Mona Simpson's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books Mona Simpson recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Mona Simpson's favorite book recommendations of all time.
Mona SimpsonWhat would female fiction be without Virginia Woolf? She picks out exactly the right details to reveal the character’s interiorities. (Source)
Alexandra HarrisIt’s a very ghostly book in that we have a very likable hero and want to get to know him a lot, but he keeps disappearing. (Source)
Alain de BottonAbout a search for how you can stop wasting your life and start to appreciate life and live fully. (Source)
Carlo RovelliProust’s reflection on the nature of time is deep and spread over his writing. (Source)
Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerA famous masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of Proust’s life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold. (Source)
Recommended by Mona Simpson, and 1 others. Mona SimpsonI absolutely love him. He’s one of our great short story writers. He’s very delicate, very mid-Western. He’s a predecessor and a great inspiration for Alice Munro. In this book there’s an interesting family story called “My Father’s Friends”. I don’t know whether his work is completely autobiographical or how much of it is fiction, but there seem to be a lot of dead mothers in his stories. I... (Source)
It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over... more
Mona SimpsonWhat I love in this book is not even the main plot, though I like that too. What I really love, the family that is so fascinating to me, is his [Edward’s] family. The mother goes crazy, and her husband and children all accommodate it and live around it. I love that little world in the novel. (Source)
Ella BerthoudThis short novel is set in July 1962, when Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are just married. It’s about the first night of their marriage, on honeymoon in a Georgian hotel next to Chesil beach on the coast of Britain. The book describes their courtship and how they got to this point, then the crucial scene is what happens on their wedding night. Edward climaxes much too soon in his excitement,... (Source)
Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing... more
Recommended by Mona Simpson, and 1 others. Mona SimpsonThis is a book where the father does live with the family. I just love Kawabata. To me this is a beautiful book about middle age and old age. The thing I like so much about it is that each member of the family is going through a particular change or journey or revelation at the same time, and yet they’re not aware of each others’ struggles. They’re only glimpsingly aware and yet they live... (Source)
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