If you read this blog, you know that there is a short list of authors I have read multiple times. With so many books and so little time, I like to fan out and cover as much ground as possible. Call it The Primo list. I’m usually done at one.
Armistead Maupin, Anne Tyler, and Anne Lamott lead the pack of exceptions with ten titles each. Harlan Coben, too. A smaller group called the thrice list includes writers like Taylor Jenkins Reid, Joan Didion, and Ann Patchett.
This week another notable lady joins their company. Call it an induction ceremony. Patti Smith is an author so poetic and idiosyncratic that I’ve now read three of her works. I may not stop there.
Here they are:
1.
Set over the year 2016, this fictionalized memoir starts at a hotel called The Dream Inn in Santa Cruz. Patti beachcombs after a few shows at the Fillmore, collecting candy wrappers and chatting with locals. She hitches a ride to San Diego, ends up in LA, and spends time in Kentucky with her friend Sam Shepard. By the end of the year she’s in New York, drinking vodka in the morning while the city reels from an election shock.
Along the way she discusses art and 2666, rummages through trunks of costumes, and takes the subway to Rockaway. She is grieving the anticipated losses of Sam and another mentor.
It’s all gorgeous and dreamlike.
2.
Another gorgeous dreamlike work, this memoir has the author writing in a Greenwich Village cafe, traveling in her mind through time and locations and into artists’ lives. She has a fondness for detective stories that adds a noir feel to her city explorations. The title refers to the subway that takes her to a getaway in Far Rockaway.
3.
Probably her most famous work, this is a memoir about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It has the same spare lyricism as her other works. Not to be missed.
Books Smitten 