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Check in with all the books featured in The White Lotus
*Cue The White Lotus theme song*
HBO's series The White Lotus, about a luxury resort chain and the antics of its guests and employees, is a sizzling blend of dark comedy and satire. The first season is set at a resort on Maui; the second in Sicily. Both seasons feature ensemble casts, supporte din many ways by an ensemble of authors, as the reading choices of the characters convey a lot about their personalities, inner states, and the themes of the show. Here's a rundown of every book featured in Seasons 1 and 2.
Season 1
The Portable Nietzsche
In the first episode, Olivia and Paula are set up by the pool, reading. College sophomore Olivia, the daughter of wealthy couple Mark and Nicole, comes from a world of privilege and is constantly using her reading material to signal her "refined" taste. In this case, she's chosen Nietzsche: there's nothing like a philosophical tome for a little light poolside reading. The edition she's picked contains Nietzsche's four major works, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as well as various letters and extensive notes.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
Olivia's friend and fellow college student Paula also brings a book to the pool in episode one, and her choice is no less dramatic than Olivia's. She's clearly trying to make a statement by reading Freud's classic text The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud delves deep into why we dream, what our dreams mean, and the links between dreaming and human psychology.
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My Brilliant Friend
Unlike Olivia and Paula, newlywed journalist Rachel's vacation reading seems to be more about pleasure and less about status. Rachel comes from a working-class family, and she's starting to doubt her choice to marry into a wealthy family, especially given some of her mother-in-law's beliefs. When we first see her at the pool, she's reading the first novel in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, which she continues to read throughout the entire season. This wildly popular literary sensation is set in 1950s Naples and traces the complicated friendship between two women as they grow and change.
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Sexual Personae
By episode three, Olivia has finished (or more likely abandoned) Nietzsche and is now reading art critic Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, which explores the connections between sex and paganism in Western art and literature. Paglia is well-known or her critiques of feminism, which certainly makes her reading material another provocative and/or performative choice.
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The Wretched of the Earth
Like Olivia, Paula arrives at the pool in episode three with a new book: Frantz Fanon's anti-colonial classic The Wretched of the Earth. In it, Fanon delves into the history and psychology of colonization and ponders what liberation means for oppressed and colonized peoples. It's a striking visual, if nothing else, considering she's reading it at a luxury resort in Hawaii, a place that has been ravaged by the violence of colonialism and continues to experience its ongoing effects.
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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Rachel's husband Shane arrives at the pool in episode three with Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. The book examines "the power of thinking without thinking," as practiced by top experts in a variety of fields. Gladwell argues that apparently simple snap decisions are often based on a complex set of perceptions built over time. When the book shows up in another scene in episode five we can see Shane has made little progress.
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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
In episode four, in a moment so quick it's easy to miss, Paula takes Gender Trouble out of her bag. In this scholarly feminist text Judith Butler argues that gender, as we understand it today, is a kind of performance. Though it was published in 1999, and much new scholarship has since been published about gender, it remains a feminist classic and an important work of transgender and LGBTQ+ theory.
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Discourse on Colonialism
At the airport in the season one finale, Paula has moved from Franz Fanon to another hugely influential anti-colonial scholar and writer, Aimé Césaire. In Discourse on Colonialism, first published in French in 1955, Césaire analyzes the impact of colonization on both the colonized and the colonizer. His scathing critique of an inherently violent system became a major influence in freedom movements across the world, from Africa to the Caribbean to South America.
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Écrits
Olivia is also reading a dense text at the airport in the season one finale: a selection of work by the French scholar and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, both an influential and controversial thinker. His work centers around otherness, examining how the idea of otherness intersects with sexuality, difference, pleasure, and subjectivity.
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Lost Children Archive
Season 2 introduces a new group of guests at a White Lotus resort in Sicily. Harper, an immigration lawyer, reads Lost Children Archive throughout the season, beginning in a scene in the first episode in which she and her husband Ethan are lying in bed, each with a book in hand (and definitely not talking to each other). As an immigration lawyer her choice of vacation reading is only a degree removed from her job: the novel is about a family road trip from New York to Arizona that culminates in an immigration crisis—both personal and political.
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Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope
Harper's husband Ethan, a successful tech entrepreneur who recently made it big, chooses nonfiction for his vacation reading: Everything Is F*cked by popular self-help author Mark Manson. Blending wry humor, forthrightness, and analysis, Manson examines the problems of hope and hopelessness in contemporary life through the lens of stoic philosophy.
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Gone Bamboo
At a pivotal moment in episode six, Ethan's college friend Cameron returns to his room to grab a book he says he forgot before heading back out to the beach. The book is the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain's crime thriller, Gone Bamboo. Set at a luxury resort in the Caribbean, it's about an ex-pat assassin whose idyllic life is thrown off-kilter when an assignment goes wrong. By enlisting his wife to help him set things right, he puts them both in considerable danger.
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The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit?
Albie is a recent Stanford graduate on vacation with his Hollywood-producer father and womanizing grandfather. In episode four, he spends a minute looking through Lydia Kallipoliti's book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, a study of closed systems. She examines classic closed systems like spaceships and submarines, and takes a close look at how (and why) closed systems fail. In a show about several slowly dissolving marriages, another kind of closed system, the symbolism of Albie's reading material is hard to ignore.
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