Books recommended by Benedict Cumberbatch
3 books

3 Recent Favorite Reads by Benedict Cumberbatch

If you are looking for decent book recommendations, here is a list of 3 books Benedict showed interest in filming based on the books and even optioned the rights for it.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
If you are looking for decent book recommendations, here is a list of 3 books Benedict showed interest in filming based on the books and even optioned the rights for it.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

The Tao of Physics

The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism is a 1975 book by physicist Fritjof Capra. It was a bestseller in the United States and has been published in 43 editions in 23 languages. The fourth edition in English was published in 2000.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
It put him in the mind of his sojourning teenage self, reading The Tao of Physics and searching for “the godhead within."
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

When Breath Becomes Air

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational MemoirAt the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
I read two fascinating, heartbreaking and inspiring books – Dr Marsh’s Do No Harm and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Highly recommended reads whatever your interests, as both are beautiful and profound insights into human nature as much as their chosen professions and particular experiences.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

Do No Harm

This text offers experiences of aid providers in war-torn societies to show that international assistance often reinforces divisions. It calls for a redesign of assistance programmes, and argues that opportunities exist for aid workers to support the processes by which societies disengage from war.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
I read two fascinating, heartbreaking and inspiring books – Dr Marsh’s Do No Harm and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Highly recommended reads whatever your interests, as both are beautiful and profound insights into human nature as much as their chosen professions and particular experiences.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

Edison

From the preeminent Edison scholar . . . The definitive life of the inventor of the modern age The conventional story is so familiar and reassuring that it has come to read more like American myth than history: With only three months of formal education, a curious and hardworking young man beats the odds and becomes one of the greatest inventors in history. Not only does he invent the phonograph and the first successful electric light bulb, but he also establishes the first electrical power distribution company and lays the technological groundwork for today's movies, telephones, and sound recording industry. Through relentless tinkering, by trial and error, the story goes, Thomas Alva Edison perseveres-and changes the world. In the revelatory Edison: A Life of Invention, author Paul Israel exposes and enriches this one-dimensional view of the solitary "Wizard of Menlo Park," expertly situating his subject within a thoroughly realized portrait of a burgeoning country on the brink of massive change. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of corporate America, and with it the newly overlapping interests of scientific, technological, and industrial cultures. Working against the common perception of Edison as a symbol of a mythic American past where persistence and individuality yielded hard-earned success, Israel demonstrates how Edison's remarkable career was actually very much a product of the inventor's fast-changing era. Edison drew widely from contemporary scientific knowledge and research, and was a crucial figure in the transformation of invention into modern corporate research and collaborative development. Informed by more than five million pages of archival documents, Paul Israel's ambitious life of Edison brightens the unexamined corners of a singularly influential and triumphant career in science. In these pages, history's most prolific inventor-he received an astounding 1,093 U.S. patents-comes to life as never before. Edison is the only biography to cover the whole of Edison's career in invention, including his early, foundational work in telegraphy. Armed with unprecedented access to Edison's workshop diaries, notebooks, and letters, Israel brings fresh insights into how the inventor's creative mind worked. And for the first time, much attention is devoted to his early family life in Ohio and Michigan-where the young Edison honed his entrepreneurial sense and eye for innovation as a newsstand owner and editor of a weekly newspaper-underscoring the inventor's later successes with new resonance and pathos. In recognizing the inventor's legacy as a pivotal figure in the second Industrial Revolution, Israel highlights Edison's creation of the industrial research laboratory, driven by intricately structured teams of researchers. The efficient lab forever changed the previously serendipitous art of workshop invention into something regular, predictable, and very attractive to corporate business leaders. Indeed, Edison's collaborative research model became the prototype upon which today's research firms and think tanks are based. The portrait of Thomas Alva Edison that emerges from this peerless biography is of a man of genius and astounding foresight. It is also a portrait rendered with incredible care, depth, and dimension, rescuing our century's godfather of invention from myth and simplification. Advance Praise for Edison: A Life of Invention "Familiar Edison stories come alive with fresh insight . . . Israel's scholarship is impeccable while his deceptively easy grace transforms a challenging story into a page turner. One hundred years of history texts have been right all along. Thomas Edison, a protean actor on the American landscape, requires our attention. Paul Israel has given us a book to satisfy that requirement for a long time to come."- John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Editor, Technology and Culture
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
- What book are you reading at the moment? - A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and an Edison biography by Paul Israel.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

A Little Life

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARThe New York Times • The Washington Post • The Wall Street Journal • NPR • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • O, The Oprah Magazine • Slate • Newsday • Buzzfeed • The Economist • Newsweek • People • Kansas City Star • Shelf Awareness • Time Out New York • Huffington Post • Book Riot • Refinery29 • Bookpage • Publishers Weekly • KirkusWINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZEA MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALISTA NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
What book are you reading at the moment? A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

The New York Times bestseller from the author of The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems“One of the year’s most entrancing books about science.”—The Wall Street Journal“Clear, elegant...a whirlwind tour of some of the biggest ideas in physics.”—The New York Times Book Review This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly explains Einstein's general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of discovery. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
Benedict Cumberbatch is a huge fan of Carlo Rovelli, and professed to carrying Seven Brief Lessons on Physics around "like a small Bible"
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

The Hobbit

A great modern classic and the prelude to The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum. “A glorious account of a magnificent adventure, filled with suspense and seasoned with a quiet humor that is irresistible . . . All those, young or old, who love a fine adventurous tale, beautifully told, will take The Hobbit to their hearts.” – New York Times Book Review
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
My dad read the book to me and it was a bedtime treat if I had done well,” said Cumberbatch. “If I had been a good boy, I’d get two chapters as opposed to maybe one, or none if I had been really bad.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

Terence Rattigan



Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
What was the last book you read, and name some of your favourite authors? Michael Darlow’s terrific biography of Terence Rattigan.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

An Ideal Husband

Published in 1899, An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde was first presented on stage in 1895. It is a social comedy that satirizes the hypocritical attitudes of people. Revolving around corruption and blackmail, the theme of the play is that there are no completely pure and pious people. Everyone commits mistakes and to pretend that one has not is an outright falsehood. The play became an instant success, like most of Wilde's other plays.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? To quote Oscar Wilde in An Ideal Husband: I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

Saturday

'Dazzling... Profound and urgent' Observer 'A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday' Financial Times Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, stands at his bedroom window before dawn and watches a plane - ablaze with fire like a meteor - arcing across the London sky. Over the course of the following day, unease gathers about Perowne, as he moves amongst hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors in the post-9/11 streets. A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive man, who to Perowne's professional eye appears to be profoundly unwell. But it is not until Baxter makes a sudden appearance at the Perowne family home that Henry's earlier fears seem about to be realised...
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
Favourite books William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth trilogy and Saturday by Ian McEwan.
Books from Benedict Cumberbatch

To the Ends of the Earth

A new one-volume edition of this classic sequence of sea novels set in the early nineteenth century, about a voyage from England to Australia.Rites of Passage (Winner of the Booker Prize)'The work of a master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom.' The TimesClose Quarters'A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream.' Daily MailFire Down Below'Laden to the waterline with a rich cargo of practicalities and poetry, pain and hilarity, drama and exaltation.'Sunday Times
Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
Favourite books William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth trilogy .