Actor, author and advocate Michael J. Fox rose to fame in the 80s, with a string of stellar roles in blockbuster hits. After publicly disclosing his 1991 Parkinson’s diagnosis, he launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a research firm aimed at finding a cure.
Since 2002, he’s also authored four memoirs exploring his life and lessons learned: Lucky Man, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned, and last year’s No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality.
Sharing six of his favorite reads with The Week, Fox included classics by Cormac McCarthy, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Steinbeck. Find his book recommendations below, and complement with the reading lists of other iconic actors and activists.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (also rec’d by Bruce Springsteen & Nick Cave)
“It’s kind of surprising for someone who’s a self-described optimist to love this apocalyptic road story so much. But McCarthy captures the step-in-front-of-a-train, protect-at-all-costs mind-set of a father and transfers it to the starkest possible context.” -MJF
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
“This is a book I wanted to option for a film. The narrator is a young man in early 20th-century Newfoundland who has killed an evil lighthouse keeper. He’s such a gentle soul that he never participated in the local custom of hunting birds, but instead chose to paint them. His story is one of redemption through art, and it’s helped get me through some tough periods. Norman’s hero, faced with a difficult situation, reacts badly, but it gives him the opportunity to evolve in ways he otherwise wouldn’t.” -MJF
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
“Chabon is so brilliant. I don’t often fall for epics, but Chabon’s award-winning novel about two comic-book artists is a story about two very personal odysseys, told on an epic scale.” -MJF
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (also rec’d by Anthony Bourdain)
“This book was my introduction to the idea of a journalist responding to people and situations we couldn’t trust by deliberately delivering writing you couldn’t trust. To me, as a teenager, Thompson seemed dangerous, and the things he was writing about were dark and twisted. Yet there was something reassuring in the fact that the book existed.” -MJF
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (also rec’d by Gabriel García Márquez & Malala Yousafzai)
“A celebration of human dignity, and an examination of loyalty and grace in the face of persecution and ignorance. Though I’m obviously no giant, I always identified with Lennie more than with George. We’re all both, of course, which is why the novella is such a towering achievement.” -MJF
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
“Biskind’s book documents a period in filmmaking that was formative for me. The films made in the ’60s and ’70s by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Robert Towne, and Hal Ashby represented such a leap forward from just a decade earlier. They shook up the way we all look at movies.” -MJF
(via The Week)
This is such an interesting article. I love MJF, and it’s cool to see what he ends up wanting to read on his down time and why!