Reading with the Boss: Some of Bruce Springsteen’s Favorite Books
There are some hefty ones on his list
I received a comment on a piece from earlier this week about collecting Penguin Deluxe Classics Editions that has been bouncing around in my brain for days and just won’t go away. George Weeks asked a question that, amazingly and unforgivably, I had never considered: what is Bruce Springsteen’s favorite book? I knew, of course, that he had written an autobiography. I also knew that both when I saw him at the Cotton Bowl in 1985 and on the Live 1975–85 album he introduced the song “This Land is Your Land” by mentioning that he had been reading Joe Klein’s book Woody Guthrie: A Life. But what were his favorite books?
This question would have been far more difficult to answer if I had asked it after that concert in 1985, more than a decade before the internet gave us instant access to things that used to take armies of researchers years to dig up. Fortunately, a quick dive down the internet rabbit hole (that really wasn’t all that quick; I took a lot of side trips) gave me the answer. It seems that exactly ten years ago, in an article from October 2014, the New York Times asked Springsteen several questions about his favorite books, and his answers were interesting.
