Book Appointment Now
Chelsea Handler’s favorites are not what you’d expect
Chelsea Handler’s appetite for the unsparing doesn’t stop at non-fiction. That instinct, to confront rather than avoid, runs throughout her reading list, where even fiction refuses to provide an escape hatch.
“Circe,” Madeline Miller’s reimagining of Greek mythology, is a rare foray into the fantastical for Handler, a reader otherwise allergic to the genre. “I’m not really into Greek mythology,” she admitted to Bustle, “but that book stood out to me so much.” It wasn’t the deities or monsters that won her admiration, but the tangled knots of jealousy and rage that drive the story forward — themes familiar enough to win Handler over.
“The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton also makes the list — a title that might appear in a roundup of classic novels to pick for your next book club read. Its heroine, Lily Bart — so poised yet so adrift — has stayed with Handler. “When I was writing my book, I wanted to inject confidence into all of the people that don’t have it naturally. I would have liked to inject that into Lily.”
Her taste for the uncompromising finds its final expression in Mitch Albom’s “The Little Liar,” a Holocaust narrative rendered into a fable, written through the eyes of a child with Hitler recast as the big bad wolf. She said, “It shows how you can tell someone a lie, then people start believing it, and the world can just become so different right before your eyes.”
