Tom Hanks reveals his 10 favourite books
Over the last four decades, Tom Hanks has climbed the full height of Hollywood to become one of America’s most beloved actors and a staple presence in high-grossing productions. His big break came with Penny Marsh’s 1988 fantasy-comedy, Big, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that he had top-flight directors rapping at his door.
An appearance in Philadelphia opposite Denzel Washington in 1993 and the following year’s epic Forrest Gump saw the Californian actor win his only two Academy Awards to date, both for ‘Best Actor’. This career peak saw Hanks become only the second actor, behind Spencer Tracy, to have won two consecutive ‘Best Actor’ trophies at the prestigious awards ceremony.
After this early peak, Hanks maintained near-constant accolades over the years, appearing in a healthy variety of successful films from the Toy Story franchise to Saving Private Ryan and Captain Phillips thereafter. Hanks’ filmography is nothing short of breathtaking.
Becoming an avid and discerning reader can be one of the strongest strings to one’s bow when pursuing a career in acting. Leading actors are frequently bombarded with meaty screenplays or novels from which planned projects will be adapted. If one has a fine taste in what they read, their filmography will, more often than not, reflect this.
As for Hanks, reading has always been an important part of his personal and professional life. He once recalled director Frank Darabont’s screenplay adaptation of Stephen King’s The Green Mile as the best he had ever read.
“The screenplay read almost like a graphic novel would,” the actor said. “You could see every frame; you could see every face; you could see every moment played out, and for that reason, I think it was truly the best example – it was probably the best screenplay I’d ever read.”
“Just by the fact that what was on the page totally reflected what ended up being on the screen,” he added. “There was almost no delusion of the artistic sensibilities from one to the other.”
When he’s not reading screenplays and bringing them to life on set, Hanks is an enthusiastic consumer of fictional and non-fictional books. In a past ‘Desert Island Books’ feature with One Grand, Hanks once listed his top ten favourite books of all time. His list features a broad range of absorbing material to keep you busy. One thing’s for sure: Hanks likes to brush up on his political and military history.
Tom Hanks’ 10 favourite books:
- Masha Gessen – The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
- Donald L. Miller – Supreme City
- Alan Furst – Spies of the Balkans
- Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Richard Ben Cramer – What it Takes
- Amor Towles – A Gentleman in Moscow
- William Manchester – A World Lit Only by Fire
- Rick Atkinson – An Army at Dawn
- David Gelernter – 1939, the Lost World of the Fair
- Anna Funder – Stasiland
