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The bumper rock ‘n’ roll reading list: Your favourite artists’ favourite books

Fri 16 September 2022 12:00, UK

“You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.” – Nick Cave

Rock ‘n’ roll might not seem fit for the library, but you wouldn’t have one without the other. The liberating voice of literature was a force that helped to fuel the pop culture revolution and inspired a legion of would-be artists to sieve the movement with the immediacy of music.

A case in point is the beat bible which led to the folk revolution. Now that the dust has settled on Jack Kerouac’s blustering travels, it has not only become clear that he is America’s true luminous literary nomad but also, with 1957’s On The Road, he may well have penned the most seminal novel of the 20th Century. Open any given modern copy, and you may well find Bob Dylan printed into the sleeve proclaiming, “It changed my life, like it changed everyone else’s.”

Or perhaps it will be some other beatnik-spawn, proudly eulogising the trail that his life-giving prose blazed through the malaise of static predestined existence, bursting into bloom a bright new bohemian future for a thousand-fold army of disenfranchised youth aiming to tackle things a little differently from their forbearers. Their mantra seemingly: if we are to fail, then so be it, at least we did it on our own wavering terms.

This was almost a proto-punk mantra that Patti Smith defined when she met William S. Burroughs and stated: “Our credo was, ‘Wake up!’ I’ve said this before, but just to tell you, in case you haven’t read or anything: I wanted to be like Paul Revere. That was my whole thing I wanted to be like Paul Revere. I didn’t want to be a giant big hero, I didn’t want to die for the cause. I didn’t want to be a martyr. All that I wanted was for the people to fuckin’ wake up. That’s all I wanted them to do, and I feel that that’s what happened.”

And all of this was mustered from the pages of literature as much as music. Such is the effect of the syllabus set out by stuffy government dullards many people have been put off fiction in the printed form forever. With 14-year-olds forced to consider how their skateboarding days are somehow similar to the life of 1930’s ranch-hands or pour over poetry from pleasant corduroy-clad laureates about geraniums and cleaners watching Tele after work, for many a teenager the conclusion was simply ‘this just isn’t for me’.

The more fitting answer for the literate un-reading masses is ‘I haven’t found the right book yet’. The below syllabus set out by musical heroes should help you sieve the right text. N.B. there are certainly some duds in amongst the lists (I believe even the dreaded B******i features), but most of them are texts that you can happily tick off for a lifetime. Enjoy…

The favourite books of your favourite musicians:

Nick Cave’s favourite books:

American Dreams – Sapphire
Break, Blow, Burn – Camille Paglia
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson
The Collected Poems – Langston Hughes
A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
I and Thou – Martin Buber
Straight Life – Art Pepper
The Bible – King James Edition
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
High Windows – Philip Larkin
The Conference of Birds – Attar of Nishapur
My Promised Land – Ari Shavit
The Christ at Chartres – Denis Saurat
King Leopold’s Ghost – Adam Hochschild
America a Prophecy – Jerome Rothenberg
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page – Gerald Basil Edwards
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
The Collected Poems – Emily Dickinson
Shaking the Pumpkin – Jerome Rothenberg
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
The Collected Works – Saint Teresa of Avila
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Mid-American Chants – Sherwood Anderson
Collected Works of Billy the Kid – Michael Ondaatje
American Murder Ballads and Their Stories – Olive Woolley Burt
Poems of W. B. Yeats – Selected by Seamus Heaney
The Good Lord Bird – James McBride
Consolations – David Whyte
Roget’s Thesaurus – Peter Mark Roget
Here I Am – Jonathan Safran Foer
Lives of the Saints – Alban Butler
Inferno/From an Occult Diary – August Strindberg
Poems 1959-2009 – Frederick Seidel
S.C.U.M Manifesto – Valerie Solanas
Complete Poems – E. E. Cummings
The Anatomy of Melancholy – Robert Burton
Dave Robicheaux Novels – James Lee Burke
Victory – Joseph Conrad
A Flower Book for the Pocket – Macgregor Skene
The Informers – Bret Easton Ellis
The Frog Prince – Stevie Smith
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Sanctuary – William Faulkner
Short Stories – Anton Chekhov
The Factory Series – Derek Raymond
The Dream Songs – John Berryman
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
Walkabout – James Vance Marshall

Lou Reed’s favourite books:

