Patti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

Image of Patti Smith performing in Rio de Janeiro by Daigo Oliva

As a little girl, Patti Smith found liberation in words — first through the bedtime prayers she made up herself, and later in books. “I was completely smitten by the book,” she writes in her memoir, Just Kids.  “I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings.”

Smith found a role model in Jo, the tomboy writer in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. “She gave me the courage of a new goal,” writes Smith, “and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister.” As a teenager she discovered the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire and especially Arthur Rimbaud, who inspired her and helped shape her own artistic persona as a poet and punk rocker.

Despite her fame as a rock ‘n’ roll musician, Smith has always described herself as essentially a bookish person. It was around the time of Smith’s appearance at the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, according to Vertigo, that Smith released this list of her favorite books. Not surprisingly, it’s an eclectic and fascinating group of books:

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Billy Budd by Herman Melville
• Songs of Innocence by William Blake
• The Wild Boys by William Burroughs
• Howl by Allen Ginsberg
• A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
• Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
• Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
• Villette by Charlotte Bronte
• The Process by Brion Gysin
• Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi
• Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
• The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
• The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt
• The Women of Cairo by Gérard de Nerval
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
• The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
• Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• A Night of Serious Drinking by René Daumal
• Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
• A Happy Death by Albert Camus
• The First Man by Albert Camus
• The Waves by Virginia Woolf
• Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
• Anything by H.P. Lovecraft
• Anything by W.G. Sebald
• The Thief’s Journal or anything by Jean Genet
• The Arcades Project or anything by Walter Benjamin
• Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca
• The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll
• The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
• Ice or anything by Anna Kavan
• The Divine Proportion by  H.E. Huntley
• Nadja by André Breton

Smith’s reading recommendations have no doubt evolved since the list was given. Earlier this year a writer for Elle asked what books she would suggest. “I could recommend a million,” Smith responded. “I would just say read anything by [Roberto] Bolaño. Re-read all the great classics. Read The Scarlet Letter, read Moby Dick, read [Haruki] Murakami. But Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is the first masterpiece of the 21st century.”

You can find a number of the texts listed above in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April 2015.

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