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Is there an official Jennifer Garner Book Club? Not yet, but there probably should be! Jennifer, 54, has been a passionate reader her whole life—thanks in large part to the magical Mrs. Annyce McCann, a West Virginia school librarian. “She was my first mentor, the first person who really took an interest in me for me,” Jen shared in an O interview.
And Mrs. McCann, who Jen still visits when she’s back home, wasn’t Jen’s only book-loving influence. Her mom, Pat, made time to read with Jen nightly (the pair took turns reading pages aloud!), a comforting habit they kept up into Jen’s tween years. It allowed the future actress, entrepreneur and mom-of-three to explore new worlds on the page while staying strongly connected to her own family. “I felt like a different person because of that,” she shared in an interview about her favorite books. So what titles are in the unofficial Jennifer Garner Book Club? Keep reading to find out.
The book that inspired a starring role
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
The tale of Hannah, a woman whose new husband mysteriously disappears, leaving her only a cryptic note reading “Protect her” — referring to his distrustful teen daughter from a previous marriage. “You can’t stop turning the pages because there is… this engine of, ’What is going to happen?’” she says. “She manages to give you a twist at the end of every chapter.”
Jennifer was so wowed, she wrote a very persuasive letter and got herself cast as Hannah in the Apple TV+ adaptation. “I was talking about the ways that somebody can disappear on you and it can bring out the best in you,” she recently shared on the One Nightstand podcast.
Jen’s also a fan of The First Time I Saw Him, which she called “a must-read sequel.” And both books make a nice companion to the two seasons of The Last Thing He Told Me, now streaming on Apple TV+.
The book series she’s read again and again
Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The adventures of the Ingalls family as they head to the American West barely need an introduction. “I’ve probably read the whole series 15 times, 20 times, easily,” revealed Jen, whose grandmother was born on a covered wagon and whose mom grew up on a tiny farm “back when the feed sacks for animals were made out of calico and that calico she would use to make their clothes.”
Even after Jen’s daughter wrote a college paper pointing out harsh realities of settler life glossed over by the books, Jen still adores “the romanticism of what this family went through… to be pioneers in this beautiful, incredible country of ours.” And if you’ve also read the series before, it’s a great time to dip in again. It’ll be fresh in your mind when the new Little House series launches on Netflix in July.
The book that sparked self-discovery
The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad
Essays from 100 celebrated writers and thinkers—like Elizabeth Gilbert, Ann Patchett and John Green—are paired with writing prompts designed to help us use journaling to uncover our truest selves. Jen had completed dozens of the mini-journaling exercises before sitting down to chat with the book’s author. “The beauty is seeing what you keep repeating,” she shared with Suleika. “Eventually, you can’t help but ask, ’How can I shift this for myself?’”
The book that connects her to her mom
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Jen’s mom made her an ardent lover of this classic that follows Anne Shirley, an irrepressible red-haired orphan mistakenly sent to live with an elderly brother and sister who had requested a boy to work their Prince Edward Island farm. What unfolds is a charming coming-of-age story, as Anne wins the hearts of her reluctant guardians and an entire community with endearing proclamations like “I’m so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers” and “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
“My mom keeps it by her bed. She reads a little bit of it at night like the Bible, and she quotes it like the Bible,” Jennifer shared on One Nightstand. “I can’t even think of how many sayings from my childhood come from Anne.”
The book she thinks is ‘perfect’
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
One of literature’s most enduring portraits of sisterhood, this beloved novel follows the four March sisters—practical Meg, fiercely independent Jo, gentle Beth and romantic Amy—as they navigate poverty, ambition, love, and loss while their chaplain dad is off tending to soldiers during the Civil War.
“It is a perfect book,” Jen recently enthused on One Nightstand. “It has love, it has intrigue. It has the country kids doing okay. It has the missing father and the promise of him possibly appearing. It has the perfect blessed mother. It has the scare of the illness, and then it has tragedy. It has real tragedy. Is there anything more sad?” Yet it also reaffirms our faith in humanity—and there is nothing better than that.
The history book so vivid ‘you feel the fabric of their clothes’
John Adams by David McCullough
If you want history that comes to life, look no further than the late Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough. “I’ve tried to branch out and read other historians’ work, but nothing sticks with me or gets the pages turned as quickly as his books,” Jen once dished to O. “John Adams is incredibly, meticulously researched; you feel as if McCullough has gone back and felt the fabric of their clothes, smelled the paper that they wrote to each other on. It’s not only facts—you get a real sense of his subjects’ lives.”
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