Patti Smith

The following is from a New York Times article online (How Susan Sontag Influenced Patti Smith’s Reading Life by Jillian Tamaki) that I discovered through an Austin Kleon post a while back. I so admire Ms. Smith and I absolutely love what she said.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I read all the time, anywhere — on my stoop, in a noisy cafe, at night in my tour bus bunk. The external circumstance is not the key, it’s the book itself. I’m like Gumby; I enter the world of a book and temporarily live there, shutting all else out. Unless I’m researching, I only finish books I love. I don’t date. I can pretty much tell right away if I’m going to commit. There are also books I know I will love someday. For instance, it took me years to tackle “The Magic Mountain,” but once I did I was transfixed, wholeheartedly enveloped in an atmosphere of convalescence. If I can’t figure out what to read, sometimes I stand before my shelves and feel which book is calling for me. I have a special technique for rereading masterpieces like “Frankenstein” or “The Glass Bead Game.” I keep the book by my bed and open it at random and read from there. I do that from a new spot for several nights until I feel I have experienced the book three-dimensionally, cubistically, from several angles.

You’ve written about your love of crime dramas on TV. Does that translate to a love of crime novels? If not, which genres do you prefer?

I read mostly fiction, most often in translation. I do love detective stories. I prefer when the emphasis is on the unraveling of a dark puzzle, revealing how the detective’s mind works. When young I admired the cleverness of Nancy Drew, revered the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes and the patience of Maigret, then gravitated toward the hard-boiled jargon of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. In recent years I’ve read all the books by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who wrote “The Laughing Policeman,” and especially loved Henning Mankells’s Inspector Kurt Wallander, depicted with such depth and poignancy by Kenneth Branagh.