Skip to navigation Skip to content

Desert Island Books

  • Books
  • Curators
    • Tech
    • Actors
    • Directors
    • Writers
    • Artists
    • Chef
    • Philosopher
    • Designer
    • Broadcaster
    • TV Personality
    • Politician
    • Athletes
    • Musicians
    • All Curators
  • Journal
  • Little Grand
  • My Account
  • About Us
  • Stay in Touch
  • Books
  • Curators
    • Tech
    • Actors
    • Directors
    • Writers
    • Artists
    • Chef
    • Philosopher
    • Designer
    • Broadcaster
    • TV Personality
    • Politician
    • Athletes
    • Musicians
    • All Curators
  • Journal
  • Little Grand
  • My Account
  • About Us
  • Stay in Touch
  • $0.00 0 items

LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Christopher Bollen's Top Ten Books

Over the course of six novels, the writer Christopher Bollen has demonstrated a knack for writing moody, intelligent mysteries that never sacrifice character development on the altar of thrills (though thrills there are aplenty). “You want life to mean something, and you want it to hurt when someone dies and you want to feel the loss of their life,” he says on our podcast Shelf Life. Hurt it often does. When a major character is killed off in his 2015 novel, Orient, it catches in your throat, feels personal. In his sixth novel, the critical darling Havoc, what initially seems like a twisted version of Agatha Christie's Jane Marple becomes a study of a deteriorating, dangerous mind as 81-year old Maggie Burkhardt meets her match in an 8-year-old rival, Otto. As the two engage in battle, anyone and everyone around them becomes collateral damage. A diehard fan of Agatha Christie, one of several touchstones for his own writing career, we invited Bollen to identify ten of his favorite Christie novels for One Grand Books, something of a daunting task given Christie’s output: 66 novels and countless short stories. Below are Christopher Bollen's favorite Agatha Christie books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Christopher Bollen'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie

Me. Sixth grade. Cincinnati, Ohio. Sitting on a late afternoon in the living room before dinner. Terrified out of my head and unable to stop reading. Desperate to finish. This novel, of Christie at her cleverest, is the first and purest crystalline experience of me obsessing over a novel. Ten Little Indians (or And Then There Were None) is one of t ...

ADD TO CART
2
Death on the Nile

Agatha Christie

Yes, starting from the first page with the “scarlet Rolls Royce” driving through a quaint village, that holds a gorgeous American heiress. Death on the Nile is the ultimate style novel for Christie, where she fuses a genius mystery (I believe she’s mining Wings of a Dove here with the plot) with a decadent foreign location (the Karnak! The Ni ...

ADD TO CART
3
A Murder is Announced

Agatha Christie

Jane Marple always plays second fiddle to Poirot, and when I was younger, I was fully behind this pecking order. Something has changed in me, and I find as I mature, a deep love for Marple mysteries. This, in my opinion, is the finest, a strange invitation to witness a murder that turns out to be exactly as promised. It’s a very wicked plot, and ...

ADD TO CART
4
The Man in the Brown Suit

Agatha Christie

I’m a fan of Christie’s one-off adventure novels. You can feel the writer trying to stretch her legs beyond the confines of a closed-circuit who-done-it plot. This novel is packed with travel—subway, boat, train—and jumps continents—Europe, Africa—and Christie even weaves in political and social unrest. But she also is playing with narr ...

ADD TO CART
5
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie

Spoiler, don’t read further if you haven’t finished it. Okay, whenever I encounter the term “unreliable narrator” my mind immediately flashes to this novel. Another astonishing magic trick performed by Christie. What other writer has been so endlessly experimental?

ADD TO CART
6
Nemesis

Agatha Christie

Many readers think the later Marple novels are wooden and flat. Many don’t like Nemesis. I’m sorry for them, because you put Marple on a bus tour of house and gardens, arranged by her old friend who appeared in A Caribbean Mystery. Soon, she’s hunting for the murderer of a young woman, and, in my mind, it’s a story of youth and age, an obse ...

ADD TO CART
7
The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie

Perhaps no novel is quite as clever in plot as this Poirot classic. Christie loved puzzles, nursery rhymes, and maddeningly childlike patterns—case in point, victims seemingly being selecting according to the first letter of their names. I often wonder what she would have made of the Zodiac killer with all those puzzles and ciphers. The ABC Murde ...