The Place of Dead Roads – William S. Burroughs
The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol – John Wilcock
Feed-Back: The Velvet Underground – Ignacio Julià
Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties – Steven Watson
Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story – Ray Charles and David Ritz
Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism – Steven Watson
Max’s Kansas City: Art Glamour, Rock and Roll – Steven Kasher
High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max’s Kansas City – Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin
A Photographic Record 1969-1980 – Mick Rock
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories – Delmore Schwartz
The Velvet Underground: New York Art – edited by Johan Kugelberg
Taijiquan Hand & Sword – Ren Guangyi & Stephan Berwick

Patti Smith’s favourite books:

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Journey to the East – Hermann Hesse
The Glass Bead Game – Hermann Hesse
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Billy Budd – Herman Melville
Songs of Innocence – William Blake
The Wild Boys – William Burroughs 2666 – Roberto Bolano
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
Howl – Allen Ginsberg
A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud
Wittgenstein’s Poker – David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Villette – Charlotte Bronte
The Process – Brion Gysin
Cain’s Book – Alexander Trocchi
Coriolanus – William Shakespeare
The Happy Prince – Oscar Wilde
The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
Against Interpretation – Susan Sontag
The Oblivion Seekers – Isabelle Everhardt
The Women of Cairo – Gérard de Nerval
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
The Death of Virgil – Hermann Broch
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters – J.D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Night of Serious Drinking – René Daumal
Swann in Love – Marcel Proust
A Happy Death – Albert Camus
The First Man – Albert Camus
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
Big Sur – Jack Kerouac
Anything – H.P. Lovecraft
Anything – W.G. Sebald
The Thief’s Journal or anything – Jean Genet
The Arcades Project or anything – Walter Benjamin
Poet in New York – Federico García Lorca
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
The Palm-Wine Drinkard – Amos Tutuola
Ice or Anything – Anna Kavan
The Divine Proportion – H.E. Huntley
Nadja – André Breton

David Bowie’s favourite books:

Interviews With Francis Bacon – David Sylvester
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
Room At The Top – John Braine
On Having No Head – Douglass Harding
Kafka Was The Rage – Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Of Night – John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Iliad – Homer
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Tadanori Yokoo – Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
Inside The Whale And Other Essays – George Orwell
Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art – James A. Hall
David Bomberg – Richard Cork
Blast – Wyndham Lewis
Passing – Nella Larson
Beyond The Brillo Box – Arthur C. Danto
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self – R. D. Laing
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Infants Of The Spring – Wallace Thurman
The Quest For Christa T – Christa Wolf
The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin
Nights At The Circus – Angela Carter
The Master And Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog – Saul Bellow
Puckoon – Spike Milligan
Black Boy – Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea – Yukio Mishima
Darkness At Noon – Arthur Koestler
The Waste Land – T.S. Elliot
McTeague – Frank Norris
Money – Martin Amis
The Outsider – Colin Wilson
Strange People – Frank Edwards
English Journey – J.B. Priestley
A Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Day Of The Locust – Nathanael West
1984 – George Orwell
The Life And Times Of Little Richard – Charles White
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock – Nik Cohn
Mystery Train – Greil Marcus
Beano (comic)
Raw (comic, ’80s)
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom – Peter Guralnick
Silence: Lectures And Writing – John Cage
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited – Malcolm Cowley
The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll – Charlie Gillette
Octobriana And The Russian Underground – Peter Sadecky
The Street – Ann Petry
Wonder Boys – Michael Chabon
Last Exit To Brooklyn – Hubert Selby, Jr.
A People’s History Of The United States – Howard Zinn
The Age Of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby
Metropolitan Life – Fran Lebowitz
The Coast Of Utopia – Tom Stoppard
The Bridge – Hart Crane
All The Emperor’s Horses – David Kidd
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
Earthly Powers – Anthony Burgess
The 42nd Parallel – John Dos Passos
Tales Of Beatnik Glory – Ed Saunders
The Bird Artist – Howard Norman
Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music – Gerri Hirshey
Before The Deluge – Otto Friedrich
Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia
The American Way Of Death – Jessica Mitford
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Lady Lover – D.H. Lawrence
Teenage – Jon Savage
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
The Hidden Persuaders – Vance Packard
The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin
Viz (comic, ’80s)
Private Eye (satirical magazine, – ’80s)
Selected Poems – Frank O’Hara
The Trial Of Henry Kissinger – Christopher Hitchens
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréamont
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler
Zanoni – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels
The Leopard – Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
Inferno – Dante Alighieri
A Grave For A Dolphin – Alberto Denti di Pirajno
The Insult – Rupert Thomson
In Between The Sheets – Ian McEwan
A People’s Tragedy – Orlando Figes
Journey Into The Whirlwind – Eugenia Ginzburg

