Experts > Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Adam Gopnik recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Adam Gopnik's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Visions Before Midnight

From the man who made TV criticism an entertainment in its own right comes Visions Before Midnight, a selection from the column hundreds of thousands of devoted fans would turn to first thing on a Sunday morning.

Clive James's comic brilliance is displayed here, from the 1972 Olympics (But your paradigm no-no commentary can't be made up of fluffs alone. It needs flannel in lengthy widths, and it's here that Harry and Alan come through like a whole warehouse full of pyjamas) to the 1976 Olympics ('Jenkins has a lot to do' was a new way of saying that our man,...
more
Recommended by Adam Gopnik, and 1 others.

Adam GopnikIn 1980, Knopf did an anthology of his essays called First Reactions. In a curious way it was an advantage to read him flat-out as a writer. All of my friends in England read him as an entanglement of personal presence and prose style. I read him simply as prose style, without any knowledge of what his personal presence was like. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2
Recommended by Adam Gopnik, and 1 others.

Adam GopnikJarrell, for me, is the absolute master of what I like to think of as “cabaret criticism”. The man has endless wit. I think his novel Pictures From an Institution is the single wittiest book of the last century, even though I’ve read it 10 times and can never recall the story! He’s a very poor storyteller but an amazingly witty writer. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

3

Essays of E.B. White

The classic collection by one of the greatest essayists of our time.

Selected by E.B. White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer.  "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are incomparable; this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.
less
Recommended by Adam Gopnik, and 1 others.

Adam GopnikWhite, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

4

The Common Reader

Woolf's first and most popular volume of essays. This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as "Modern Fiction" and "The Modern Essay." less
Recommended by Adam Gopnik, and 1 others.

Adam GopnikExactly because we read Woolf for her tone – her equanimity, her ability to weave together a detached and usually very severe critical judgement with a tone of ruminative engagement. That’s a tone, as much as Beerbohm’s is in another way, which seems to me particularly enviable. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5

And Even Now

Yesterday I found in a cupboard an old, small, battered portmanteau which, by the initials on it, I recognised as my own property. The lock appeared to have been forced. I dimly remembered having forced it myself, with a poker, in my hot youth, after some less
Recommended by Adam Gopnik, and 1 others.

Adam GopnikYes, absolutely. He was a caricaturist with remarkable insight and relatively little malice in his parodies and cartoons. He found the pomposities of over-zealous ideology absurd. He also had a lovely vein of affection. One of my favourite of his picture-books is called Rossetti and His Circle. It’s basically imaginary pictures of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites in their very complicated... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Adam Gopnik's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.