Read like Patti Smith

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

The Devil turns up in 1930s Moscow with a giant talking cat, while a writer known as the Master works on a novel about Pontius Pilate. Patti calls it one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. It sent her to Moscow to find Bulgakov’s grave, and she named her 2012 album Banga after Pilate’s loyal dog.

2666, Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño’s final novel, published after his death: five parts and nearly 900 pages, with murders of women in a fictional Mexican border town at its dark centre. Patti spent two years reading it and taking it apart. Among the Polaroids in M Train there’s one of Bolaño’s own writing chair.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

A man’s cat goes missing, then his wife, so he climbs down a dry well to think. Patti says this was the one that “did me in”. When she finished it, she went straight back to page one, set off looking for the house with the well, and eventually lost her copy in an airport bathroom.

The Wild Boys, William S. Burroughs

Burroughs imagines a future overrun by feral gangs of boys, written in his cut-up, collage-like style. He was one of Patti’s friends from her early New York years. She has named this book among her all-time favourites, alongside 2666 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse

A short, strange book about a secret league of pilgrims whose journey falls apart when one quiet servant disappears. It’s been on Patti’s favourites lists for years. Hesse matters to her so much that she photographed his typewriter for M Train and went to his grave to thank him for writing The Glass Bead Game.

Ariel, Sylvia Plath

Plath wrote these poems in the last months of her life, and they were published after her death. Patti has called Ariel the book of her life at 20. In M Train, she describes visiting Plath’s grave in Yorkshire three times; once, she left a notebook, a purple ribbon and a sock embroidered with a bee.

Kappa, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

A patient in an asylum tells how he followed a kappa, a water creature from Japanese folklore, into a hidden world, where he found a society every bit as absurd as ours… This sharp, sad satire came out in 1927, the year Akutagawa died. In M Train, Patti raises a cup of sake in a Tokyo hotel and toasts Akutagawa by name.

After Nature, W.G. Sebald

Before his famous novels, Sebald wrote this long poem in three parts: two figures from history, then himself. Patti is a devoted Sebald reader; in 2011, she even built a whole evening of songs and readings around After Nature in Suffolk and read his verse aloud on stage.