Booked
In her April 2019 interview with Kristen Tauer for Women's Wear Daily, Ellie Bamber said: “I'm always reading. I've loved reading since I was young, and I've always loved sinking my teeth into a different world, especially one that you begin to create in your head. I feel like the books that I'm reading at any given time will really help me with my work, because it's just more characters, and you see new people while you're reading.”
In the December 2018 issue of the Stylist, it was revealed that her breakfast interview with Colin Crummy was accompanied with a 2018 book titled My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Ellie Bamber thought that author Ottessa Moshfegh has a dark voice. Speaking of darkness, it was revealed that Ellie had just finished filming The Seven Sorrows of Mary (which is now referred to as a 2024 release). Because of the film’s subject matter, Ellie said: “I read this book, Asking For It: The Alarming Rise Of Rape Culture And What We Can Do About It by Kate Harding, which talks about how when someone comes forward and says they have been raped, the immediate reaction of a lot of people is to say, ‘No you weren’t’. Statistics show that if someone says they have been raped, they have – there’s a very small percentage of people who make a false claim. That reaction needs to be addressed.”
According to an interview that Ellie Bamber did for the December 2018 issue of Elle UK (whose interviewed resurfaced in the March 2019 issue of the Australian edition), she recovered from lengthy days of filming by throwing herself head first into books e.g. she read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (1988) while on location.
In the December 2018 issue of Glamour, Josh Smith compiled a bunch of quotes from Ellie about what the year had been like for her in general. At one point, she talked about Tenerife where she was ever the bookworm: “I needed some warmth, and some family friends own a like villa within a hotel. I don’t know when it was, but I took a flight out there on Easy Jet, not realizing it was five hours long and I was squished in. I basically just read a lot of books and at one point ended up at this party in a recording studio in Tenerife after we got really friendly with the restaurant owner. It was so bizarre.”
In a December 2019 issue of The Telegraph, Ellie told Caroline Leaper about playing Mandy Rice-Davies in a BBC TV series titled The Trial of Christine Keeler. At one point, Ellie said: “I had read Mandy’s autobiography and it was interesting to speak to my grandmother about it, as she only knew what she had essentially been fed by the press at the time. Mandy says something in her autobiography that stuck with me, that her life was “one slow descent into respectability.” In the face of adversity, she did overcome it to become a millionaire.”
In an interview for the BBC in that same month, Ellie Bamber said: “I read Mandy’s book, Mandy, and I really loved it. The book is all her own story and from her own point of view. I also listened to interviews that she’d given, read newspaper articles and a book called An English Affair, by Richard Davenport-Hines, that gave me a lot more background on the scandal.”
In the May 2020 issue of Marie Claire, Fiona Embleton asked Ellie about what her favourite book is - to which Ellie replied: “Ah! My God this is so hard! I mean I love F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night is one of my favourite books and obviously The Great Gatsby. But then I also really love Play It as It Lays by American writer Joan Didion.”
Prior to that question, Fiona asked Ellie what is her favourite way to relax - to which Ellie responded: “I would say reading, especially in the evening. I won’t really touch electronics for an hour before bed as I find reading helps me sleep.”
In a January 2021 interview for Schön! Magazine, Ellie told Kelsey Barnes: “I started reading some Eve Babitz which I really enjoyed; I love how she looks at Hollywood, and her stories are so engaging. I also really loved So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder. As a writer, she’s so unafraid to be totally honest. It made me laugh, cry and everything in between. I also loved My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan and I re-read some Joan Didion, who I love.”
When asked what character that she would love to play in a book-to-film adaptation, Ellie Bamber answered: “Off the top of my head, I’d love to star in My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.”
In the December 2022 issue of The Laterals, Miglė Kriaučiūnaitė asked Ellie if there is a character - stage, screen or page - that has stayed with her ever since. Ellie said: “There’s this book called My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I haven’t read it again, but I keep thinking to myself that I must. I know that someone’s working on a film adaptation for it too. Other than that… I feel that I’ve been lucky to take on some really amazing characters.”
In the same month’s issue of The Condé Nast Traveller, Francesca Babb asked her what she packs first for a vacation - to which Ellie had said: “A book. My friends laugh at me, because I always seem to bring a library, but I don’t know what I’m going to be in the mood for – a poolside read, something a bit heavier, or something on a specific subject. I can’t just take one! I totally overpack, but it makes me feel reassured because there’s absolutely nothing I could have forgotten.”
In a November 2016 interview for the Uproxx site, Brett Michael Dykes asked Ellie Bamber what book that she is most likely to give as a gift? Ellie’s response was: “Touching From a Distance by Deborah Curtis.”
In the January/February 2021 issue of Country & Town House Magazine, Ellie told Harriet Compston that she was currently reading Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids.
In a video interview for British Vogue circa December 2022, Ellie said: “Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse. This book, actually, I was recommended to read by a director that I was working with. He gave me a list, I think maybe it was, like, 15 books that he thought my character would've read, which was just really amazing. It kind of, like, takes apart desire and love and puts it into kind of almost, like, I think you can see, like a dictionary format, and then this is Joan Didion. I'm rereading this and, yeah, it's brilliant.”
In the January 2023 issue of InStyle, Faran Krentcil asked Ellie what book that she could read repeatedly. Ellie’s reply was: “Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. It’s just so beautifully written. The way he writes, it’s like he’s painting the most gorgeous picture that you've ever seen in the world, and he’s doing it with words.”
On Twitter, Ellie Bamber used to advertise what books that she was reading. In June 2013, she posted a Vine video where you could see a copy of Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (2012). In October 2013, Ellie tweeted: “The Great Gatsby is just such a beautiful book and i'd happily read it over and over again.”
In December, she tweeted: “I have relentlessly been reading Morrissey's autobiography.”
In January 2014, she tweeted: “If you haven't read Morrissey's autobiography then you need to.”
In September 2015, she tweeted: “What Milo Saw by Virginia MacGregor - such an awesome book!! Really recommend this to anyone.”
On Instagram, Ellie Bamber has plugged books in more recent years. In March 2018, she made a post about Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes. In January 2019, she made a post about Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room. In April 2021, she found Lisa Taddeo's Three Women to be "totally addictive."
In March 2019, Ellie posted a passage from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (1919): “But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward indeed but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we peform in that phrase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life, we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”
Ellie Bamber narrated the audiobook for Cathy Cassidy's Love from Lexie (2017). By the way, Ellie likes Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (a 2000 Hong Kong film). This may have informed her decision to star in an indie film adaptation of a Tao Lin novel titled Taipei (2018). It’s an interracial romance. Ellie’s interest in Asian culture extended to learning how to speak Thai for a BBC TV series titled The Serpent (2021). In the aforementioned Uproxx interview, she stated that the best meal of her life was at Joe’s Shanghai in NYC. Furthermore, I admire Ellie for how she often talks about being against racism.