of course, which is why the novella is such a towering achievement."

"Biskind’s book documents a period in filmmaking that was formative for me. The films made in the ’60s and ’70s by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Robert Towne, and Hal Ashby represented such a leap forward from just a decade earlier. They shook up the way we all look at movies."