ADD TO CART
8
Endless Night

Agatha Christie

Endless Night, about two young lovers of different classes who seem to be cursed, was written in 1967. It’s fascinating to watch Christie in her later years, writing about the young, trying to reckon with the cultural revolution that drastically transformed the social milieu which she chronicled so successfully in earlier eras. Sometimes—and un ...

ADD TO CART
9
Five Little Pigs

Agatha Christie

It surprises me that Hitchcock never felt the itch to tackle a Christie novel. Five Little Pigs would have been ideal, as it deals with so many of the two masters’ shared interests: repetition, family secrets, memories and hauntings. (The Hollow would have been my other Hitchcock suggestion). It’s hard enough for Poirot to solve a murder when t ...

ADD TO CART
10
Evil Under the Sun

Agatha Christie

Okay, I love this novel, but I’m including it because I love the 1982 film even more. So this recommendation also serves as a love letter to all of the wildly terrific cinematic takes on Christie over the years that’s been a huge influence on me. The film, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot, alongside Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Roddy ...

ADD TO CART
❮
❯

LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Janet Eilber's Top Ten Books

A pivotal force in contemporary dance, Janet Eilber has danced at the White House, danced with Rudolf Nuryev, and most importantly, danced for Martha Graham. It was Graham who mentored Eilber as a young dancer – coaching her in her famous “contraction and release” method – eventually leading to Eilber’s appointment as Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, School, and Archive in 2005. She is still there, commissioning work that embodies and expands on Graham’s legacy. “Martha is compared to Picasso and Stravinksy because she made such a seismic shift,” Eilber has said. “Her discoveries were so radical.” That radicalism lives on, cemented and extended by Eilber's leadership. Founded in 1926, the Martha Graham Dance Company is not only the oldest contemporary dance company in America, but one of its most dynamic, producing new work and interpretations of classics at a remarkable pace. Did we mention that Eilber also played the co-star and love interest to Rick Springfield in the 1984 movie, Hard to Hold? Below are Janet Eilber’s favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Janet Eilber'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
The Style of Movement 

 Deborah Ory and Ken Browar

Ken and Deborah have taken the dance world by storm with their ability to capture spectacular moves that are also filled with personality.  In this book, a pantheon of today’s greatest dance stars show how fashion and fabric can be so much more.  Costumes designed by Martha Graham side by side with Dior, Valentino, Oscar de la Renta and many mo ...

ADD TO CART
2
Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs

Barbara Morgan

Eighty years from its first publication, this is still hands down the most compelling book of dance photos ever. They capture the genius in Graham’s early works of modernism that revolutionized dance. And in the photos of Graham, you can feel the depth of her animal charisma.

ADD TO CART
3
Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern

Neil Baldwin

Cultural historian Neil Baldwin has done a deep dive into Graham’s early years to unpack her genius revolution as she infused American dance with modernism.   

ADD TO CART
4
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring

Annegret Fauser

Inside the creation of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic works of art with the genius collaborators – Copland, Graham and Noguchi.  The American conversation in the early 1940s, from regionalism and nationalism to immigration and racism, was poured into this modernist masterwork and vibrates within it still. 

ADD TO CART
5
Wreck this Journal

Keri Smith

I love this book because it advocates for (and gives guidance in) subversive behavior.  It’s an interactive manual that invites a practice of destruction as a path to freedom of choice and creativity.  Favorite page: “Collect your pocket lint. Glue it here.”

ADD TO CART
6
Slow Horses

Mick Herron

My work deals so much with the abstract and ephemeral that I lean toward plot-driven stuff where the good guys win. I recently discovered Mick Herron’s Slough House series – dealing with the rejects of MI5 in London. Laugh-out-loud humor woven into the mayhem.

ADD TO CART
7
Oedipus Rex

Sophocles

The wait for Oedipus to grasp the truth is the essence of theatrical suspense -- especially in the context of our current relationship with the truth.  Recommended with a screening of the 1961 film of Night Journey, Martha Graham’s genius masterwork, which reimagines the Oedipus story through the eyes of Jocasta. 

ADD TO CART
8
Nutshell

Ian McEwan

Another classic brilliantly transformed — a prequel to the tragedy of Hamlet – told by the eavesdropping fetus (Hamlet-to-be) in Gertrude’s womb.  The cross-referencing to the original is brilliant.

