Bumbershoot’s lineup is an unusually bookish bunch this year: Lucy Dacus has a famous Goodreads account with over 2,100 books cataloged, Noname founded a book club with chapters all over the country, Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna penned the memoir Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard is a fanboy of Jack Kerouac and Raymond Carver. To celebrate the upcoming festival, I gathered some of the headliners’ top literary picks. I also threw in a few books about the artists themselves for good measure, like Girls to the Front and Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made. Why not tuck a copy or two into your Bumbershoot-approved clear bag for some reading on the grass in between sets? (If you need more tips to navigate the festival, check out our guide here!)

Noname
Rapper Noname’s book club describes itself as a “Black-owned business connecting community members both inside and outside carceral facilities with radical books” and believes “building community through political education is crucial for our liberation.” Each month, the club selects a Black-authored book to read and recommends that members purchase it through their Black-owned and POC-owned bookstore list. Since its inception in 2019, the book club has grown to encompass chapters in the US, Africa, and Europe and maintains chapters in prisons in the US and Lagos, Nigeria. In 2020, the organization also opened the Radical Hood Library, a community library in Los Angeles that provides “free access to books, movie screenings, teach-ins and a monthly open mic.” Here are some of the club’s picks from over the years.

  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saiidiya Hartman: Academic and writer Saidiya Hartman explores in depth the “evolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century” and finds that many young Black women created bold new forms of love and intimacy that defied the social rules and expectations of the time, paving the way for “a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape.” Because these pioneering women were largely forgotten and usually not documented properly by history, Hartman had to use unconventional research techniques at times. She cleverly reads between the lines of historical texts and archives to finally do justice to their stories and pay them the long overdue credit they so richly deserve.
  • Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: This dystopian 2023 novel portrays a world where the prison system televises death matches between convicted wards of state for viewers’ entertainment. It’s a blistering critique of the carceral system and the commodification of pain.
  • Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde: Legendary Black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde’s landmark collection of writing is required reading for everyone.
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler: Butler’s 1993 post-apocalyptic dystopian novel envisions a near-future version of Los Angeles devastated by climate change and social inequality. Amidst this turmoil, the 15-year-old protagonist Lauren, who possesses the gift/curse of “hyper-empathy,” develops a religion called “Earthseed” that believes “God is Change.”
  • Heavy by Kiese Laymon: A searing memoir that tracks Laymon’s experience of growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, including his “complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling.”
  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi: Gyasi’s PEN/Hemingway Award-winning generational family saga spans 300 years in Ghana and America, following the drastically divergent stories of half-sisters Effia and Esi and their descendants.

Lucy Dacus
Like many other parasocial queers, I’ve long followed Lucy Dacus’s Goodreads account and admired her literary taste. She and her boygenius bandmates are notoriously avid readers, as documented by this LitHub reading list.

  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin: Dacus has cited this classic multiple times as one of the most influential books she’s read and has called Baldwin “maybe the best writer who ever lived.”
  • Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz: Described succinctly on Dacus’s Goodreads as “if Joan Didion was a hot slut.”
  • Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib: “If only every writer approached their subjects with the generosity, humility, respect, and honesty that Hanif does.”
  • In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado: “There is no readying yourself for this one. Carmen is a modern legend, case closed.”
  • The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck: “An immediate favorite.”
  • Cleanness by Garth Greenwell: In Vanity Fair, Dacus called Greenwell “probably one of the best sex writers alive” (and I agree).

Bikini Kill
Bikini Kill frontwoman and Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna is an author herself and has shared some of her favorite reads on the You’re Booked podcast, in The Believer, and in the Perfectly Imperfect newsletter.

  • Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna: Hanna’s memoir detailing her life in the punk rock world, her time launching the Riot Grrrl movement in Olympia, and stories of friendships with everyone from Kurt Cobain to Kim Gordon.
  • Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. and To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine: Hanna cites Slits guitarist Viv Albertine’s books as a major influence on her writing.
  • Black Punk Now, an anthology edited by James Spooner and Chris L. Terry: In Perfectly Imperfect, Hanna writes, “Like a great musical compilation that features a ton of different styles. From fiction by Honeychild Coleman and Hanif Abdurraqib to several great Roundtable Discussions called ‘No Whites on the Mic’ that cover topics like how to start a DIY collective, what’s happening in the punk scene NOW, and self care. I came for the great writing and the bands but came back again to fully enjoy the amazing comics and photos. This is one of those must-have books like Banned in DC and Shotgun Seamstress; The Complete Zine Collection.”
  • Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse by Brontez Purnell: Also on Perfectly Imperfect, Hanna raves, “This book says ‘A Memoir in Verse’ on its cover but it DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU DON’T ‘GET’ POETRY OR HATE IT EVEN. This book will change your mind. This is the funniest most fucked up book you will ever be lucky enough to read. Seriously do yourself a favor and get it because I can’t describe seeing a sunset while having an orgasm anymore than I can describe this book.”
  • What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo: Hanna has said this literary memoir by former This American Life producer Stephanie Foo on healing from C-PTSD helped her through some “really fucked-up trauma” that surfaced while writing Rebel Girl.
  • Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus: While Hanna hasn’t recommended this book specifically, it’s a comprehensive history of the underground feminist punk movement of the 1990s and gets its title from her famous call to action at Bikini Kill shows.

