Andrew Garfield's Top 3 Book Recs Are Absolutely Heart-Wrenching

I host a classics book club and must confess Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) has been on my TBR (that's "To Be Read" list) for some time, after having stumbled upon a reference in Mary Oliver's poem, "The Invitation". His best-known works among Anglophones remain Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Garfield's rec, Letters to a Young Poet. The tome consists of ten letters from Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military officer, journalist and writer who was, at the time, in military school. The letters span 1903-1908, detailing Rilke's advice to Kappus on, as the title suggests, how a young poet develops a relationship to art as he explores love, feelings and truth. Kappus published the letters in 1929, following Rilke's death from leukemia in 1926.

The second book Garfield rattles off is The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology compiled by editors Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade. Published in 1993, the collection features poetry from a list of who's-who: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Henry David Thoreau, Pablo Neruda and the aforementioned Rilke, among many others who comprise the 400 works.

Seeing as Garfield's latest movie is We Live In Time, which deals with grief, his selection of Martín Prechtel's 2015 book feels fitting. It's a guide to grieving death by way of giving thanks for living. Prechtel dives into the ways unexpressed grief can summersault into social, cultural and even individual malaise—and what we stand to gain from confronting these ghosts.