AOC loves DFW.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rock star of the political left, contributed a list of her 10 “desert island” books for One Grand Books, an independent bookstore in Narrowsburg, New York. And it turns out she’s a big fan of David Foster Wallace—the late author’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and Infinite Jest both made the list.
Besides Wallace’s doorstop novel, the only other fiction to appear on Ocasio-Cortez’s list was Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The congresswoman also selected one book of poetry: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.
The New York Democrat has a taste for nonfiction—her list includes Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Howard Thurman’s The Search for Common Ground, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Why We Can’t Wait, and Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. Rounding out her list is the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita.
Ocasio-Cortez has mentioned her fondness for King’s book before. In 2018, she tweeted, “Many people have heard of MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but what some don’t know is that this letter is a chapter in his larger book, Why We Can’t Wait. Here he outlines the urgency of protest and social change.” The tweet was accompanied by a photo of her well-worn copy.
Let’s look at MLK’s writing.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 15, 2018
Many people have heard of MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but what some don’t know is that this letter is a chapter in his larger book, Why We Can’t Wait.
Here he outlines the urgency of protest and social change.
Here’s my tattered copy. pic.twitter.com/i7PxlIJe2A
The same year, she mentioned her fondness for Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet, tweeting to a journalist who had mentioned the film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, “I was obsessed with these books as a kid! Looking forward to taking my niece to see this.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
