St. Vincent shares reading list featuring 34 of her favourite books
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St. Vincent shares reading list featuring 34 of her favourite books

As well as being a frequent guest on KLRX Radio’s Unbound Book Podcast, musician Annie Clark’s adoration for the written word is well known in the music world – her moniker St. Vincent is a reference to the hospital where poet Dylan Thomas spent his final living hours. Sharing a list of her 34 favourite books for website Radical Reads, St. Vincent personally acknowledged the synonymous and often overlapping relationship between words and music, stating “I’ve always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians. I was a lusty kid who loved Tennessee Williams.”

 

At first glance, it’s worth noting a few notable authors in Clarke’s extremely diverse list – there’s everyone from Ernest Hemmingway and Mark Twain to Patti Smith and Tina Fey, with other keynote literary figures such as Dylan Thomas, Werner Herzog and Marcel Proust copping a mention as well. Check out the full list below, and do yourself a favour and check out a read from your local library – reading is super underrated. 

 

Hilton Als – White Girls
Saladin Ambar – Malcolm X At Oxford Union: Radical Politics In A Global Era
Roland Barthes – A Lover’s Discourse
Roland Barthes – Mythologies
Jorge Luis Borges – The Aleph 
David Carr – The Night of the Gun
Joan Didion – Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion – The White Album
Joan Didion – Year Of Magical Thinking 
Tina Fey – Bossy Pants
John Fowles – The Magus
Spalding Gray – The Journals of Spalding Gray
Ernest Hemmingway – The Sun Also Rises
Werner Herzog – Animal Love
Werner Herzog – The Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Dave Hickey – Air Guitar
Ray Kurzweil – Experiencing Time Perabolically
Legs McNeil – Please Kill Me
Lorrie Moore – Bark
Lorrie Moore – Birds Of America 
Tracy Morgan – I Am the New Black
Maggie Nelson – The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Christopher Ryan – Sex At Dawn
Patti Smith – Just Kids
James Westcott – When Marina Abramovic Dies
Lawrence Wright – Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, And The Prison Of Belief

 

Find your closest library and check out one of St. Vincent’s favourite reads here.

 

Feature image via Erik Melvin.