Julia Stiles Favorite Book Is A Page-Turner (& It Won The Pulitzer Prize)

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The woman best known to '90s girls as Kat Stratford in "10 Things I Hate About You" may be as much of a bookworm as her onscreen counterpart. Most recently, Julia Stiles shared her favorite nonfiction books, but back in 2019, the 2026 "Dancing With the Stars" contestant declared her own personal literary GOAT. Among other personal facts, like her mantra, teenage celebrity crush, and secret talent for moving furniture, Stiles revealed to Us Weekly, "My favorite book of all time is 'The Goldfinch' [by Donna Tartt]."

It's no surprise that Stiles is so fond of Tartt's 2013 story of a boy who absconds with a painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art during a deadly terrorist attack on the museum. Stiles is a lifelong New Yorker who considers the Met a nostalgic part of her childhood, and the protagonist's subsequent journeys around the country no doubt appeal to her as a travel lover as well. "The Goldfinch" was a runaway bestseller at the time of its release and eventual winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so she's definitely not alone in her devotion.

Still, not everyone loved "The Goldfinch" as much as Stiles. Tartt is a fairly divisive author in general; her debut novel from 1992, "The Secret History," basically invented the dark academia genre, but both of the novels she released almost like clockwork 10 years apart afterward have confused readers as much as they've dazzled them. In "The Goldfinch" in particular, there's a fanciful quality to 13-year-old Theo's travels that has been compared to Dickens, but also denigrated as childish and interpreted as evidence of a dumbing-down of literature. As critic James Wood told Vanity Fair, "I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading 'Harry Potter.'" Ouch.

Clearly, however, Wood's opinion was in the minority. In addition to the Pulitzer, "The Goldfinch" also won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and it was named Amazon's Best Book of 2013. Also, more than 1 million readers have contributed to its nearly solid four-star rating on Goodreads. While it's a hefty tome at 784 pages, it seems that most readers agree that "The Goldfinch" is one of the best books over 500 pages by a female author.