Nick Cave's Reading List

"He's co-created a gorgeous book called faith hope and Carnage and become a Frank and eloquent interlocutor on Grief."

"I actually wanted to read you a poem would you like that Mary Oliver poem... it's lovely."

"I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch – it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time."

"When I grew a little older my father read me the murder scene in this book and said: This is what violent literature should be like, son. He was right. This is one of the most influential books I’ve read and it affected the writing of my own book. My father gave me a very special feeling about written words."

"I fled through Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am and halfway through I was in tears and again a bit further on, more tears – as a father, as a son and as a husband. The last book that did this was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and in some way this book is not dissimilar – there is a family in crisis and there is an apocalypse – but The Road is all darkness with brief spasms of light, and although Here I Am is also a deeply melancholy book about a doomed family, it is wickedly funny, so that you a..."

"I love that book. It’s clever, that book, because the environmental that they’re living in is so unremittingly pessimistic that he’s able to weave this extraordinarily sentimental story about the love between father and son and completely get away with it. The end speech that the dying father gives his son about carrying the fire … if you take that out of context it reads completely differently."

"I’ve sent both my older kids Lolita and advised them to read the first chapter. They’re older than when I had it read to me – I was about 12. I didn’t read the whole thing [at the time]. The point was the first chapter is very short, half a page. It’s undeniably beautiful even to a young child, to someone who doesn’t really understand."

"[Solanas] wrote a very angry and very precise portrait of what she considered the male to be: something between a human and an ape; an unresponsive blob only concerned with physical sensation and without the capacity for empathy or self-knowledge or intimacy, and at the same time full of hatred and jealousy and shame and guilt. Her description is beautiful and on some level, I think, entirely accurate."