Hello Bob Dylan lovers, today we do a research about the books that Bob Dylan loves and we have listed the books that Bob Dylan loves for you. (To buy the book you like, you can click on the link on the Amazon website.)
“People I read? Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Henry Miller, Joseph Conrad, and Melville.” – Bob Dylan
“At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don’t know. Lately if I read poems, it’s like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare’s sonnets I can hear a melody because it’s all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, ‘What kind of song would this be?'” – Bob Dylan
2- ‘Poems’ by Henry Timrod
4- The Dave Stewart Songbook: The Stories Behind The Songs – Volume One
6- Francois Villon poems
“Someone gave me a book of Francois Villon poems and he was writing about hardcore street stuff and making it rhyme. It was pretty staggering, and it made you wonder why you couldn’t do the same thing in a song.” – Bob Dylan
7- Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues
10- Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems (PENGUIN CLASSIC)
“[When I came to New York] the idea that poetry was spoken in the streets and spoken publicly, you couldn’t help but be excited by that. There would always be a poet in the clubs and you’d hear the rhymes. Ginsberg and Gregory Corso—those guys were highly influential.” – Bod Dlan
11- ‘A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat’ by Arthur Rimbaud
“Rimbaud has been a big influence on me. When I’m on the road and want to read something that makes sense to me, I go to a bookstore and read his words. Melville is somebody I can identify with because of how he looked at life. I also like Joseph Conrad a lot, and I’ve loved what I’ve read of James Joyce. Allen Ginsberg is always a great inspiration.” – Bob Dylan
12- The Oxford Book of English Verse
13- All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel
14- ‘All Access: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Photography of Ken Regan’ by Ken Regan
15- Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta
16- Woody Guthrie – American Radical Patriot
17- ‘Naked Lunch’ by William S. Burroughs
18- ‘The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics’ by Eric Sackheim
19- ‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Melville
20- ‘Girl from the North Country’ by Conor McPherson
22– ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’ by Alan Lomax
23- ‘Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards’ by Al Kooper
24– ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac
25- ‘Mexico City Blues’ by Jack Kerouac
27- ‘Bound for Glory’ by Woody Guthrie
28- ‘Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley’ by Peter Guralnick
29– ‘Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps’ by Emmett Grogan
30- ‘The White Goddess’ by Robert Graves
31- ‘One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding’ by Robert Gover
32- ‘Jerry Garcia: The Collected Artwork’ by Jerry Garcia
33- ‘The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry’ by Angel Flores
34- ‘The Complete Poetry and Prose’ by John Donne
35- ‘Victory’ by Joseph Conrad
36- ‘On War’ by Carl von Clausewitz
37- ‘Stories’ by Anton Chekhov
38- ‘Tropic of Cancer’ by Henry Miller
ADLER: You often list Henry Miller amongst your influences.
DYLAN: Yes. I think that he’s the greatest American writer.
ADLER: I believe you’ve met him. What did you talk about?
DYLAN: We played ping-pong.
39- ‘Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63’ by Taylor Branch
40- ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy
41- ‘The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club’ by Sonny Barger
“My, ah, my latest book…it’s been out for a long time, but my latest thing I’m just reading is…back into reading the William Blake poems again. It seems like when you’re young and you read them they don’t have the effect on you that they do when you get older. It was years ago when it was time just to read all those guys, but lately it’s been necessary for me to find some time to go back and re-read someone like Blake or Shelley, Byron, some of those people.” – Bob Dylan
Sources
http://favobooks.com/tvradio/76-books-that-made-bob-dylan.html
Congrats to my old pals The Zimmer twins, Kent and Keith Zimmerman whose book with Sonny Barger made the list of Bob Dylan’s favorite 42 books. High praise from the master putting them among the literary elite ( the literati?)
The jury is out on the value of classical authors of the not so recent past. Their true worth lies in the now novel way in which they used words , sentences , syntax and phrases just as Kerouac, Keasy,Wolfe,HST and Dylan used today but as back then in a style that their contemporaries could readily relate to which gave it an exciting appeal, an adoptable vanguard, an aura of security and confidence that provided the subject with perfect default positions for any intellectual or grammatical discourse – the play of words, double and hidden meanings to those who would search for them and words recently invented, rehashed and implied. This has all happened in the past too but todays literature means the same and speaks to the current cohort using current conventions of language.
Nothing much has really changed over time concerning our literary endeavours, interests concepts and challenges. The change seems to come from the same palette of life’s colours that have been refreshingly recombined and presented today on a new canvas.
Change is inevitable and unavoidable. It is the connective tissue of the past.. Long live literature, no doubt.