Actress, comedian and author Casey Wilson takes us on a tour of her favorite reads! She shares recommendations from her own bookshelf, spanning everything from essays, novels, poetry and great reads for moms.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 What have we here? It's right here. It just happened to be here. That's so crazy.
00:04 Hi, this is Casey Wilson. I am here to give Marie Claire a kind of sneak peek
00:09 into my personal library shelf portrait.
00:12 Behind me is one of my bookshelves. We are here in a room. I've sort of made my dining room,
00:20 frankly, into also a library. We have to multitask right now with our spaces.
00:26 I'm an avid reader. I've also recently written a book. The Wreckage of My Presence has just
00:31 come out on May 4th, and I've written a collection of comedic essays, honestly inspired by some of my
00:38 favorite writers who are on the shelf. One is called The Most of Nora Ephron. It's her huge
00:44 essay collection, basically all the best of her work. She absolutely loved it. So funny.
00:49 Also, I have a ton of David Sedaris books here. This is his latest book,
00:54 Theft by Finding. He makes me laugh constantly, so I feel like David Sedaris and Nora Ephron are
01:00 the gold standard of essay collections. I like poetry. This is Maya Angelou's book of poems.
01:06 It's called Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water, For I Die. It's wonderful. This has been a well-worn
01:12 copy that my mom gave me that is very close to my heart. Love this one. Here is my favorite book
01:19 of fiction. It's by Ann Tyler, who's one of my all-time favorite fiction writers. She tends to
01:25 write, honestly, about just very ordinary women, typically living in Baltimore, which sounds very
01:31 specific, but she really just writes about the life of an ordinary woman, which I actually find
01:36 fascinating. This particular book is called The Amateur Marriage, and it's basically about the
01:42 span of a couple from growing up together all the way through, spoiler alert, their death,
01:47 but it's not a spoiler, and just kind of all the kids they have, every single thing, the life that
01:52 a couple goes through. It's wonderful. A book that is so deeply funny, but also amazingly poignant
01:58 and incredibly powerful, this book by a woman I'm going to call friend, and I hope she would
02:03 feel the same, Nicole Byer. It's called #VeryFat, #VeryBrave, and it is so good. Nicole taking
02:11 photos all around Los Angeles. She's wearing different glorious bathing suits and doing
02:16 hilarious things, and kind of has a meaningful message about how people have said to her,
02:21 "You're so brave for basically existing in the skin that you do," and I felt that before too,
02:27 and it's about kind of body positivity, but Nicole has such an amazing sense of humor that also has
02:32 kind of a f***ing component to it, which I absolutely love. Every picture is just better
02:38 than the last, and the subtitle is, "The Fat Girl's Guide to Being #Brave and Not a Dejected
02:44 Melancholy Down in the Dumps Weeping Fat Girl in a Bikini." Amazing. This is my favorite kids' book
02:51 that I read when I was little. It's called The Hundred Dresses that my kids are about to get
02:56 old enough to read. It's kind of young adult-ish, maybe like 11 years old. Great book about empathy,
03:03 about a little girl who tells her classmates that she has 100 beautiful dresses, and the girl
03:08 doesn't have a ton of money, and everyone makes fun of her and says that she's lying, but when
03:12 they go over to her house, they find out that she has 100 beautiful watercolors that she's done of
03:18 100 different dresses, and it really affected me. I'm about to cry thinking about it when I was
03:23 younger, about kind of including people and not, I guess, not really bullying anyone and just being
03:30 inclusive, so it's a great book. Last book is a parenting book. It's called The Early Riser
03:36 Companion, but it says rhythms and rituals, traditions, and transitions for the first seven
03:42 years of a child's life. So beautiful, and basically includes all these ideas for very small,
03:48 inexpensive, beautiful rituals you can build into your family's life, and kind of building on this
03:55 idea that we've lost a lot of ritual in our lives, that I have no time, no patience, no energy for
04:01 anything, but this book just gives you great ideas as a mom that are free and easy. So I love
04:07 The Early Riser Companion, and I'm going to shout out one last book, which is an incredible book,
04:14 and it's called Girl Underwater. It is a novel. It's young adult by Claire Kells, who also happens
04:20 to be my incredibly talented sister-in-law, and it's a young adult novel. It has intrigue. It has
04:26 mystery picture, kind of a sexy lost for young adults. Truly such an amazing book, and Oprah's
04:34 O Magazine online rated it and said it was one of their best books. That's it, and what's this?
04:40 I'm grabbing my own book again? Who put this here? This is crazy, guys. The Wreckage of My
04:48 Presence is my book. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you so much for joining me in my home
04:54 in front of my gorgeous bookcase. Thanks, Marie Claire.