Stevie Nicks’ favourite books:

The Mabinogion Trilogy – Evangeline Walton
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Out of Africa – Karen Blixen
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
The Twilight Series – Stephenie Meyer
Wheel of Fortune – Susan Howatch
The Johns Hopkins Consumer Guide to Drugs
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
On The Road with Janis Joplin – John Byrne Cooke
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works

Jimi Hendrix’s favourite books:

The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Urantia Book
The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus – Brian Wilson Aldiss
Complete Fairy Tales – Hans Christian Andersen
Night of Light – Philip José Farmer
Winnie-the-Pooh – A. A. Milne
Lot – Ward Moore
Earth Abides – George Stewart
Secret Places of the Lion: Alien Influences on Earth’s Destiny – George Hunt Williamson

Alex Turner’s favourite books:

Saturday Night & Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
There is a Happy Land – Keith Waterhouse
The works of John Cooper Clarke
The works of Valdamir Nabokov
The works of Joseph Conrad
The works of Ernest Hemingway
Amusing Ourselves to Death – Neil Postman
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The works of H.P. Lovecraft
The works of Edgar Alan Poe
Submarine – Joe Dunthorne

Kurt Cobain’s favourite books:

The Inferno – Dante Alighieri
Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable – Samuel Beckett
Junky – William S. Burroughs
Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
Queer – William S. Burroughs
Ham On Rye – Charles Bukowski
Post Office – Charles Bukowski
Geek Love – Katherine Dunn
The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton
The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Collected Essays – Camille Paglia
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
SCUM Manifesto – Valerie Solanas
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Selected Works – Elinor Wylie

Yoko Ono’s 57 favourite books:

The Women – Hilton Als
Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves – Kevin Bales
The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today – Kevin Bales & Ron Soodalter
Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water – Maude Barlow & Tony Clarke
Skinny Bitch – Kim Barnouin & Rory Freedman
50 Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People – Sally Beare
The Ancient Art of Self-Healing – Yogi Bhajan and Siri Amir Singh Khalsa
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertold Brecht
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier – Smedley D. Butler
Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining – Tom Butler & Doug Tompkins
MAO – The Unknown Story – Jung Chang & Jon Halliday
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old – Deepak Chopra
Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis – Christopher D. Cook
Days That I’ll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono – Jonathan Cott
What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite – David DiSalvo
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science – Norman Doidge
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters – James W. Douglass
Classified Woman – Sibel Edmonds
The Hidden Messages in Water – Masaru Emoto
Healing Visualisations: Creating Health Through Imagery – Gerald Epstein M.D.
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group – Daniel Estulin
Every Man Dies Alone: A Novel – Hans Fallada
India – A Portrait by Patrick French
Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s – Otto Friedrich
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming – Masanobu Fukuoka
Windfall – Booming Business of Global Warming – McKenzie Funk
Creative Visualisation: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life – Shakti Gawain
A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness – Nassir Ghaemi
Love Your Body – Louise Hay
The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting – Ageing Without Growing Old – Marie de Hennezel
An Earth Saving Revolution – Teruo Higa
Brain Trust: The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease – Colm A. Kelleher
The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources – Michael T. Klare
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide – Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn
Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility – Ellen J. Langer
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession – Daniel J. Levitin
Ultraprevention – Mark Hyman & Mark Liponis
The Revolution is to be Human – Walter Lowenfels
Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions – Read Montague
And Justice For Some: An Expose of the Lawyers and Judges Who Let Dangerous Criminals Go – Wendy Murphy
Journey of Souls – Case Studies of Life Between Lives – Michael Newton Ph.D
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System – Raj Patel
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – John Perkins
The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World – John Perkins
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual – Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto – Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals – Michael Pollan
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business – Neil Postman
The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilisation’s Greatest Threat – Eric Roston
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book – Don Miguel Ruiz
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal – Eric Schlosser
When the World Outlawed War – David Christopher Naylor Swanson
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light – The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta by Mother Teresa
The Way of Life – Lao Tzu
Overcoming Speechlessness – Alice Walker
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World – Mark Williams, Danny Penman and Jon Kabat-Zinn
Violence – Six Sideways Reflections – Slavoj Žižek