Martha Wainwright's Reading List

"The first real book that I read independently was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles , and it really marked my pre-teen years. It was sitting on a bookshelf in my house in Saint-Sauveur, Quebec, and I just picked it up when I was about 12. I’m not a big sci-fi reader, but it reads pretty easily. It was the most expanded that my mind had ever been to that point by far! I don’t know if I understood all of the subtleties of it, but it was the beginning of the possibility of fiction, in a way."

"I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking after I lost my mother. It was a very interesting account — very different from my own personal experience, in that hers was so descriptive and detail-oriented in terms of timeline and what happened to her husband and then her daughter’s illness. There’s a coldness and an objectivity to it that I really loved and somehow needed at that time. It also opened the door for me to read more memoirs."

"I have a song called ‘Lolita’ and I saw the movie before I read the book, to be honest. But when I read Nabokov’s book, I was bowled over. I probably read it when I was about 19. And I didn’t identify with Lolita at all, but rather with the character of Humbert Humbert, which is what I wrote about in this song. I understood the feeling of having an obsession with someone you probably should stay away from."

"It’s a proto–Beat Generation drugs-and-alcohol writer book about a struggling artist living in a crappy apartment in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. It’s a coming-of-age book that’s fun and a bit dangerous."