We Need To Make Books Cool Again: The Favorite Books of John Waters
Happy 70th birthday, John Waters!
Waters, the cult filmmaker (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray) and author (Role Models, Carsick), is also notorious for his love of books. (“We need to makes books cool again. If you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.”)
And like any book lover, he has a lot of favorites. So for his birthday, we’ve collected a list of his favorite books, as mentioned in interviews, as well as his own works.
My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard (Author), Carol Janeway (Translator)
Narrow Rooms by James Purdy
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short
Genet: A Biography by Edmund White
The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Still Holding by Bruce Wagner
Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare
The Beard by Michael McClure
(As listed in the New York Times Magazine, Nov. 20, 2015)
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
Swimming Underground by Mary Woronov
Suicide in the Entertainment Industry by David K. Frasier
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq (Author), Gavin Bowd (Translator)
Sita by Kate Millett
(As listed in The Week, May 21, 2010.)
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder by Deborah Spungen
Consider the Oyster by M. F. K. Fisher
Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles
Jernigan by David Gates
Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Platform by Michel Houellebecq (Author), Frank Wynne (Author)
So Much for That by Lionel Shriver
The Assistant by Robert Walser (Author), Susan Bernofsky (Translator)
The End of Alice by A.M. Homes
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley
The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (Author), Richard Seaver (Translator)
Time Remaining by James McCourt
Voss by Patrick White
We Disappear by Scott Heim
(As listed in The Strand’s Curated Collections)
In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton-Burnett
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
(As listed on KCRW on July 28, 2010)
Books by John Waters:
Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981)
Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1987)
Art: A Sex Book (2003) (With Bruce Hainley)
Role Models (2010)
Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (2014)
