Jenna Bush Hager is a lifelong book lover and a beloved book expert. Her recommendations for her Read With Jenna book club help launch titles onto bestseller lists and into reader conversations everywhere. But for all her many book recommendations throughout the years, there’s one book that she thinks should be required reading for all adults. It’s not just her lifelong favorite; it’s a classic and a banned book, to boot.
The book she thinks all adults should read is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. It’s one of the most commonly challenged books in attempted library book bans and has had a deep impact on Jenna Bush Hager throughout her life.
“I remember where I was sitting when it was assigned to my sophomore English class,” she wrote on Today.com. “I remember marking it up like I had never marked up any books before. At the time I read it, The Bluest Eye was prohibited across some Texas schools. Knowing that some kids weren’t even allowed to read this made it an even more special treasure of a book.”
She featured The Bluest Eye as a December 2020 pick for Read With Jenna to celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary, and she has continued to recommend it throughout her life.
The book follows 11-year-old Pecola, a young Black girl who desperately wishes for the blue eyes that she associates with America’s obsession with and love for white children, dreaming that blue eyes would end the racism and abuse she faces. With heartbreaking depictions of assault, the book is commonly challenged for containing sexual material.
“Thematically, I had never read anything quite like this,” Jenna Bush Hager wrote. “It was a book that talked about adult subjects but the underlying themes of racism, otherness, and feeling not good enough were things that my classmates were dealing with, particularly my classmates of color. It was the first book that really opened my eyes to how literature can create understanding and take you into worlds you don’t know.”
The book’s powerful writing - as well as the fact that it’s still unfortunately as relevant as ever - make The Bluest Eye an essential read for everybody, especially if you last read it in high school.
