Owen Wilson's Reading List

"I like the part where he runs into this guy, Walter Luckett, at a bar. He talks about the other times he’s run into him. And he says, There’s one time when he sat down, and after we exchanged a few things, it went into this horrible silence of us just staring at each other – it went on for five minutes or so until he got up and left without saying a word."

"I love the part where Huck and Jim get separated on the raft. There’s a storm and now the storm’s kind of over, and it’s still not quite dawn, and Huck gets back on the raft, and then decides that he’s going to play a joke on Jim as it gets light. Jim’s like, ‘My God, you’re here, you’re back!’ And Huck’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he’s like, ‘We got separated,’ and Huck’s like, ‘I’ve been here the whole night – you must have had a dream.’ And he’s like, ‘How could I dream all of..."

"It’s a first-person account by Nando Parrado, the guy who was responsible for getting them out. He lost his mom and his sister on the plane, and what kept him going was thinking about his father waiting, having lost his mother and his daughter. There’s a spiritual element to the book that I appreciated. It’s very moving."

"Churchill has this quote about World War Two, that it was ‘won with American money, Russian blood, and British courage.’ In Stalingrad , you see a lot of that Russian blood."

"There are books that I read in a day, which is just great – a page-turner – and then there are some that I enjoy so much I don’t want them to end, and it seems like almost every page has something that’s really meaningful on it, that I want to think about, to savour."