(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 15 June 2025 17:36, UK
A wise man once said, “We need to make books cool again”. This poignant message is built on the foundations of learning, the pursuit of knowledge, and the broadening of one’s horizons. The same wise and practical man continued, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em”. Thus, the quest to find the legendary reading list of the wise man, the iconic John Waters, began.
John Waters’ reading list is as wide-ranging and captivating as the man himself. It hints at his creative urges, his obsessions, and that restless pursuit of knowledge that’s always driven him past the obvious and into the odd corners of art and culture, where the real fun begins.
The pursuit of bed-worthy literature feels fitting for Waters, a man known as the Prince of Puke, the Sultan of Sleaze, and – our personal favourite – the Pope of Trash.
Of course, it’s not just filth for filth’s sake. Waters reads the way he films: with one eye on the gutter and the other on the stars. His shelves groan under the weight of highbrow lowlifes, perverse poetry, political horror shows and queer misfits who never got the clean Hollywood ending. It’s the kind of library that makes you feel clever and corrupt at the same time…a perfect bloody storm of sleaze and sophistication.
Waters has always had a love for books and a desire for everyone to engage in his wild love affair alongside him. It jumps head first into the power of words for a sordid intellectual orgy, because “nothing is more impotent than an unread library”. Below is just a selection of his claimed 8,000-book-strong library in Baltimore, and it’s a fascinating list.
Having written several books alongside his screenplays for cult-classic titles such as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Cry-Baby, and Hairspray, it’s fair to assume he has good taste. And he does, thankfully.
Waters’ often expressed his love for the subversive and his book choice is no different, he marks out Andy Milligan as a preferred filmmaker in the list, and also says James Purdy is great if “you’re having a sexual nervous breakdown”, while also declaring undying love for his idol and David Bowie inspiration, Jean Genet
While some books remain firmly in his perceived wheelhouse, such as Cooper’s The Sluts and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight others are a little more out of leftfield such as the biography of Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot. It all amounts to a full library, and according to Ohn, that means you’re more than likely to get lucky.
Below is a selection of John Waters’ favourite books collected by Radical Reads, or as we’re calling it, ‘the reading list to get you laid’.
John Waters’ favourite books:
- My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard (Author), Carol Janeway (Translator)
- Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
- The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley
- Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton-Burnett
- The Sluts by Dennis Cooper
- The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp
- The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (Author), Richard Seaver (Translator)
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Consider the Oyster by M. F. K. Fisher
- Suicide in the Entertainment Industry by David K. Frasier
- Jernigan by David Gates
- We Disappear by Scott Heim
- Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare
- The End of Alice by A.M. Homes
- Platform by Michel Houellebecq and Frank Wynne
- The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq (Author), Gavin Bowd (Translator)
- The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell translated by Charlotte Mandell
- The Beard: A Play by Michael McClure
- Time Remaining by James McCourt
- The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough
- Sita by Kate Millett
- Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles
- Narrow Rooms by James Purdy
- Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short
- So Much for That by Lionel Shriver
- We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder by Deborah Spungen
- The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
- Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
- Genet: A Biography by Edmund White
- Still Holding: A Novel of Hollywood by Bruce Wagner
- The Assistant by Robert Walser (Author), Susan Bernofsky (Translator)
- In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch
- Voss by Patrick White
- Swimming Underground by Mary Woronov
Related Topics