ADD TO CART
9
Drawing on the Surface of Dance

Annie-B Parson

An illustrated walk through the brain of one of today’s greatest choreographers.  Annie-B has created for everyone from the Graham Company to David Byrne.  Her multifaceted theater works are absorbed through the skin rather than the intellect.  Don’t miss the deck of cards in the back – a tool for composition of any sort.

ADD TO CART
10
The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles

This irresistible American road trip in the mid-1950s surprises and engages with every turn of the road while somehow evoking other classic quests and archetypes -- from Huck Finn to Odysseus.

ADD TO CART
❮
❯

LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Sera Gamble's Top Ten Books

Sera Gamble is the screenwriter and showrunner for the hit Hetflix series You, based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, in which the romantic hero is not just a pretty face - he’s a serial killer as well. You is not the first book that Gamble has turned into darkly entertaining television. She also created The Magicians for the SyFy Channel, based on the best-selling novel by Lev Grossman. And she was a showrunner on Supernatural, a haunting fantasy series which ran for 15 seasons. She has said, “I’m a horror writer in my heart, in that I always like to ask myself what scares me, and what scares us universally when I’m approaching a story. To me there’s just about nothing scarier than the truth that we can never really know another person.” Below are Sera Gamble's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Sera Gamble'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Trick Mirror

Jia Tolentino

This was required reading in the You writers’ room. Tolentino has a gift for taking apart cultural phenomena to show you the problematic bits. Reading it gave me a sense of relief, because she can so precisely explain why something like Sweetgreen salad makes me angry.

ADD TO CART
2
Life on Mars

Tracy K. Smith

I can’t read “Aubade” without crying. The dog gets me every time.

ADD TO CART
3
Misery

Stephen King

In 2020, I listened to 16 of his books in a row on long walks. Having the shit scared out of me really calms my anxiety. I especially love when King traps his protagonist – keeping the story in a tight box forces it deeper into the character’s psyche.

ADD TO CART
4
Proof

David Auburn

Not a wasted word. Sometimes I’ll be stopped at a red light and suddenly start thinking about “connecting the dots.”

ADD TO CART
5
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman

The first time a dentist gave me nitrous oxide, I saw the skeleton of the universe. So now when I get dental work, I take advantage of the altered state to investigate the question I like to dwell on at 3 a.m.: where do we go after we die? This book posits 40 possibilities. The vignettes are thoughtful, sometimes freaky, and a delight even if you ...

ADD TO CART
6
Crush

Richard Siken

His poetry feels like driving fast on a bad road in the rain, and that is a way I want poetry to feel. (This would also be at the top of my list of favorite cover art. I mean, look at it. Jesus Christ.)

ADD TO CART
7
An Anthropologist on Mars

Oliver Sacks

Sacks’s writing is compassionate and elegant, and makes me like people more as a species.

ADD TO CART
8
Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence

Nick Bantock

An epistolary novel so creative it practically vibrates in your hands. Turning the page to see the next postcard or letter is thrillingly immediate— a couple of times, I gasped. And pulling a handwritten note out of an envelope addressed to someone else feels slightly illegal.

ADD TO CART
9
Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m so lucky that I came to this book without knowing anything about it. If you’re as lucky, go read it. If you’ve heard about the plot or seen the film, I’ll just say: when I think of the writing, I picture the pages gently glowing, like an object that has been touched by the Divine.

ADD TO CART
10
Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

I like how transgressive and wrong this book is and I’m not sorry.

ADD TO CART
❮
❯

LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Michaela Coel's Top Ten Books

“I’m very nervous about doing this,” says Coel with admirable candor. “My memory is really bad, to the point that I forgot how bad my memory was.” She does, however, recall being spurred to spend a summer reading books by her local library which gave a medal to anyone who reached a goal of reading ten books. Coel, the child of an immigrant Ghanaian mother, won that library medal after devouring Marieke Nijkamp’s series of graphic novels for kids, Goosebumps. “I wasn’t really into things like sports, I didn’t dance, so reading really occupied me that summer and took my brain somewhere else, for which I’m forever grateful.” The actress, screenwriter, and director, who found acclaim in the UK with her series, Chewing Gum, and then as the lead in Black Earth Rising, Hugo Blick’s intense political thriller for Netflix, went through 191 drafts of her autobiographical HBO-BBC series, I May Destroy You, before she felt ready to release it into the world. The series won her a British Academy Award and an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards, making her the first black woman to win that category. She will next write, star in and executive produce First Day On Earth, a 10-part series for the BBC. Below, are Michaela Coel's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Michaela Coel'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Society Within

Courttia Newland

The first book I read that was adjacent to the world in which I lived. It’s about a girl on a west London housing estate, who is a conduit to the lives of all the other people in her orbit. Until reading this, I didn’t realize that books in which I could recognize people from my own life, could be written.

