Friday, August 31, 2007

What is Suzanne Vega reading?

Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega talked to the Christian Science Monitor about her recent video- and film-viewing and what she's been listening to.

And what she's been reading:

I just finished Lady Brooke Astor's autobiography called Footprints. She just passed away at the age of 105. I loved it while I was reading it and I can't wait to reread it. To put it in a nutshell, it's like one of Edith Wharton's heroines come to life. Her life was quite Edwardian, and when she describes her social visits when she was a teen, it really is from another era. She had such an impact in New York. She would go visit the places she gave money to, and it was the poorest neighborhoods. She wrote [her biography] when she was 80, I think, and she was just out there visiting the projects, planning things for them. She had a great life. One that I enjoyed was called Eat, Pray, Love [by Elizabeth Gilbert]. First of all, I'm a fan of any kind of writing about food. I love to read about food – I like to read M.F.K. Fisher – so I was intrigued by the title Eat, Pray, Love. I thought, wow, those are three really good things to do. The part that I ended up liking best was when she goes to an ashram and just basically prays. It's a very monastic life that she leads there. It's entertaining and at the same time it's instructive. You go on the journey with her. I naturally gravitate toward biographies and classics. I love Dickens and all the Brontës. Only in the last five or 10 years have I been able to read Jane Austen.
Check out Vega's recent encounters with movies and other artists' music.

--Marshal Zeringue