Bono's Reading List

"I love timeline transportations. I enjoy tangential views of a core theme. I not only discovered the word Apeirogon, I rediscovered murmuration as a most powerful symbol."

"All art is religious to me, even bad art is revealing. It will be the only real glance we get into the state of our soul until that can be measured."

"Like George Orwell's Animal Farm, this is a book that moved in with me as a teenager and has never moved out."

"Like George Orwell's Animal Farm, this is a book that moved in with me as a teenager and has never moved out."

"It was in the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco where I discovered Kerouac's On the Road, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg's Howl and America, all of which heavily influenced The Joshua Tree."

"I discovered Kerouac's On the Road, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg's Howl and America, all of which heavily influenced The Joshua Tree."

"Art Pepper's Straight Life, where I discovered truth outclassed style and vernacular was the king's English at the right table."

"When I heard Bruce Springsteen's music I reread John Steinbeck — when I read his memoir Born to Run, I re-listened to Patti Scialfa's Rumble Doll."

"A couple of other memoirs I held close during the writing of my own were Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Patti Smith's Just Kids."

"Everything in We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole's magnum opus/personal history of generational change in Ireland. Really great on the troubles in the church as well as the state."

"The book I often give as a gift is Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, his final collection."

"Screwtape in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters — I channel his devilish spirit in someone I become onstage called MacPhisto."

"I got a copy of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls growing up, which hurried my puberty to a place where I thought differently about girls and women."

"I loved Tolstoy's Resurrection."