Joan Didion's ultimate reading list: the books that changed her life
Joan Didion has one of the most distinctive writing styles of the 21st century. Sentence for sentence, her controlled, yet searingly honest tone has made her a literary legend. For her confessional accounts of grief, self-respect and loss, there is also a coolness, a crispness to everything she writes. Didion's aloofness (and innate sense of style) only intensify our fascination with her, which is why - when she shared her reading list back in 2015 - it quickly went viral.
She scrawled her the titles of her 10 favourite books on a piece of notepaper, gave it to her nephew Griffin Dunne, who in turn shared it with Brainpickings.org. If you're in need of reading inspiration, who better to take advice from than one of the greatest living writers?
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Victory by Joseph Conrad
Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
The Novels of Henry James: Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw
Speedboat by Renata Adler
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Collected Poems by Robert Lowell
Collected Poems by W.H. Auden
The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
For more insights into Didion's world, don't miss Netflix's documentary, The Centre Will Not Hold, which was released in 2017 and made by her nephew, Griffin.
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