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Actress Dakota Johnson at the 78th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, on May 19, 2025. Photo: Reuters |
A loyal and avid reader, 36-year-old actress Dakota Johnson founded the TeaTime Book Club through her production company, TeaTime Pictures.
For the Materialists actress, the book club is more than just people flipping through pages together. Each monthly selection on TeaTime's Instagram comes with a journey of in-depth discovery , from recommended reading lists and movie recommendations to themed music playlists.
For Dakota, this approach accurately reflects her own reading habits.
"There are many artists like me who also run book clubs, but I always felt, 'Wow, my way of reading is completely different,'" she shared with Bustle magazine in 2024.
"Every time I read, I want to completely immerse myself in that world … I want to live with the book, live with the words and the details mentioned."
Below are five books that offer intense emotional experiences, powerful enough to bring readers to tears, which Dakota Johnson particularly admires.
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
In an interview with Hits Radio UK, Dakota affirmed that A Little Life is a book she always recommends to her friends.
"However, it's such a brutal novel that people often exclaim, 'Why are you hurting me like this?' But I think the work is truly beautiful," she shared.
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The novel revolves around four friends living in New York City, including Jude, a young man who grew up with a life deeply marked by the traumas of a harsh past.
While his three friends gradually achieved success, Jude withdrew into absolute mystery. He never spoke of his family, kept his past hidden, and always concealed his disabled legs and the numerous scars on his body.
As time passed, Jude's current dazzling successes could no longer mask the pain that tormented him every night. Through fragmented memories, his horrific past gradually came to light.
Hanya Yanagihara doesn't write a story of overcoming adversity in the conventional sense; instead, she presents a difficult-to-accept possibility: there are wounds that can never be completely healed. Can the love of friends mend a shattered soul, or is death the only escape for "a small life"?
Beautyland - Marie-Helene Bertino
In a conversation with Bustle in 2024, Dakota revealed that Beautyland – the book chosen for her book club at the time – is "a book I will continue to recommend to people for the rest of my life."
Beautyland follows Adina Giorno, who was born at the same time Voyager 1 left Earth in 1977 and always believed she was an alien sent to observe humanity.
Throughout her life, Adina sent reports about her home planet via a fax machine at the supermarket near her home in Philadelphia: describing pizza, explaining the Super Bowl final, or analyzing why people cry when watching movies.
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Drawing on science fiction as a foundation, Bertino wrote about loneliness, a sense of belonging, and the strange beauty of the most ordinary things. Adina's fax reports were both humorous and moving, depicting human life with a wonder and love that humanity itself had inadvertently forgotten.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
In January, the book chosen at the TeaTime Book Club was Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . A post on TeaTime Pictures' Instagram confirmed it was "one of Dakota's favorite books."
Published in 1963, Sylvia Plath's only semi-autobiographical novel delves into the psychological tragedy, the struggle against depression, and the social pressures that weighed heavily on young women in the 1950s.
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In the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood, a talented college student from the suburbs of Boston, landed a prestigious internship at a major New York fashion magazine. Amidst the glitz and glamour and the promising future, Esther found herself suffocated as she struggled to find her place within rigid stereotypes: an independent career or the role of mother and homemaker.
Appearing at a time when mental health issues were still a taboo subject, the work made an impression thanks to its sharp writing style and detailed portrayal of inner thoughts.
The Bell Jar transcended the boundaries of a personal psychological novel to become an iconic reflection of the gender norms imposed on women in the 20th century.
Things I Don't Want To Know - Deborah Levy
Also in the interview with Hits Radio UK, Dakota revealed that the book she had recently finished reading was * Things I Don't Want To Know* by Deborah Levy.
Combining personal history, gender politics , philosophy, and literary theory into a brilliant treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay, Why I Write .
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Struggling to balance her roles as a woman, mother, and writer, Levy points to several real-life experiences that shaped her novels, including her family's migration from South Africa during apartheid; her teenage years in England, where she played the role of a writer among crowds of construction workers and bus drivers at cheap eateries; and her days writing screenplays on tour in Poland amidst the Eastern European economic crisis, where she witnessed a soldier affectionately kissing the women of his life goodbye.
This is a work containing profound insights and a powerful capacity for psychological comfort, from one of the most important contemporary writers today.
A fleeting moment of brilliance in this world – Ocean King
In an interview with Marie Claire magazine, Dakota revealed that she read Ocean Vuong's *A Glimpse of Ourselves* after receiving it as a gift from her friend Carrie Brownstein. She praised the novel as "exceptionally beautiful."
Born in Vietnam in 1988 and immigrated to the United States at the age of two, Ocean Vuong has distilled real-life experiences from his family to create his artwork.
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The novel is structured as a letter from a young man named Little Dog to his illiterate mother. This letter, which never reaches its recipient, unfolds a flood of memories: from the wounds of war and the alienation of a foreign land to an unspoken same-sex love.
A story that is both "cruel and tender," deeply personal yet reflective of humanity's larger issues of loss, migration, and the struggle for self-discovery. Ocean Vuong's writing blurs the lines between prose and poetry, creating quiet yet haunting reflections.
Source: https://lifestyle.zingnews.vn/nhung-cuon-sach-khien-ngoi-sao-50-sac-thai-vua-doc-vua-khoc-post1687389.html