ADD TO CART
2
Homo Deus

Yuval Noah Harari

I was drawn to the book because of the subtitle: A History of Tomorrow. It had been a year since I left church and I was having what I now understand was an existential crisis and spinning out of my mind: what the fuck is going on, where am I, what is happening? I didn’t understand anything because I’d so whole-heartedly adopted the Bible’s a ...

ADD TO CART
3
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson

Because it helped me give less of a fuck.

ADD TO CART
4
The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

Originally published in China in 2006, but now translated into English, this took me about eight months to read because I had to keep going back. It’s a book that I struggle to explain—it flashes back and forth in time over a million years and across solar systems—but it totally helped me escape this planet. It’s not offering a utopian visi ...

ADD TO CART
5
The Dark Forest

Liu Cixin

The second in Liu’s trilogy (see above), that takes off in new and wonderful ways.

ADD TO CART
6
Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

The story of a mouse in a lab undergoing an experiment to make it more intelligent is juxtaposed with a parallel story in which Charlie Gordon, a cleaner in a bakery with learning difficulties, undergoes the same experiment. It may mean different things to different people; for me it was about what you lose when you trade naivete for intelligence ...

ADD TO CART
7
Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut

Reading this reminded me of people who approach life like a video game, without consequence. I love it so much that I included a homage to Kurt Vonnegut in I May Destroy You, in episode two when Arabella is at the clinic and meets a woman who is covered in blood, having been assaulted. The woman says, ‘Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, ...

ADD TO CART
8
Exhalation

Ted Chiang

I’m usually drawn to novels, but this beautifully-written collection of short stories was recommended by the same person who recommended Three-Body Problem, and they weren’t wrong.

ADD TO CART
9
Poor

Caleb Femi

I’ve never read about life on a housing estate written with such beauty. Femi is a poet, and this is a combination of short stories and poems and photography, and—a little like Society Within--it’s about life for people in working class London who are Black, so again it’s a book in which I saw myself.

ADD TO CART
10
The Book of Eels

Patrik Svensson 

I never thought I would see myself in an eel, until I read Svensson’s beautiful book, in which he anthropomorphizes eels and shows how mysterious they are, and how little we know about them. It’s a beautiful book that makes you realize that the eel is our cousin—we are the eel, and the eel is us.

ADD TO CART
❮
❯

LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Mike White's Top Ten Books

When HBO, desperate to feed the pandemic TV appetite, asked Mike White if he wanted to create a new TV show, the veteran actor, writer, and director didn’t need to be asked twice. “The filtration system of getting something on the air is aggravating and time-consuming,” he told The New Yorker. “I thought, If they go with this, it’ll be like a boulder they can’t stop. I can do exactly what I want to do.” The “this” was his runaway hit, The White Lotus, a veritable Trojan Horse--a spiky critique of class and privilege dressed up as a murder mystery. A second season was greenlit before the first season--six episodes each written and directed by White--concluded with what was among the most satisfying TV finales in recent memory. The third season will be the last. White is too much the auteur to push a concept past its peak. With one of Hollywood’s most eclectic resumes, running the gamut from the comedy musical, School of Rock, to the lauded HBO series, Enlightened, starring Laura Dern, White's not-so-secret passion is competing on reality TV, where he has been a contestant on The Amazing Race, twice, and on Survivor. “As a writer of drama, I aspire to do what reality television already does,” he told The New Yorker, “To create characters that are surprising and dimensional and do weird shit and capture your attention.” When he’s not writing, directing, acting, or competing, White is a reader, as this list of books reflects. “These may not be my 10 favorite books, that’s impossible,” he writes. “But these come to mind and are ones I’m always recommending.” Below are Mike Whites's books, available to purchase individually or as a set. Photo: Courtesy of Jason Yokobosky

Mike White'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Independent People

Halldor Laxness

What a masterpiece of a novel. I’ve recommended this book with enthusiasm to so many people and almost none of them have managed to get through it. I have no idea why. It’s funny and brutal and transportive. It’s about a crofter in Iceland putting his poor family through the wringer so he can prove he is an independent, self-sufficient man. A ...

