Patti Smith's Reading List
"She advised me to read more German authors," says the writer and singer, whose latest memoir is "Year of the Monkey."
Open in WellRead Daily app →Books from The Ezra Klein Show: Patti Smith on the One Desire That Lasts Forever (2025)
Extracted via LLM (gemini-2.5-flash) from auto-captions of The Ezra Klein Show (2025-10-24).
Source: www.youtube.com
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Pinocchio was very important to me because I knew I was a weward kid... It's a redemptive story. It gave me hope as a kid."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"And I love Peter Pan of course because I didn't want to grow up. And so that was hope of a new place, Neverland, where you didn't have to grow up."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"reading Little Women. Of course, Joe March was an early hero, a girl who wrote, a girl like me who was sort of a tomboy who didn't like the fuss and feathers of being a girl and wanted to be a writer."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"All desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts forever. That was the desire for wisdom. And when that character is asked what to do with that wisdom, he says, I would make a poem. I know. I just love that so much."
Unknown · Buy on Amazon
"Pinocchio is my go-to book. I've read it a 100 times. That was always my dream. If I could write a book as good as Pinocchio, then I could say, 'Okay, I did my job.'"
Mary Shelley · Buy on Amazon
"Mary Shelly writes Frankenstein truly a masterpiece. Two different takes on creating being as a almost a god figure in creating life."
By the Book: Patti Smith (2019)
NYT By the Book column (2019-09-05).
Source: www.nytimes.com
Yuri Herrera · Buy on Amazon
""Kingdom Cons," also by the Mexican author Yuri Herrera, floored me. His writing style is like nobody else's, a unique turn of language, a kind of poetic slang."
Yukio Mishima · Buy on Amazon
""Star," by Yukio Mishima, is a startlingly modern, hypervisual jewel; it could be a really interesting movie. Both books were mesmerizing."
Carlo Collodi · Buy on Amazon
"I would suggest "Pinocchio," by Carlo Collodi, for it contains the full arc of innocence and experience, encompassing love, betrayal, heartbreak, forgiveness, transformation and redemption."
Jean Genet · Buy on Amazon
""The Thief's Journal," by Jean Genet, presented a genre that most connected with my early aspirations, a kind of autobiographical fiction, his chronicle having its own inherent truth."
Hermann Broch · Buy on Amazon
"she also advised me to read more German authors, which led me to Hermann Broch's "The Death of Virgil," now a favorite book, always close at hand, a musical infinity of words."
Sylvia Plath · Buy on Amazon
"I will always cherish the copy of Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" that Robert Mapplethorpe gave me shortly after we first met in 1967."
Mikhail Bulgakov · 1967 · Buy on Amazon
"From the first page I was immediately beguiled, leading me to my year of reading Bulgakov, drawing me to venture to Moscow to seek out the landmarks in the book"
Heinrich Böll · Buy on Amazon
"I like Katharina Blum, the person of interest in "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum," by Heinrich Böll. I can't say why but she fascinates me, having read this book at least seven times and still can't pin her down."
Hermann Hesse · Buy on Amazon
"I could not dwell in the obscure streets of Patrick Modiano or follow the ascension of Joseph Knecht as the Magister Ludi in "The Glass Bead Game," by Hermann Hesse."
Favorite books (2019)
Favorite books recommended by Patti Smith, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/patti-smith-favorite-books/.
Source: radicalreads.com
Louisa May Alcott (also rec’d by Gloria Steinem , John Lennon & Maya Angelou ) · Buy on Amazon
Artaud · Buy on Amazon
W.H. Auden · Buy on Amazon
Walter Benjamin · Buy on Amazon
William Blake · Buy on Amazon
Roberto Bolaño · Buy on Amazon
"Every time I read Bolaño I feel so inspired, I just want to write…He’s a genius – the expansiveness he creates, how he relates one book to another – he’s set a new template for writing."
