№ 01
“Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced.” source
Singer-songwriter and author
Patti Smith
Patti Smith is a singer-songwriter, poet, and author whose album Horses helped shape punk and whose memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award. She calls herself a bookish person first. Picks below come from interviews, her memoirs, her Instagram, and a list for Service95.
18
Recommendations
2022
Most recent list
Literary Fiction
Most-recommended
On the record
All Patti Smith book recommendations.
№ 02
“I became obsessed with Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, even incorporating it in my book in a chapter called 'The Well.'” source
№ 03
“Ariel became the book of my life then, drawing me to a poet with hair worthy of a Breck commercial and the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart.” source
№ 04
“At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them.” source
№ 05
“She writes stories like I approach Land of a Thousand Dances: she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, comes through.” source
№ 06
“Essential to anyone in search of concrete delirium.” source
№ 07
“Every time I read Bolaño I feel so inspired, I just want to write. He's a genius.” source
№ 08
“Every word written in The Thief's Journal is conscious, as stone by stone, Genet draws us into his triad of transgression, criminality, and betrayal, transfigured as love through his pen.” source
№ 09
“Re-read all the great classics. Read The Scarlet Letter, read Moby Dick, read Murakami.” source
№ 10
“William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer.” source
№ 11
“I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe.” source
№ 12
Smith placed Letters from Iceland on the list of forty favorites she handed out at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, with no accompanying public quote about the book source
№ 13
“Re-read all the great classics. Read The Scarlet Letter, read Moby Dick, read Murakami.” source
№ 14
“I have found a most unlikely chum in the writer H. P. Lovecraft. A study of his process has led me through a labyrinth of scholarly pulp horror.” source
№ 15
“An early favorite was Pinocchio, not the Disney version, Collodi's Pinocchio.” source
№ 16
“Emily was like a small volcano, dormant yet restlessly bubbling, and erupting through the words and actions of her chosen characters.” source
№ 17
“Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is the first masterpiece of the 21st century.” source
№ 18
“She gave me the courage of a new goal, and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister.” source
Readers with overlapping taste
