Life as a touring musician necessitates a lot of in-betweens. The hours from 6 to 9PM, after soundcheck but before the show, stuck in a backstage green room. A mind numbingly long van drive from San Francisco to Portland, I-5 inexorably whizzing by. Countless flights and bus rides and ferries. So many not-heres, but not-yet-theres.

For much of that time, I’m reading.

My creative inspiration often comes from non-musical places, and from books specifically. I find it both energizing and emotionally grounding to engage with different mediums of storytelling, to feel that nothing is categorically “good” or “necessary” when it comes to translating experience.

Here are ten books I LOVED, books that helped me to consider the world from new vantage points, books that seem to keep poking me on the shoulder long after I’ve finished them.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Disease can feel like a concrete concept, but it’s totally contextual, and speaks to the culture and institutions that define it. This compulsively readable work of nonfiction follows a young Hmong girl and her family as they navigate the U.S. healthcare system in the midst of an epilepsy diagnosis. It’s about trust, language, disease, imperialism, and resilience.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
🎧 Audiobook

This book really challenged the ways that I think of womanhood and motherhood. It’s provocative and magical and fresh and I love how Yoder plays with hyperbole. Childbirth as the ultimate creative act. Children as art. Mothers as dogs. Very, very good stuff. A must-read for anyone thinking about gender, parenthood, and our tendency toward sanitizing human nature.

Stay True by Hua Hsu
🎧 Audiobook

In this memoir, Hsu deftly captures the experience of adolescence, the development of taste, the torturous reckoning with authenticity that so many young people endure. What does it mean to be you? To be true? He also explores grief and how it manifests across time. As someone who lost a parent as a teenager, I related deeply to his portrayal of his friend’s death, and how he’s carried that loss into adulthood.

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

I was nearly out of breath when I finished this book, which I devoured a couple years ago on the recommendation of my girlfriend (I read it as an attempt to flirt with her—it worked). I found myself totally enchanted with Lethem’s Brooklyn universe and the deeply rich characters he creates. The novel explores boyhood, race, superheroes, criminal justice, and the limits of imagination.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
🎧 Audiobook

Coates is such a master of language, of empathy, of honesty. This book defies form and simply unfolds. A meditation on being a Black man in America, an indictment of racial injustice, and an exploration of the body as the subject of oppression and violence. He accomplishes the incredible feat of writing beautifully about horrific experience. This is a must-read.

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi
🎧 Audiobook

What an absolutely strange book! Yagi’s protagonist is a woman who fakes a pregnancy (or does she?) to contend with misogyny in the workplace and beyond. I found myself captivated by this absurdist novel and its subtle twists and turns. Many of the books on this list explore the modern experience of gender, and this feels like a wonderful companion to Nightbitch, if you feel like reading them back to back :)

The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
🎧 Audiobook

There’s a notion that intellect can conquer all, that we can think our way out of most problems. In this expansive and tragic work of nonfiction, Rosen chronicles the life of his childhood friend as he copes with a schizophrenia diagnosis in the 1990s. It’s a dense read at times, but the payoff is worth it. A history of mental illness and its treatment in the United States, and an inquiry into the power of the mind.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
🎧 Audiobook

I think about this book all the time. It takes place in a not-so-distant future, when parents have the option to buy “artificial friends” for their lonely children. A meditation on the human spirit and the importance of pain. Ishiguro captures so much about our modern dilemma, the limits of technology, the environment, and our deep need for connection. And it has a great ending.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
🎧 Audiobook

A beautiful and complicated novel about women, gender identity, sexuality, and parenthood. The book’s two main protagonists are former partners, trans women who once lived together and planned to raise a family. After one of them “detransitions” and impregnates his boss, they find a renewed opportunity to build a queer family. Who can be a mother? Who can be a father? How does it feel to be a woman? I found this novel compulsively readable and very moving.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
🎧 Audiobook

As someone who assiduously avoids true crime (which is strangely hard to do in the 2020s), I didn’t clock that this novel is based on the crimes of Ted Bundy. Nevertheless, I loved how Knoll flips the traditional serial killer narrative and instead focuses on the women who suffer and rebuild in the face of senseless violence and misogyny. The novel is structured as a bit of a thriller and I thought the tension really worked—I finished it and immediately turned back to page one.

*Title availability may vary by library & region.

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About K.Flay

Based in L.A. and originally from Illinois, multi-platinum artist K.Flay, born Kristine Flaherty, started rapping and writing songs on a lark while attending Stanford University, and soon began releasing her self-produced mixtapes. In 2017 she released her major label debut album Every Where Is Some Where, earning two Grammy Award nominations for the album’s iconic smash single “Blood in the Cut” and sending her to arenas around the world with her kinetic live set.

As a songwriter, musician, and producer, she’s lent her talents to numerous collaborations, working with Fitz and the Tantrums, Bishop Briggs, Tom Morello, Louis the Child, Kaskade, Walk the Moon, Imagine Dragons, grandson, The Regrettes, Two Feet, MisterWives, and more.

Whether working on her own music or with others, K.Flay’s output remains rooted in her undeniable lyrical skills, an element she attributes to her innate love of language and its infinite possibilities. This spring she announced her fifth studio album MONO, which was released on Sept. 15. The LP is her first for Giant Music and is her first since going suddenly and completely deaf in her right ear at the end of last summer. Although K.Flay’s hearing loss deeply informed her songwriting on MONO, the album marks the start of a new era for the artist who explores an entire spectrum of existential questions and complex matters of the heart and mind on the LP.

Additionally, K.Flay wrote an original song “T-Rex” for Neflix’s groundbreaking new animated film Nimona which was released last summer. A relentlessly boundary-pushing artist with more than 1 billion streams and 100k+ tickets sold, K.Flay continues to commit herself to constant growth by holding herself to higher and more rigorous standards in every aspect of her artistry.