Here’s Your 4 Day (Reading) Pass to Lollapalooza!

I absolutely love Lollapalooza weekend. Whether I'm attending the music festival with my husband, watching the live streams from the comfort of my couch, or drinking espresso at 10pm to make it to an aftershow, I always look forward to this weekend. Sadly, this year I will be out of town so I thought it would be fun to get some Lolla-inspired reading done on my trip. I had a lot of fun imagining what books some of this year's artists may have been reading while recording some of the songs they'll be performing this year. Check them out below - a book for each day of the fest!

Luckily, I didn't have to think too hard for this first one because Lorde is very vocal about the books she reads! Recently she highlighted Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang, and I completely understand why. Through her memoir, Jackie Wang takes us through her girlhood, from being the "odd girl" in Florida scrolling the early days of Tumblr to her time at Harvard, leading all the way to becoming a National Book Award finalist. It's a beautiful look at the entire life of an artist, organized by the place in which the piece was written as opposed to being strictly chronological. It's not surprising that Lorde, known for her incredibly introspective lyrics also spanning over a decade of life experiences, would enjoy this novel. 

Charli XCX just released her latest album Music, Fashion, Film but a lot of us (read: me) are still stuck on Brat. I was listening to "Symphony is a Knife" the other day, the song purportedly about Charli feeling inadvertently competitive with Taylor Swift, and it reminded me a lot of the novel I'm A Fan by Sheena Patel. The unnamed narrator is a woman in her 30s who becomes obsessed with the woman her affair partner is sleeping with. She's unable to tear herself away from the online persona this woman has created, self-aware enough that she shouldn't be checking up on her all day but also unable to stop comparing herself to this other woman. It's short, a bit manic, and packs a punch - much like a lot of Charli XCX's discography, no?

The Smashing Pumpkins' "1979" is often referred to as a bittersweet song about growing up, specifically that brutal transition from youth to adulthood. Lovers XXX by Allie Rowbottom elicited the same sort of melancholy I associate with 1979. Told over the course of 40 years, Lovers XXX follows two girls who escape their hometown as teens and find themselves working within the grungy world of LA's burgeoning porn world of the 1980s. As June and Winnie spend their 20s making a name for themselves as adult film stars, they both can't help but piece apart their 1970s childhood wondering how, exactly, did we get here? Lovers XXX is a poignant novel about friendship, love, and the various changes both our minds and bodies go through as we age. 

Suki Waterhouse is probably (most definitely) talking about her partner, Robert Pattinson, in her song "Weirdo" but I can't help but think about all the fantastic novels written recently that feature some pretty weird main characters. The weirdest of them all has to be Sky Daddy, a novel about a woman named Linda living in San Francisco that starts out relatively normal until you quickly realize that Linda is sexually attracted to planes. And not just sexually attracted, but completely totally obsessed. She wants to unite with her soulmate (a plane) for the rest of her life and when given the opportunity to do so, she has to decide if she's going to adhere to the normal world or finally achieve her dream of plane love. It's funny and surprisingly loving, and I have to admit that when I finished the book, just like Suki Waterhouse, I realized I was "missing my favorite weirdo" (Linda, not Rob Pattinson). 

We'll end with one of the Sunday closers: Tate McRae! As a longtime Tater Tot (I love a fandom name!), I felt a bit sad the first time I heard her song "Horseshoe." It's a song about a girl who seems to have everything but still can't help but feel depressed. Though not a singer, the main character in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity owns a record store in London and he is feeling truly down in the dumps after his girlfriend breaks up with him to date the guy upstairs. As Rob is dealing with his heartbreak, he's also inundating people with trivia about his second true loves: rock music and vinyl records. Rob knows he should be happy but he's struggling to get there. This novel is both introspective and laugh out loud funny... do you think anyone could get a copy backstage for Tate!?

What novels do you think your favorite artists are reading? Let us know in the comments below!