Roberto Bolaño · Buy on Amazon
Heinrich Böll · Buy on Amazon
Paul Bowles · Buy on Amazon
André Breton · Buy on Amazon
Hermann Broch · Buy on Amazon
Charlotte Brontë · Buy on Amazon
Emily Brontë (also rec’d by Ernest Hemingway & Joan Didion ) · Buy on Amazon
Mikhail Bulgakov (also rec’d by David Bowie · Buy on Amazon
William S. Burroughs · Buy on Amazon
Albert Camus · Buy on Amazon
Albert Camus · Buy on Amazon
Lewis Carroll (also rec’d by Hayao Miyazaki , Patti Smith & Rose McGowan ) · Buy on Amazon
Jean Cocteau · Buy on Amazon
Joseph Conrad · Buy on Amazon
Dante (also rec’d by Susan Sontag ) · Buy on Amazon
René Daumal · Buy on Amazon
Osamu Dazai · Buy on Amazon
Osamu Dazai · Buy on Amazon
Arthur Conan Doyle · Buy on Amazon
David Edmonds & John Eidinow · Buy on Amazon
Isabelle Eberhardt · Buy on Amazon
Jean Genet · Buy on Amazon
Allen Ginsberg (also rec’d by Bob Dylan & John Lennon ) · Buy on Amazon
Nikolai Gogol · Buy on Amazon
Brion Gysin · Buy on Amazon
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Buy on Amazon
Hermann Hesse · Buy on Amazon
Hermann Hesse · Buy on Amazon
H.E. Huntley · Buy on Amazon
Henrik Ibsen · Buy on Amazon
Anna Kavan · Buy on Amazon
"Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach Land of a Thousand Dances : she’s caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that’s really exciting. She’s not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps ex..."
Anna Kavan · Buy on Amazon
Jack Kerouac · Buy on Amazon
Federico García Lorca · Buy on Amazon
H.P. Lovecraft · Buy on Amazon
Malcolm Lowry · Buy on Amazon
Maurice Maeterlinck · Buy on Amazon
Enid Meadowcroft · Buy on Amazon
Herman Melville · Buy on Amazon
Herman Melville (also rec’d by Bob Dylan , Bruce Springsteen , John Irving , Norman Mailer , Patti Smith , Penn Jillette , Ray Bradbury , Steve Jobs & Tilda Swinton ) · Buy on Amazon
Henry Miller · Buy on Amazon
Haruki Murakami · Buy on Amazon
Haruki Murakami · Buy on Amazon
Haruki Murakami · Buy on Amazon
Robert Musil · Buy on Amazon
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · Buy on Amazon
Vladimir Nabokov · Buy on Amazon
Gérard de Nerval · Buy on Amazon
Ouida · Buy on Amazon
Nicanor Parra · Buy on Amazon
Fernando Pessoa · Buy on Amazon
Sylvia Plath · Buy on Amazon
"My copy of Ariel [was] given to me when I was twenty. Ariel became the book of my life then, drawing me to a poet with hair worthy of a Breck commercial and the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart. With little effort I visualized my Ariel perfectly. Slim, with faded black cloth, that I opened in my mind, noting my youthful signature on the cream endpaper. I turned the pages, revisiting the shape of each poem."
Sylvia Plath · Buy on Amazon
Marcel Proust · Buy on Amazon
Arthur Rimbaud · Buy on Amazon
J.D. Salinger · Buy on Amazon
J.D. Salinger · Buy on Amazon
W.G. Sebald · Buy on Amazon
"At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them. Scarcely would I enter their world before I’d be transported to a myriad of other worlds."
William Shakespeare · Buy on Amazon
Mary Shelley · Buy on Amazon
Sam Shepard · Buy on Amazon
Margaret Sidney · Buy on Amazon
Betty Smith · Buy on Amazon
Susan Sontag (also rec’d by Carrie Brownstein ) · Buy on Amazon
Alexander Trocchi · Buy on Amazon
Amos Tutuola · Buy on Amazon
Mark Twain · Buy on Amazon
Rosemary Wells · Buy on Amazon
Oscar Wilde · Buy on Amazon
Ludwig Wittgenstein · Buy on Amazon
Bertram David Wolfe · Buy on Amazon
Virginia Woolf (also rec’d by Carrie Brownstein ) · Buy on Amazon