Mike White reveals his 10 favourite books
Mike White has come to everyone’s attention recently with the success of the first two seasons of The White Lotus, the TV series that examines the inter-relationships of several guests staying at the titular hotel resort with a wide variety of psychological dysfunctions.
Offering a peak behind the curtain, White once named a selection of the books that he regularly recommends to other people, so looking at a few of them gives us a closer glimpse into the inner workings of the mind behind one of today’s most beloved TV shows.
One of White’s picks is Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel Gilead, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. The epistolary novel focuses on the fictional life of Reverend John Ames, a pastor in the equally fictional titular town of Gilead, Iowa.
Discussing his love for the novel, White said: “Oh God, this book. It almost made me a believer in middle American Christian goodness. Talk about a feat of imagination and compassion. There’s something about the voice of John Ames that makes me cry just thinking about it. He is a fiction but I don’t care, I love him. Glory be to God.”
White is evidently an admirer of poetry as he loves Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical text, The Poetics of Space. Of the work, White said: “This is theory – and French, no less – at its best. It is not ‘deconstructing’ poetry – it IS poetry. Its radical but obvious thesis is that poetry is generative, enhancing our lives with feelings and thoughts that otherwise would not exist. It is alive to the haunting magic of childhood and the imaginative spaces of our youth.”
While having an admiration for literary theory is evident, it is also true that White admires literary criticism just as much. He said of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, “This is criticism at its best. So funny and inspired and bursting with ideas. I am jealous of anyone who has not read this book – because reading this for the first time is like going on a literary thrill ride through the tropes of our culture. Is it all true? Who cares? It will jiggle your mind and broom out the cobwebs in your brain.”
Check out the complete list of Mike White’s must-read books below to learn more about his literary interests.
Mike White’s favourite books:
- Independent People – Halldor Laxness
- Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
- The Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard
- Love and Death in the American Novel – Leslie Fiedler
- In the Freud Archives – Janet Malcolm
- The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
- Outline Trilogy – Rachel Cusk
- The Scorpion-Fish – Nicolas Bouvier
- A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
- My Lives – Edmund White
