Looking for book recs? Here are what your favorite female celebrities are currently reading
Reese Witherspoon
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Reese Witherspoon has shown quite the knack for optioning bestselling titles and producing or starring in hit book-to-screen projects (Wild, Gone Girl, Big Little Lies, and soon, The Luckiest Girl Alive). Yesterday, she revealed the newest pick for her book club. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn is a historical novel about two women: Eve Gardiner, who was recruited to be part of the real-life Alice Network of spies in France during World War I, and Charlie, a pregnant and unwed American socialite who, when sent by her parents to France to have her “little problem” taken care of, goes on a search for the cousin whom she loved like a sister and had disappeared during the Nazi occupation. Should Witherspoon’s production company Pacific Standard also adapt this book into a film project, whom do you think should be cast for the two lead roles? And would Witherspoon herself be one of them?
Kate Beckinsale
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Kate Beckinsale’s recent reading material of choice is Roxane Gay’s searing memoir Hunger. In her latest book, the feminist writer admits to not having quite overcome her “unruly body and unruly appetites.” Diagnosed by her doctor as “super morbidly obese,” a medical term that she finds mean and dehumanizing, the 200-lb Gay presents a dissenting voice to the chorus of body positive platitudes that permeate the media. As she told Ira Glass in the beautiful and sobering This American Life episode “Tell Me I’m Fat“:
“It’s sobering to realize just how the past 25 years have just been all about my body. And that’s where I struggle with the fat acceptance movement. I think it’s wonderful, and I think it’s necessary and a necessary corrective.
“But not all of us of have been able to get to that space where we don’t care what other people think. I’m not all there yet, and I’m trying. But it’s just really hard to not care what people think, especially when they’re constantly telling you what they think.”
Gay is dissenting not simply to be contrarian, but to foster different types of honest conversations about the rampant fatphobia in general society. In turning her critical view on herself, she allows others to be equally authentic with themselves.
Lena Dunham
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Lena Dunham has been open about her health struggles, particularly with endometriosis, and her effort to make healthcare more accessible to women. Her latest medical episode happened in May, when she was rushed to the hospital after attending the Met Gala due to complications from her most recent endometriosis surgery. Thus, her current choice of reading material, the Virgina Woolf essay “On Being Ill,” seems quite fitting: it makes the bid to show illness as a topic worthy of literature. “Considering how common illness is….it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” Woolf wrote. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no; … literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.”
Jenny Slate
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It’s a throwback reading post for actress/comedianne Jenny Slate, whose book of choice is the third title in a four-part series about the knighthood of Alanna of Trebond. The 1986 novel by Tamora Pierce chronicles Alanna’s beginnings as a knight errant, wandering around the realm and learning new things, including her own power and worth as a woman. Slate’s The Woman Who Rides Like a Man post even gives a shout out to fellow actress Zoe Kazan, who currently stars in the romantic comedy The Big Sick.
And finally…
Zendaya
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As the Spider-Man: Homecoming premiere approaches, here’s Zendaya promoting her cover issue of Vogue. And we’re not kidding either when we say homegirl deserves it: after the whirlwind of international press tours she has to go to in order to promote her latest movie, the super cool star more than deserves some shut-eye and self-love. Catch her in the newest Spider-Man flick, out in local theaters starting July 7.
