The actress Emma Watson is a bookworm just like her brainy characters of Hermione and Belle. Her love for books reflects her personality as an outspoken feminist. The actress also frequently recommends books on social media and in interviews that everyone should read at least once in their life. We have made a list of the best 15 books recommended by Emma Watson.
Over the years, she has recommended 76 books, including literary classics, feminist must-reads, and trendy titles. Take a page out of Watson’s book when looking for your next page-turner and enjoy this complete list of every book that Emma Watson has ever recommended.
15 Books recommended by Emma Watson
1. My Life on the Road
The most important thing in one’s life is to find one’s soul. In her memoir, My Life on the Road, Gloria Marie Steinem tells stories about her life as she travels around the world making a change and finding herself on the way. She reveals the story of her growth at the same time as the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. Gloria gives us an insight into her rich prose which reminds us that living an observant life can make a difference in the way we look at things.
2. The Color Purple
This book is about a little black girl who is raised in a poor family and sexually abused by her father. At the age of fourteen, she got pregnant with her father’s child and was then deported to a widower as his wife. At her husband’s house, it was no different. She was often abused and forced to work without any rest. Her sex life with her husband was also just as wretched. Her husband had a lover known as Shug (sugar). She is forced to take care of her in times of illness. Sugar is a free spirited singer and believes that everyone deserves happiness. While taking care of her, the two fall in love with each other. She helps Celia to take responsibility for her happiness.
3. How to Be a Woman
Life of modern women have never been a cake walk. They may have received the right to vote and get the pill to avoid pregnancies but their life has not been any easier. They are surrounded by uncertainties and questions.
Caitlin Moran interweaves her observations on women’s lives with the funny incidents from her own life to create a book on why female rights and empowerment are essential issues not only for women today but also for society itself. She mentions scenes of her adolescence, her life as a writer and mother. She uses humor to bring out the sad truth of women in our society—whether it’s about the workplace, strip clubs, love, fat, abortion, popular entertainment, or children.
4. All About Love: New Visions
It is a beautifully written book by Hooks who reminds us of what it means to love in today’s societal climate. It is honest and filled with ideas and thoughts and feelings that a lot of people have but cannot necessarily articulate into words. In today’s world, where we find ourselves defining love and all our expectations that come with it as subjective since it is immeasurable, unlike power and money and status, All about Love serves to question its subjectivity and how this subjectivity is what makes it so hard for people to feel loved.
Most importantly, this book brought up some important questions such as “is giving care and feeling cared for, the same as loving and feeling loved?”
5. The Argonauts
The Argonauts is a book in which the author writes about the exceptional experience as a pregnant. At the time of her pregnancy, her husband, the sculptor Harry Doge was undergoing treatment, changing from a man to a woman, undergoing a double mastectomy and injecting himself with hormones.
Maggie explores in her book the various aspects of her pregnancy but also her experience alongside her transitioning partner and the way they were perceived by the public. The book was received with mixed reviews by the public and the author was sometimes criticized for being so open about her personal life and her struggles but she claims that writing about everything that surrounds her comes naturally to her.
6. Persepolis
Satrapi uses black and white comic strip images to tell the story of her life during the reign of Shah’s regime. It is wise funny and heartbreaking that glides through the overthrow of the Shah’s reign, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. Marjane’s childhood was a witness to the terrific history of her country.
Persepolis portrays an image of her daily life in Iran and the bewildering contradictions between her home life and public life. It is an intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original book about Margane and what her little child’s eyes witnessed during war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love with.
7. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is Carrie Brownstein’s memoir who is a bisexual guitarist and singer. It starts with her as a young hyper-performative young nerd, who runs for vice president of her school, Washington State elementary. The story goes on to cover Brownstein’s escape from tempestuous family life into a world of music that came to her rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era’s flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia, years later.
19 Inspiring and Amazing Emma Watson Quotes
8. Half the Sky
The purpose of Half the Sky is to put forth the arguments that the oppression of women is the moral and economic issue of the age and to spur readers to take action against such oppression. To build this argument, they guide the reader through twisted stories of women’s oppression in Asia and Africa, but also heartening stories of women’s success. They also wrestle with complex issues concerning foreign aid and outline hopeful solutions to the global problem of gender inequity and oppression.
9. Mom & Me & Mom
Mom & Me & Mom is the last book in author Maya Angelou’s series of autobiographies. This book was published a little before her mother’s death and it focuses on Angelou’s relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter. The book explains Baxter’s behavior, especially Baxter’s abandonment of Angelou and Angelou’s older brother when they were young children, and fills in “what are possibly the final blanks in Angelou’s eventful life”. The book also mentions Angelou’s reunion and reconciliation with her mother. It records the unconditional love, support, and assistance they gave to each other, as Baxter helps her through single motherhood, a failed marriage, and career ups and downs.
10. His Dark Materials
Source- Goodreads
His Dark Materials is an epic trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman. These thrilling adventures tell the story of Lyra and Will—two ordinary children on a perilous journey through shimmering haunted other worlds. They will meet witches and armored bears, fallen angels, and soul-eating specters. And in the end, the fate of both the living and the dead will rely on them.
Phillip Pullman’s spellbinding His Dark Materials trilogy has captivated readers for over twenty years and won acclaim at every turn. It will have you questioning everything you know about your world and wondering what lies just out of reach.
11. A Thousand Splendid Suns
A thousand splendid suns is a heart touching story that revolves around the events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years from the invasion of Soviet to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding. It is a story of two people of different generations who were witness to the horrors of these events. Happiness was long hidden in their past as they struggled to just remain alive.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a remarkable chronicle that marks three decades of Afghanistan with bounds of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love—a stunning accomplishment.
12. The Opposite of Loneliness
Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale. She had written a play that was supposed to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. But she did not live to see her success. She died 5 days after her graduation.
Her last essay known as The Opposite of Loneliness went viral after her death. She was very young when she died but she left behind a rich treasure of prose that captures the hope, uncertainty, and the possibility of her generation. Her prose articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.
13. Love Letters to the Dead
Source – GoodReads
It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May did. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to people like Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Heath Ledger, and more — though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating new friendships, falling in love for the first time, learning to live with her splintering family. And, finally, about the abuse she suffered while May was supposed to be looking out for her. Only then, once Laurel has written down the truth about what happened to herself, can she truly begin to accept what happened to May. And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was — lovely and amazing and deeply flawed — can she begin to discover her own path in this stunning debut from Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead.
14. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Paralyzed from head to toe, the patient’s soul was trapped inside his body, unable to speak to anyone and his left eyelid being the only means of communication.
Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke in 1995 and was left paralyzed completely but entirely conscious. The doctors called this ‘locked-in syndrome’. Using his only functioning muscle, his left eyelid, he began dictating this remarkable story, painstakingly spelling it out letter by letter.
His book offers a haunting, harrowing look inside the cruel prison of locked-in syndrome, but it is also a triumph of the human spirit.
15. The Queen of the Tearling
It is set on a fictional landmass several centuries in the future and is the first novel of a fantasy trilogy. The other books in the trilogy are The Invasion of the Tearling and The Fate of the Tearling. Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn must defeat the powers of the Red Queen, who is out to destroy her. She must journey to the royal castle to claim her throne and is accompanied only by the loyal Queen’s Guard which is led by the mysterious Lazarus.
