Chelsea Handler's Favorite Books Make For A Unique Reading List

For comedian Chelsea Handler, books are no joke. Most children discover reading through childhood mainstays like "Goosebumps" or a well-worn copy of "Charlotte's Web." Not her. By age 8, she told Bustle, she was already entangled in the doomed passions of "Anna Karenina," parsing the moral wreckage of "East of Eden," and the vast, inscrutable seas of "Moby Dick."

These tragic classic books were assigned by her father, who believed reading was the most effective way to keep his daughter out of trouble. Though Handler now has the autonomy to stock her own shelves (maybe with her new book, "I'll Have What She's Having"), her tastes remain unforgiving. The canon may have expanded, but the criteria have not: fiction must be muscular, nonfiction revelatory. Sentimentality need not apply. "I don't like soft stuff. I like to learn something after I read," she revealed to the outlet, adding, "I don't like fantasy. I like fiction if it's meaty and juicy but I don't want to hear about a girl falling in love with the guy. I don't care about that stuff."  

So, what earns a place alongside the heavyweights? Don't expect any beach reads for your summer TBR. One candidate is "Letting Go," David Hawkins's treatise on relinquishing "hurt feelings, guilt, and shame." "All of those are things that we hold on to, especially as women," Handler frankly observed, "I think what 'Letting Go' really does is teach you how to let go of the nonsense." But this isn't the only one of her favorites that demands something of its reader. 

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."