“There’s more to life than dating the boy on the football team.” – Taylor Swift
From heart-wrenching lyrics in your headphones to cozied up with an enthralling novel in your hands. It’s no secret that mega singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is a fan of reading which would explain her impressive and adored storytelling abilities. If you’re in need of some book recommendations and looking to add some Taylor Swift inspired picks to your reading list, here are her official favorite books that she has referred to and raved about over the years!
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Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/szckwfcs
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/mmmjmy6a
Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
He was a tough-guy Welshman softened by the affections of a breathtakingly beautiful woman; she was a modern-day Cleopatra madly in love with her own Mark Antony. For nearly a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were Hollywood royalty, and their fiery romance, often called “the marriage of the century”, was the most notorious, publicized, and celebrated love affair of its day. Addictive and entertaining, Furious Love is more than a celebrity biography; it’s an honest yet sympathetic portrait of a man, a woman, and a passion that shocked and mesmerized the world.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/55875cke
The Kennedy Women by Laurence Leamer
Laurence Leamer was granted unheralded access to private Kennedy papers, and he interviewed family and old friends, many of whom had never been interviewed before, for this incredible portrait of the women in America’s “royal family”. From Bridget Murphy, the foremother who touched shore at East Boston in 1849, to the intelligent, independent Kennedy women of today, Laurence Leamer tells their unforgettable stories. Tough enough to withstand the unimaginable, these Kennedy women soldier on in the name of their extraordinary family and what they believe is right.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/73y8e8kh
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Leo Borlock follows the unspoken rule at Mica Area High School: don’t stand out–under any circumstances! Then Stargirl arrives at Mica High and everything changes–for Leo and for the entire school. After 15 years of home schooling, Stargirl bursts into tenth grade in an explosion of color and a clatter of ukulele music, enchanting the Mica student body. But the delicate scales of popularity suddenly shift, and Stargirl is shunned for everything that makes her different. Somewhere in the midst of Stargirl’s arrival and rise and fall, normal Leo Borlock has tumbled into love with her.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/mwemu5va
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins. A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/aks93jnb
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Working as a lady’s companion, the orphaned heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to his brooding estate, Manderley, on the Cornish Coast, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers . .
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/4dfm8jha
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The couple swore eternal love, but also swore (as skittish divorce survivors) never to marry. However, providence intervened in the form of a U.S. government ultimatum: get married, or Felipe could never enter America again. Told with Gilbert’s trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilbert’s complex and sometimes frightening journey into her second marriage.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/ykcnj5sy
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Embellished with the author’s lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather’s fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveau riche, and the New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects of wild ambition.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/35k6k4dt
Wonderful Tonight by Pattie Boyd
An iconic figure of the 1960s and ’70s, Pattie Boyd breaks a forty-year silence in Wonderful Tonight, and tells the story of how she found herself bound to two of the most addictive, promiscuous musical geniuses of the twentieth century and became the most famous muse in the history of rock and roll.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/bdkyeb94
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Set in small-town Alabama in the 1930s, the novel is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, and chronicles the childhood of Scout and her older brother Jem Finch as their father Atticus defends a Black man falsely accused of a vicious crime. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, “To Kill A Mockingbird” takes readers to the roots of human behavior – to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/ycr8ed5r
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want—husband, country home, successful career—but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.
link to buy here https://tinyurl.com/2vv5ur5w
The Coquette Journals 