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Sarah Jessica Parker is a known bibliophile, often spotted on the streets of New York with a book nestled under her arm or immersed in pages in between takes on set.
Fittingly, she was appointed as a judge for the 2025 Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world. As one of five judges, she will help choose one best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland this year.
The judging panel are tasked with reading 170 novels from which they’ll honor one best piece of fiction. It’s a daunting task (arguably more arduous than the Academy’s requirement to watch every Oscar-nominated film before voting, which bafflingly only just became a requirement this year and will still likely go ignored by more than a few Academy voters). No, not you Kirsten Dunst.
But, like Dunst, who has famously “watched every [nominated] film because she’s a member of the Academy,” Parker wants you to know she’s taking her job very seriously. Last week at the PEN Literary Awards she told Page Six that she is currently reading two books a day to prepare for her role as judge.
“It’s intense to be reading (that number of books), the volume is kind of hard to convey, what it’s like to have as many books we are given the opportunity to read in a month…it’s quite something,” Parker said.
Either she has more hours in the day than the rest of us, is a Guinness World Record-level speed reader or is a liar. Formalities aside, though, Parker’s love for books is a win for the literary world. Even before she became a Booker judge, there’s no question that scoring a feature on Parker’s Instagram, where she has nearly 10 million followers, significantly pushes sales for authors.
Below, check out a few of best books Parker recommends:
We Must Not Think of Ourselves
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
A Quitter’s Paradise: A Novel
So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