Blood Orange
English singer-songwriter and record producer Dev Hynes of Blood Orange has recommended his favorite books in various places, including One Grand Books and the New York Times.

  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Hynes has called this 1818 classic one of his favorite books and has revisited it multiple times throughout his life.
  • Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, edited by Chris Devito: Hynes wrote, “The ever-elusive music icon is definitely not shy in these interviews and portraits that paint the picture of man, a musician and free-thinker to be much championed.”
  • Swing Time by Zadie Smith: “As a black, British, dancer who now resides in New York, Zadie’s descriptiveness in regards to her characters’ childhoods sent me back in time to a very English place.”
  • Love Is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill: “This collection of poems, prose and essays by Essex Hemphill is my go-to carry-around book. It includes words of wonder, sadness and critique all centered around the black, gay experience—especially heightened within the AIDS epidemic.”
  • The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin: “What a wonder of a book. My cello bible. I long for many books like this—one third investigative journalism, one third history lesson and one third self-discovery. Eric Sibling sets out on a quest to understand the uniquely mysterious history of the Bach Cello Suites, which were discovered by the cellist Pau Casals when he was a child. Siblin goes so deep into the lives of Bach, Casals—and himself—and it will truly make you listen to these pieces in a whole new way.”

Orville Peck

  • Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz: The masked cowboy and singer-songwriter told Thrillist in 2022, “I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a conscious inspiration that I draw from, but I read a lot growing up. For me, the books that really stand out to me now as an adult that I always go back to are books like Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz. It’s a biographical, kinda manic rant about being a gay man. For him, it was in the ’70s in New York. Soon after he would die of AIDS.”

Death Cab for Cutie

  • Big Sur by Jack Kerouac: Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard has frequently noted his love of Kerouac and collaborated with Jay Farrar of Son Volt on One Fast Move or I’m Gone, an album based on Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur.
  • Cathedral by Raymond Carver: Carver is one of Gibbard’s biggest literary influences, and he’s called his 2005 song “Crooked Teeth” an “attempt to be a junior Raymond Carver.” He told Vice in 2018, “There aren’t a lot of writers that I’m always re-reading, but Raymond Carver is one of them. I have an anthology where the pages are like Bible paper, and I find myself just picking that up. If I’m in between books, I find myself picking up Raymond Carver, and just choosing a story and re-reading it, because there’s such a depth to his writing in such a simple language, and there’s so much unsaid in those stories–there’s a lot of negative space in his writing, and that’s the real meat of it.”
  • Moonglow by Michael Chabon: In the same 2018 Vice interview, Death Cab guitarist and keyboardist Dave Depper said, “The last thing I read that really knocked me out was called Moonglow by Michael Chabon. His last few books really didn’t do anything for me, so I was really surprised that this book was so wonderful. It’s historical fiction that takes place in World War II, and it’s set up as a memoir of his grandpa being on his deathbed telling him stories. And the setting is something I didn’t know a lot about, which was the Allied rush to grab German scientists, as it became clear that the Allies were going to win the war, to get the scientists before the Russians did.”

Sudan Archives

  • African Music: A People’s Art by Francis Bebey: Last year, the violinist and singer-songwriter Brittney Denise Parks, aka Sudan Archives, told The Guardian she returns to this book: “It’s about the different string instruments in Africa and how they’re played, and what tribes play them.”
  • Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle: In the same Guardian interview, she also mentioned this title, explaining, “It’s light poetry about life, and it’s really inspirational. And you don’t need to read the whole book—when you don’t have a lot of time, you can just open up to any page.”

De La Soul

  • Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made by Austin McCoy: History professor Austin McCoy explores the pioneering hip hop group’s impact and cultural significance.
  • High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul by Marcus J. Moore: Music journalist Marcus J. Moore documents the rise of De La Soul and their influence on his own coming-of-age in this biography.

Julianne Bell is a staff culture writer for The Stranger, an Aries, and a proud AMC A-List member. She lives in Seattle with a tabby cat named Rhubarb and can usually be found knitting in a cafe somewhere.