ADD TO CART
2
Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

Oh God, this book. It almost made me a believer in middle American Christian goodness. Talk about a feat of imagination and compassion. There’s something about the voice of John Ames that makes me cry just thinking about it. He is a fiction but I don’t care, I love him. Glory be to God.

ADD TO CART
3
The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard

This is theory - and French, no less - at its best. It is not “deconstructing” poetry - it IS poetry. Its radical but obvious thesis is that poetry is generative, enhancing our lives with feelings and thoughts that otherwise would not exist. It is alive to the haunting magic of childhood and the imaginative spaces of our youth.

ADD TO CART
4
Love and Death in the American Novel

Leslie Fiedler

If Bachelard is theory at its best, this is criticism at its best. So funny and inspired and bursting with ideas. I am jealous of anyone who has not read this book - because reading this for the first time is like going on a literary thrill ride through the tropes of our culture. Is it all true? Who cares? It will jiggle your mind and broom out the ...

ADD TO CART
5
In the Freud Archives

Janet Malcolm

I think I have read every published sentence of Janet Malcolm. She is non-fiction prose at its sadistic finest. Talk about assuming the intelligence of the reader. She suffers no fools. I chose this book because I share her love for the writings of Freud - for Freud, like her, wanted to crack open the reader’s skull and leave a permanent mark on ...

ADD TO CART
6
The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

Like the voice of John Ames, the melancholy Bernardo Soares stays with you forever. I love the values of this book - inertia, passivity, confusion. What an antidote to most things we read. Following around this civil servant as he journals about his mundane, depressing life, I feel weirdly giddy with life’s possibilities. We should all have heter ...

ADD TO CART
7
Outline Trilogy

Rachel Cusk

The most uncanny and sober of fever dreams. What the fuck are these books? Why did I chew through them - as if they were the most compelling of murder mysteries - yet nothing ever happens and I can’t remember a thing after putting them down?  Dissociative perambulations but written with such urgency. These books cast a spell on me. Maybe Rachel ...

ADD TO CART
8
The Scorpion Fish

Nicolas Bouvier

There are so many travel writers I love - hard to choose one. But Nicolas Bouvier’s writing is unmatched and this book is a major freak-out. Stuck in Galle, Sri Lanka - he loses his mind as he watches strange tropical bugs invade his squalid hotel room. He is in a haunted colonial Hell and the whole time I’m reading, I just wish I could be ther ...

ADD TO CART
9
A Bend in the River

V.S. Naipaul

Speaking of colonial Hells! This is such a strange, grim, beautifully rendered book. Its nihilism about the human condition is so convincing! (And if that’s not a glowing recommendation, I don’t know what is - lol!) It’s hard to call this a “favorite” book but it has stayed with me longer than most. Ugh.

ADD TO CART
10
My Lives

Edmund White

So many gay writers have influenced me - Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Stephen Sondheim, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde yadda yadda. I also wanted to include an autobiography. Edmund White is a great writer - so erudite, curious about all things, a great aesthete. And as honest as anyone can be about sex and the motivations of self. Honesty is everythin ...

ADD TO CART
❮
❯
❮
❯
  • Kehinde Wiley


VISIT US
60 MAIN ST.
NARROWSBURG, NY
12764

VISIT US
Arclight Hollywood
6360 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
90028

VISIT US
Blue Bottle at Platform
8830 Washington Blvd #103
Culver City
CA 90232

VISIT US
Nest, Livingston Manor
34 Main Street, Livingston Manor
NY 12758

VISIT US
North Branch Inn
869 N Branch Rd, North Branch
NY 12766
Events: David Mitchell Has Written a Rock ‘n’ Roll novel.

Grand lists is a curated arts site specializing in books and movies selected by 100 public figures and celebrities, ranging from designers, musicians, artists, actors, performers and directors, to politicians, novelists, scientists and athletes.

© onegrandbooks.com 2025
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Stay in Touch
  • About Us
  • My Account
Newsletter Signup

Want a new list of great book recommendations every week?

Enter your email address

Thanks, I’m not interested