Jennifer Garner took her oldest daughter Violet to Starbucks yesterday in Los Angeles. It must have been early in the morning, because Jennifer didn’t even bother to make Violet change out of her pajamas. Violet’s always been a cute little girl, but as she gets older, she looks less like her mom and more like her dad, don’t you think? Except when she smiles – then she looks just like her mom. When they exited the Starbucks, it looks like Violet managed to talk her mom into getting her some kind of treat too. Perhaps a scone?

Anyway, Jennifer’s publicity tour for The Invention of Lying will be starting up soon. To promote the film, Jennifer contributed an essay for Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, in the section called “Books That Made a Difference to…” Jennifer’s five book pics are: Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley; Possession by A.S. Byatt (which is a really good book, and a sucky movie adaptation); The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (I read that years ago, and I’m struggling to remember the plot); John Adams by David McCullough (which was used as the primary source material for the HBO miniseries) and The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten (Team Ina, I LOVE her). Before Jennifer lists and describes her five books, she gives us this funny, touching little story about how, when she was a kid, she dreamt of becoming a librarian. At first I was like “Oh, Jennifer, stop trying to be boring” but I ended up liking the story about one of her first mentors:

As a kid in West Virginia, I had a very rich imaginary world. And my dream was to grow up to be a librarian, because I had a librarian named Mrs. McCann who I thought was the most magical woman on the planet. She used to publish little versions of my stories, typing them on manila folders and illustrating them with pictures of me and my teddy bear: T-Bear Goes to Mars and T-Bear’s Trip to the Moon. She was my first mentor—the first person who really took an interest in me for me, which when you’re a kid is a major deal. I’ve had other mentors, and those relationships were based on reading. They gave me a sense of who I was.

My mom grew up in poverty in dust bowl Oklahoma, and the thing that got her out was education. She had three daughters, and she did all the housekeeping, all the cooking, all the driving—just like moms do—and was also a teacher. But somehow, at night, she was in my room and we read to each other. I would read a page and she would read a page. And I felt like a different person because of that. Once I had kids, I looked at my baby and thought, “What am I supposed to do with you?” Nobody tells you how you need to play with them to help their brains develop. Mothers all over the country want what’s best for their kids, but they might not have had a mom or dad like mine who took a keen interest in the way their minds worked. Yet they don’t love their kids any less than I love mine. That’s what made me become a Save the Children ambassador, and it’s why I’m so passionate about early education in particular. I know that it was reading that helped me define myself.

[From O Magazine]

What’s weird is that Jennifer refers to her mother’s childhood as “dust bowl Oklahoma”. The Oklahoma/mid-West Dust Bowl is generally considered to be through the 1930s, and perhaps, if you’re stretching it, into the first half of the 1940s. So if her mother grew up in “dust bowl Oklahoma”, the youngest age I can come up with for her mother is in her early seventies, but probably older. With Jennifer at 37 years old… well, maybe the timeline isn’t off. But it would mean Jennifer’s mother probably started her family a lot later than other women of that generation.

As I was reading Jennifer’s book selections, I noticed something amazing. Mad Men’s Jon Hamm contributed an essay to ““Books That Made a Difference to…” too! By the way, no one tell Jaybird what happened on Mad Men – she hasn’t seen it yet. Anyhoodle, Hamm says that he loves “my generation of novelists—Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and Jonathan Franzen—and the way they can tell a story and make it interesting, make it deep, make it funny and yet incredibly touching.” He also admits to being something of math and science geek. His favorites book picks are: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (it‘s a very good play); Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin; Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (excellent choice) ; The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (my dad loves that one); Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (I‘ve never been able to get past page two on that one).

Jennifer Garner & Violet are shown at Starbucks on 8/16/09. Credit: Fame Pictures