Elton John is a big fan of books and has shared a memoir that he particularly enjoyed. On journalist and campaigner Charlie Gilmour’s memoir Featherhood, John said: “Nothing I read this year touched me as deeply or profoundly.”
Charlie Gilmour is the adopted son of David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Polly Samson, who is also a writer. Charlie was famously arrested and imprisoned after being photographed swinging from the Cenotaph during the student protests in 2010. A synopsis, as per Weidenfeld and Nicolson, reads: “It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one’s own.
“It is a story about change – from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie’s nest. And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.”
In GQ, John explained: “It’s not just that the story he has to tell is incredible, although it is – you really don’t get many books about a son, abandoned by his father, ultimately finding peace and understanding through caring for a rescued magpie.
“It’s that Charlie is a skilled, enchanting writer: about nature, about human relations, about loss.”
The Sunday Times named Featherhood as its Memoir of the Year in 2020.
John added: “It’s a moving, funny, ultimately uplifting book that brilliantly juxtaposes two relationships – one with a damaged human being, filled with pain and confusion; the other with a bird, filled with joy and wonder – and shows how redemption can turn up in the most unlikely forms.”
John has also highlighted many popular children’s books that he reads with his sons.
He shared his top picks with Amazon Books, including: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, What is a Refugee? By Elise Gravel, Stick Man by Julia Donaldson, If I Built A Car by Chris van Dusen and The Family Book by Todd Parr.