Chris Pine’s 15 favourite novels
It seems like he’s been around forever, but Chris Pine’s breakthrough came relatively late in the day. After starring in a string of modestly-reviewed 2000s rom-coms like Just My Luck and The Princess Diaries II, he landed the role of Captain Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek reboot before going on to cement his a-list status in 2010’s Unstoppable, 2012’s People Like Us and the 2014 Sondheim stage-to-screen adaptation of Into The Woods.
Pine was born into a family of performers and went on to study English at the University of California, Berkeley, taking a year out to study at the University of Leeds. Here, Pine discusses some of his favourite books, from Victorian state-of-the-nation novels to hard-boiled ’50s crime thrillers.
One wonders if it was during this time that he first read A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’ 1859 reign-of-terror novel. “I love Dickens,” he told Esquire. “I read Bleak House when I was like 14, and it always stayed with me. I hadn’t read Dickens since. And Tale of Two Cities, I thought was going to be some giant book—which it’s actually not. He’s the master of the run-on sentence and the parenthetical, but also, he’s so fucking funny—still. Just like Mark Twain. But also, Tale of Two Cities is so relevant to America right now. I think we all need to read this book, because this is about how revolutions happen and how ugly they are. What happens when the middle class dies.”
Chris Pine’s love of UK literature isn’t restricted to the classics – he also names Phillip Kerr’s Berlin Noir and all of John Le Carre’s espionage novels. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—fucking hands down, one of the most gorgeous novels ever written, I think. And this is quite fun—The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life. It’s one of the last things he wrote—it’s just a beautiful tour through his life as a writer. But in terms of where to go after Spy, I would go for the George Smiley series, Honorable Schoolboy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. So nuanced, so complicated, just stunning.”
Pine is also a devoted reader of America’s great post-war novelists. As well as calling In Cold Blood by Truman Capote “a fucking masterpiece,” the actor opened up about his love for The Naked and The Dead by bestselling novelist, serial adulterer and enemy of Gore Vidal (he once headbutted the Myra Breckinridge author backstage) Norman Mailer: “I read The Naked and the Dead, which he wrote when he was fucking twenty-five. His insight into the human mind and the psyche, and insight into a soldier, is profound. He definitely gilds the lily—sometimes, you can really see him flexing his muscles. But God—I mean, a book about an unrequited homosexual love affair between a sergeant and a general in 1947, when the war’s just ended? The fuck is that about? A complete existentialist takedown of war, the stupidity of war, sending men off to die for nothing. Fascinating.”
Find the full list of Chris Pine’s favourite books below.
Chris Pine’s favourite books:
- Lady Joker, Volume 2 (Kaoru Takemura, 2022)
- Flights (Olga Tokarczuk, 2007)
- Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes, 2009)
- What It Is Like to Go to War (Karl Marlantes, 2011)
- Dispatches (Michael Herr, 1977)
- The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer, 1948)
- The Executioner’s Song (Norman Mailer, 1979)
- In Cold Blood (Truman Capote, 1965)
- Underworld (Don DeLillo, 1997)
- Master of Souls (Irène Némirovsky, 1939)
- A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
- The Master (Colm Toibin, 2004)
- The Magician (Colm Toibin, 2021)
- Berlin Noir (Philip Kerr, 1993)
- All of John le Carré (1961 -2021)
