Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
It’s been 9 years since the last Bridget Jones film, 24 since the first, and 27 since the publication of the book that started it all: Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding. Today, the fourth film in the beloved franchise lands on Peacock, based on the third book in Fielding’s series: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Bridget (the Oscar-nominated Renée Zèllweger)—who we first met as a 30-something counting calories consumed and cigarettes smoked—finds herself in yet another love triangle, this time as a 50-something widow with two kids. Vying for her affections in a new world of dating apps and sexting are Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall.
The original book, blurbed by Salman Rushdie, who appeared in the first Bridget Jones movie as himself, began as a column in The Independent, following a fictitious singleton navigating dating in the ’90s. Fielding thought the column would be canceled within weeks; instead, Bridget Jones went on to become a phenomenon. Fielding wrote four novels about the character (including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Bridget Jones’s Baby), and the movie adaptations have taken in more than $800 million at the box office. She is now at work on a new, non-Bridget novel.
The Yorkshire-born, London- and L.A.-based Fielding played viola, violin, and piano growing up; has two children; met best friend and screenwriter-director Richard Curtis at Oxford University when she played Marlene Dietrich in a college play; appeared in the BBC Two documentary Being Bridget; kept, then deleted, a diary of her own; once slept overnight on a deserted island in Honduras.
Likes: Aga stoves; the color blue; self-help books; Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita”; procrastinating by cleaning out the fridge, surfing Net-a-Porter; and applying a smoky eye.
Take a peek at Fielding’s book recommendations below.
The book that...
...has the best opening line:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” I stole and adapted this line (along with the plot) in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
…made me laugh out loud:
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe. What really makes books funny is the voice and perspective of the narrator. This is a hilarious first-person diary of a young and utterly hopeless nanny.
…I would recommend to a recent graduate:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s a great example of how to write about modern love in a modern world.
...I read in one sitting; it was that good:
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. It’s a prequel to Jane Eyre, set in the Caribbean. Couldn’t put it down.
…cemented a friendship:
One Day by David Nicholls. I took it on holiday with a friend, and we both got so addicted to reading the same copy that we had to organize a reading rota—and thus learned the value of Sharing in Friendship™.
...features the coolest book jacket:
The original Ian Fleming James Bond books have insanely cool covers. I have five of them framed together on my wall. They’re gorgeous. My favorite: Octopussy.
…I’d pass on to my kids:
Buddha’s Little Instruction Book by Jack Kornfield. I’m addicted to self-help books, which may or may not have ultimately improved myself. If you boiled them all down to the fundamentals, they’d be in this tiny book with a short rule for living on each page.
…influenced me as a writer:
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I love Hemingway’s sparse, muscular style of writing so much that my first novel, Cause Celeb, has a random chapter where my usual feminine chatty voice weirdly turns into Hemingway’s masculine, muscular prose, then changes back again. A Moveable Feast should be on every high school reading list.
...I could only have discovered at Keith Fawkes vintage store on Flask Walk in London’s Hampstead, where Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is set:
The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton. It made a very appropriate present for a girlfriend.
Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:
Libreria Acqua Alta in Venice, Italy, before the Instagrammers discovered it. It’s magical, right on a canal, and crammed with vintage books—some displayed in a gondola. But, of course, now I’ve said this even more Instagrammers will fill it.
Read Fielding’s Picks
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home by Nina Stibbe
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Octopussy and the Living Daylights by Ian Fleming
