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.
In 2016, Amy Tan turned to birding as a balm for the divisiveness in the country, and her editor convinced her that the nine journals she eventually filled with colored pencil illustrations of winged visitors to her backyard and her writings on nature could be her 11th book. Now it is: The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Knopf). She recently returned from a birding trip to Ecuador (target: Ecuadorean Hillstar hummingbird) with another notable author/birder, Jonathan Franzen.
The Oakland-born author, who splits her time between Sausalito, CA (where her house has a living roof and spider web art on glass doors to prevent birds from crashing into them) and Soho, NYC (in a loft that was once a sausage factory), is perhaps most known for her debut, 1989’s The Joy Luck Club. That title spent more than 10 months on the NYT bestseller list, became a 1993 movie she co-wrote and co-produced, and was a National Endowment of the Arts Big Read and a finalist for the National Book and National Book Critics Circle awards.
Tan grew up in a house of four languages (English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese), where she and her late father read the thesaurus; switched from pre-med to English lit at San Jose City College; was a business writer then started writing fiction at 33; wrote the libretto for the opera of The Bonesetter’s Daughter (her 4th novel); received a National Humanities Medal from President Joe Biden ( she sat next to Julia Louis-Dreyfus at the White House) and had dinner at President Barack Obama’s table during a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Singapore. She also sings for the garage band Rock Bottom Remainders (whose members have included Stephen King and Scott Turow); attended high school in Switzerland and five colleges (she got her English and linguistics BA (double major) and linguistics MA at San Jose State University, but dropped out before finishing her PhD at UCBerkeley); practiced to become a concert pianist until a disastrous recital; belongs to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; once wrote love horoscopes; met her tax attorney husband on a blind date (they celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this year); has gone swimming with sharks; has three dogs Bobo, Tux, and Felix; has worked as a switchboard operator and carhop; won a transistor radio for an essay on libraries she wrote as an 8-year-old.
Fan of: hiking (UltaThon insect repellent is a solid choice), Rodeo Beach and Marin Headlands, Issey Miyake (she once wore them as PJs in a hospital overnight), Joey Alexander, Noble Fibre (sweaters made by Nepalese and Peruvian women’s co-ops)
Likes: NYC restaurants Che Li, Bodhi Kosher, and Kuih Cafe; lunches with expat writers at La Rotonde in Paris; tofu from Fong On; pu-erh tea, moon cakes, and zongzi (sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves); McEvoy Ranch olive oil; zumba; skiing in Tahoe; Chinatowns, especially the murals, architecture, and Waverly Place in San Francisco’s; and hula hoops. Get around to reading her book picks below.
The book that...
…I swear I’ll finish one day:
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, which is stylistically perfect and so beguiling in its moral nonchalance that I happily fall asleep each time I’ve read it a quarter of the way through.
...I read in one sitting, it was that good:
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, which I’ve read three times for the stunning strength of emotion in a young Antiguan girl’s deepening and devastating perception of her life.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon, which I immediately bought after hearing the author give a riveting talk that left me and the entire audience roaring in appreciation.
…made me laugh out loud:
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan, because its manic characters are deliciously true about the trappings of cultural snobbism and social power, and, well, because it’s also about family, the expectations, secrets and betrayals.
…I first bought:
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and I had to buy it twice because it was confiscated from me as a banned book, which, of course, was the reason I bought it in the first place.
...I last bought:
Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper, who takes us behind the scenes of the infamous racist threat to the author as he birded in Central Park and also expresses how being among wild birds is both balm and purpose.
…helped me become a better writer:
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, because those short stories told by generations of a Chippewa community made me realize in 1987 that my disparate short stories told by different mothers and daughters could be contained in a community called The Joy Luck Club.
…described a house I wanted to live in:
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, for its cozy sod roof home, a dream I realized when I built a sod roof home, the one where I now live.
...I’ve re-read the most:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, because each time I re-read this story of a lonely young girl coming of age, I revisit my turbulent past at a similar age and gain new perceptions about my evolving self.
...I could only have discovered at the Asian Art Museum store in San Francisco:
Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910, by Catherine Yeh, a scholarly text that left me reeling when I saw its cover—a photo of women wearing costumes identical to what my grandmother wore in several of her photos in 1910.
If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:
The private library of Barry Humphries, an enormous, dark-paneled room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a fantasy repository of rare books, paintings, sculpture, and ephemera collected by one of greatest satirists and intellectuals I’m grateful to have known.
The literary organization/charity I support:
The Community of Writers, whose conference in 1985 made me believe I would always be a writer, published or not, because it would always be meaningful to risk writing a story that could unbury truth about myself.
Read Tan’s Picks:
Shanghai Love
