Mindy Kaling Reveals 5 Books That Made a Difference

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Mindy Kaling has made her love of reading no secret. In the past, she’s spoken of how much her childhood was spent with her nose in the pages of a book. This beloved past is what inspired her to become a writer—which, of course, led to the multi-hyphenate’s successful foray into acting and producing.

So it only made sense when news broke last year that Kaling was launching Mindy’s Book Studio, a new imprint with Amazon Publishing. The intention behind the imprint: to help a diverse group of new and established writers bring their work to the world. The second book from the imprint, I'll Stop the World, by Lauren Thoman, is out now—and Kaling calls it “unforgettable.” Here, she shares a few other books that have made an indelible mark on her life.

“I was living in New York in 2002 when I first heard about this book. At that time, you couldn’t find screenwriting resources online, and I hadn’t taken any screenwriting classes in college, so I used to go to the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble to just try to educate myself. I was making money babysitting and desperately trying to find an outlet for creativity. I had inspiration but no structure. And that’s what this book does so well. It helps teach you the technical execution of screenplays. A blank page can be so daunting, and this book de-mystified movies and television for me.”

“I’m half-Bengali, so Jhumpa Lahiri became a celebrity in my family when she wrote The Interpreter of Maladies and won the Pulitzer in 2000. We were proud of her like she was a member of our family. I even named the character of Mindy Lahiri from The Mindy Project after her. The Namesake is my favorite of her books. It’s such an elegant saga of an immigrant family that is relatable to anyone who feels pulled by different worlds. It made me understand my parents better.”

“I read A Thousand Acres when I was a junior in high school, and I remember thinking, This is so adult. I can’t believe they’re letting me read this. It’s about the tensions of marriage, adultery, and scary patriarchs, and I felt like I was invited into a secret world where grown-ups acted on impulses of lust and greed. I never anticipated a retelling of King Lear transposed onto an Iowan farming family would be so titillating. It is an utter cinematic page-turner and marked my maturing into a reader who could ‘handle’ stories about actual grown women.”

“I love cooking, but I hate the tyranny of precision in recipes. I simply don’t want to take the time to measure things, and I want to believe that if I follow my own instincts, I can create a delicious, restaurant-quality meal for my family. No Recipe Recipes allows me to be the free-spirited improvisational chef I dream of being. The recipes are refined crowd-pleasers (cowboy ragu, roast shrimp tacos, ham and cheese pasta shells with peas) that guests and picky, capricious family members will love.”

“Growing up, I was that kid who couldn’t put their book down. I see so clearly the thread connecting my love of reading novels to my becoming a writer and producer for television. I look for the same things in my shows as a producer that I did and continue to do as a reader: gripping characters and cinematic narratives that are real and grounded but, above all, entertain. That is why having my own book studio with Amazon Publishing has been such a full-circle moment and why I am so excited to give a platform to a page-turner in the true sense of the word, I’ll Stop the World. The best stories are the ones that move us but also give us no option but to press ‘next episode’ or turn another page, even when it’s 1 a.m. and you know you should just go to bed.”

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