Bill Hader’s favourite books of all time
Bill Hader is one of the best comic entertainers in recent years. He got his breakthrough on Saturday Night Live, where he enjoyed eight years as one of its writers and players. Hader appears to be an avid reader and has gone on record several times to state his interest in literature.
The first adult novel that Bill Hader ever read is Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. King’s 1975 horror novel centres on a writer who returns to a town in Maine where he had lived as a child but discovers that all the town’s inhabitants have since become vampires. Hader had first been given the book by his grandfather, who told him to pick out a book to read for pleasure from his local bookshop.
Hader said of the tale: “I self-consciously browsed the aisles, careful to avoid unwittingly picking up Fear of Flying or something until I came to a paperback with a spooky cover. The title: Salem’s Lot. Description: Vampires in a small town run amok. Written by the guy who wrote that movie where the girl gets blood dumped on her, so she destroys her tormentors with her mind. ‘This one,’ I said. Lying under the eaves in my attic bedroom, devouring that story.”
As a comedian, Hader has his comic heroes and looks to be in great admiration of the legendary Steve Martin. Martin’s Born Standing Up is one of Hader’s favourite reads and was of great importance to him and his career. “I would recommend that to anyone starting out not only in comedy but performing in general,” he said. “If I’d read that book in high school, I would’ve gone into comedy sooner, I think. It’s very inspiring.”
When asked what one of his least favourite books is, Hader gave the humble response of not wanting to talk dirty about anybody’s hard work, so instead flipped the question around to say which book he loves that everyone else seems to hate. He said: “One of my favourite books that people recently love to trash is A Confederacy of Dunces. I think it’s one of the funniest books ever written, but I come across more and more folks who find it vastly overrated.”
John Kennedy Toole wrote the A Confederacy of Dunce, but it wasn’t published until 1980, 11 years after he had died. Sadly, Toole’s failure to publish the novel led to him taking his own life at the age of 31. It has since become something of a cult classic, and he won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Hader added, “I don’t know if I just hang out with contrarians or if it’s some latent backlash. I’m such a nerd for that book; I want to go to New Orleans just so I can take the Confederacy of Dunces Tour.”
Bill Hader’s favourite books:
- Rock Springs – Richard Ford
- Vanity Will Get You Somewhere – Joseph Cotten
- Raven – Tim Reiterman
- Descent of Man – T. C. Boyle
- The Patrick Melrose Novels – Edward St. Aubyn
- What I’d Say to the Martians – Jack Handey
- What in God’s Name – Simon Rich
- Bossypants – Tina Fey
- Mindsploitation – Vernon Chatman
- My Dead Dad Was in ZZ Top – Jon Glaser
- Norwood, Masters of Atlantis & The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
- Live From New York – Tom Shales and James Miller
- Born Standing Up – Steve Martin
- Homicide – David Simon
- In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
- Columbine – Dave Cullen
- Under the Banner of Heaven – Jon Krakauer
- The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
- In Broad Daylight – Harry N. MacLean
- Shot in the Heart – Mikal Gilmore
- A Wilderness of Error – Errol Morris
- Popular Crime – Bill James
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Light in August – William Faulkner
- Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
- City of Nets – Otto Friedrich
- The Parade’s Gone By… – Kenneth Brownlow
- Who the Devil Made It & Who the Hell’s in It – Peter Bogdanovich
- How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime – Roger Corman
- The Jaws Log – Carl Gottlieb
- Picture – John Huston
- Conversations With Clint – Kevin Avery
- Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers – Simon Louvish
- Sergio Leone – Christopher Frayling
- The Name Above The Title – Frank Capra
- Elia Kazan & Conversations with Scorsese – Richard Schickel
- My Life and My Films – Jean Renoir
- The Emperor and the Wolf – Stuart Galbraith IV
- Images – Ingmar Bergman
- Conversations With Wilder – Cameron Crowe
- Lost at Sea – Jon Ronson
- Tenth of December – George Saunders
- The Makioka Sisters – Junichiro Tanizaki
- Bunnicula – James Howe & Deborah Howe
- A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
