Lily-Rose Depp And Yara Shahidi Both Love This Classic Toni Morrison Book

There's little to suggest that Lily-Rose Depp and Yara Shahidi would make a likely literary pair. Their lives play out in very different corners of contemporary celebrity, after all. Depp, thanks to famous parents, often keeps to film sets and fashion capitals. Shahidi, meanwhile, is a polished polymath: a Harvard graduate and "Grown-ish" alum with a long list of activist credentials. But both have named "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison as a hit.

For the French-American "Nosferatu" star, the novel was part of a color-coded reading streak. "I read 'Blue Nights' by Joan Didion, and then I read 'The Bluest Eye' by Toni Morrison. I was on a blue thing, I guess," she told Elle. "Both of those books were just so profound and beautiful and heartbreaking in their own way." Shahidi, in her list for One Grand Books, called Morrison's debut "one of the only books that has left me in tears." As the actress so eloquently phrased it, "Morrison's words vividly depict how societal pressures and stereotypes become internalized, emphasizing the importance of self-love through self-hate."

Published in 1970, "The Bluest Eye" follows Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who believes that if she had blue eyes, she might finally be seen as beautiful. It's a deeply affecting novel of extraordinary psychological insight, as it explores the damage caused by racial trauma and Western beauty standards. That portrayal of shame has earned it a permanent place in literary history and the crosshairs of censors, as it's frequently listed among the best banned books they don't want you to know about. It's a rare book that cuts across celebrity personas (for it's also one of the best Read with Jenna book club picks of all time), and still feels urgent, decades after publication.

Beyond their shared admiration for Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," the rest of Yara Shahidi and Lily Rose Depp's reading lists diverge in markedly different directions. Shahidi's One Grand Books reading list reflects a deep engagement with the world around her. Her choices — James Baldwin's "The Devil Finds Work," Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," "Chains" by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Voltaire's "Candide" — reveal a reader drawn to structural critique and historical reckoning; a sensibility that mirrors her activism. She founded Eighteen x 18 to galvanize young voters, and created Yara's Club — a mentorship initiative with the Young Women's Leadership Network that focuses on social issues and the role of education in breaking cycles of poverty. And to formalize her purpose, in 2018, she enrolled at Harvard to study social studies, supported by a glowing letter of recommendation from Michelle Obama after they collaborated on the Let Girls Learn initiative. Her reading, much like her public life, is defined by a desire to understand the world's institutions — and then to change them for good.

Lily-Rose Depp's list moves in more interior directions, marked by moody melancholy and elliptical emotional dislocation. One author appears again and again: Haruki Murakami, whom she first read in high school, and has since named him as one of her favorite authors ever to Elle. In a 2016 interview with Vogue, she named his "Norwegian Wood" — a coming-of-age romance set in Tokyo — as the best book she'd read that year. Later, during lockdown, she turned to his short story collection "Men Without Women." As Depp's favorite author, he has a stunning backlog of books to devour, which is perfect for readers drawn to dreamlike prose at a slow-burning pace.