Kim Gordon's Reading List

"I've read all the others in the series. I'm learning about Norway's relationship with the Nazis and a lot of other things about that country."

"I also love Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, who wrote the first feminist novel in "Madame Bovary." I love that period of literature; it's like hyper-elegant gossip."

"Why is that the best book? Because it is."

""Mystery Train," by Greil Marcus was very inspirational to me."

"Chris Kraus's "I Love Dick" and Cayce Pollard in "Pattern Recognition," by William Gibson."

"Cayce Pollard in "Pattern Recognition," by William Gibson. Cayce is known as a "coolhunter," and she's described in the book as being allergic to fashion."

""Dissident Gardens," by Jonathan Lethem. It covers 80 years in New York, and so many different scenes."

""A Wrinkle in Time," by Madeleine L'Engle. I also liked the Nancy Drew books."

""The Lonely Doll," by Dare Wright. It was my first view, my first idea, of New York as a glamorous place."

""Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk," by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain."

"Didion's "The White Album." I love the period of time in California she writes about... She's both an insider and a critical outsider. She's bearing witness to an era."

"Why is that the best book [about music]? Because it is."

"Jamie’s book is a biography of a famous Australian surfer who’s transgender, man to woman, and still surfs."

"It’s about how feminism fails to address the relationship between mothers and daughters because of its emphasis on escaping the house. I didn’t finish it—who has the time or the energy to read when you’re a new mom?—but I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things—a mother, a good partner, a lover, as..."

"In 1987, Thurston and I were both reading Philip K. Dick, whose writing has more in common with philosophy than science fiction, and whose descriptions of schizophrenia were better than those of any medical journal. Philip Dick had a twin sister who died shortly after she was born and whose memory plagued him his whole life—which is maybe how and why our new album ended up being called Sister ."

"I was really late to getting around to this. It wasn’t until a journalist related my art sensibility and writing to her that I finally stopped rebelling and started reading! I love her asexual voice, writing in a man’s world. Her essays about California are like no one else’s."

"Naturally, Dan Graham turned me on to it, telling me how seminal a book it was for music critics like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, and Greil Marcus. Whether he was telling the truth or not, I really responded to the book."

"The first feminist character in a novel. I love this period of French lit, reflecting the life of a bored wife trapped as a woman in a ‘suitable’ marriage as a way to maintain her inheritance. It was seen as introducing realism and the modern narrative."

"Still one of my favorite writers. Her writing is audacious and detailed. These stories are almost anti-chick lit, opening up contemporary female eroticism."

"His first non-sci-fi book. I loved the idea of a ‘coolhunter’ being a woman, and stalked by a corporation."

"The back cover describes it as ‘the indispensable book on the social power and meaning of sex and love.’ Who wouldn’t want to read that?"

"The first book I read by him is incredibly sad and so well written. It also reminded me of when I first took a bus across country to New York — so alone in the night surrounded by weird America."

"A haze-filled dream world of a novel about the survivors of nuclear fallout attempting to rebuild their lives and society. In my head, Fiskadoro mingled with old 1960s movie themes of young women growing up in small towns, wanting to leave their hometowns behind and be somewhere, anywhere, and someone, anyone, else. Maybe they’d glimpsed a highway billboard that advertised clothes, a car, a golden future, a possibility. Maybe, thanks to the machine of consumerism, they felt they were missing..."

"A book analyzing the films of French director Catherine Breillat, one of my favorite directors, is infinitely fascinating for how it dissects her treatment of subject matter: desire, shame, body image and male/female power struggles as sexuality."

"Reading Rachel Kushner’s novel The Flamethrowers, I could relate to the sensation of being young in New York, living on the outside of the art world."

"There’s no character as good or as innovative as Lisbeth Salander in the Stieg Larsson series, but I keep looking."

"It covers 80 years in New York, and so many different scenes. I hadn’t really known about Sunnyside Gardens as a planned retirement community, and also a Communist stronghold."

"The first book that I read that turned me on to thinking about music intellectually. It inspired me to write."

"Maybe the best writer. The way she naturally and effortlessly integrates her life with her inner, critical self, without being meta about it, and always finds the place that no one else occupies but always seems to makes perfect sense."

"I’m learning about Norway’s relationship with the Nazis and a lot of other things about that country. I like the protagonist, Harry Hole; it’s a ridiculous name, but it works. He’s grizzled, alcoholic, surrounded by a lot of corruption, so he’s working against the police and trying to find the serial killer at the same time."

"Before I discovered Roland Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, I stumbled upon this book around my parents’ house, left by my brother. It was like a light bulb going off in my head."

"Sure to be a classic. A present-day venture into the surrealist novel. It’s the best description of the art world ever and the existential void every artist faces in an art practice."

"It was my first view, my first idea, of New York as a glamorous place. I also really liked the doll’s pink-and-white-checked apron and the general air of existential blankness. When I tried to read it to my daughter, Coco, I thought, ‘This is so dark and terrifying.’ But I’ve met many women who were influenced by that book."