Natalie Portman's Reading List

Natalie Portman is an Academy-Award winning actress, filmmaker, and activist. She first gained recognition for her role in the 1994 movie Leon, and has since starred in many iconic films, such as Black Swan, V for Vendetta, and Star Wars prequels. In 2011, she won an Oscar for her performance in the drama Black Swan.

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Favorite books (2022)

Favorite books recommended by Natalie Portman, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/natalie-portman-favorite-books/.

Source: radicalreads.com

The Ministry of Special Cases

Nathan Englander · Buy on Amazon

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth..."

Sun Under Wo od

Robert Hass · Buy on Amazon

"In college, I took a poetry class with Jorie Graham, an amazing poet. She directed me to Hass, and his stuff moved me so much. His writing is very American, spare, clean. And manly. There’s a ruggedness to his poems. One in particular I’ve always loved is called ‘Dragonflies Mating.’ It combines a sense of abandonment in childhood with natural images. I don’t even know exactly what it means, but I think that’s what poetry does—it evokes all these feelings without our really understanding why..."

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell · 2004 · Buy on Amazon

"This was the present I gave everyone I knew for three years. It’s six different stories told in different time periods and genres: One is historical fiction, another is a ’70s thriller mystery, the sixth is a postapocalyptic story. It’s one of the most beautiful, entertaining, challenging books—something that takes all your attention. I think the stories are meditations on violence, specifically the necessity of violence. The book ends with a beautiful exchange: ‘…only as you gasp your dying..."

What Is the What

Dave Eggers · 2006 · Buy on Amazon

"I read about Sudan every day, and I didn’t understand what was going on there until this book. Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who walked across the country, the largest in Africa. And then Deng spent 13 years in refugee camps before being resettled in Atlanta. It’s a powerful story of what he survived. There are lighter moments in the book: He and his roommates buy a tampon box because they think it’s so pretty. And there are less-kind inst..."

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz · Buy on Amazon

"Essentially an autobiography tracing the author’s own family’s move from Europe to what is now Israel and the disappointment of immigration. His mother killed herself, and he’s spent much of his life creating scenarios of why that happened. The process of meditating on her life makes him into a writer. The book is also about the birth of a language. He talks about his great-uncle, who was one of the architects of modern Hebrew, and how there didn’t used to be a word for shirt until he created..."

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