M Train

I can't believe Patti Smith wrote a book about drinking black coffee and watching serial crime dramas and it's the best thing I've ever read.

"Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all." - Patti Smith, M TrainMy second Patti Smith memoir. This one was more experimental and nonlinear than Just Kids (which still wasn't exactly linear). It was filled with dreams, detective shows, talismans, cats, constant travels, coffee, more coffee, missing things, memories, loose threads, graveyards, hotels, photographs, and miles and miles of beautiful, lyrical Patti Smith p [...]

I listen to Patti Smith's audible. The very first thing I notice was her voice. Her raspy eastern accent was mesmerizing. As I was walking, I could picture Patti in the cafe she sat drinking coffee. She says"It's not so easy writing about nothing". Easy or not I had a warm smile on my face listening to everything she had to say - at times aching -and soooo loving this woman. There is a mystery about Patti Smith which adds to her beauty. Her mind is fascinating. A coffee drinker, loner, a thinker [...]

Sometimes the right book finds us at the right time. For me this was the book. No linear, no plot to speak of, just musings and meanderings of a creative woman. Search for the perfect coffee, cafés, Hurricane Sandy, her obsession with detective shows and the way she enters into the lives of authors and novels. At times her writing is poetic, at others very poignant, especially when thinking or remembering her husband, Fred and her children when they were young. Her photography, travels, confere [...]

Reading the lovely Proustian interlude that is M Train, I felt like a shadow-angel trailing Patti Smith, from Café 'Ino down the block from her New York apartment to the far-flung places in her past and present that twirl like ribbons in her poetry, her songs, her art. M Train is a meditation on this artist's life, more kaleidoscope than memoir, a shifting wonder that spills pieces of colored glass memories. The clarity of Patti Smith's language, the fragility of her voice, made me want to wrap [...]

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch once said in an interview that if all culture breaks down, he's following Patti Smith. Much of the pleasure of reading Smith's nostalgic M Train is that it offers fascinating insights into her interior life, her dreams, her quixotic travel adventures, her literary obsessions (listed in my Comment below), and her minimalist, bohemian tastes for such things as black coffee, brown bread with olive oil, Polaroids, word games, moleskines, detective stories, and her favorite bla [...]

What's the point of reading books? Do they really help? Sometimes – compulsively turning pages to lift your mood – you have to wonder. I think often of a line I read once in an Orhan Pamuk novel: ‘Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.’ That hurts so much that you feel there must be something to it.It's been quite some time now since the fascination and joy I get from books could be ascribed to youthful enthusiasm, but I still worry that I'll reach some ol [...]

In my life I have had various musical periods where I would want to listen to one artist exclusively for a period of time, exhausting myself on listening over and over again to all the media I could get. There was a long Led Zeppelin period back in HS, also a Doors period and The Police. In college I had a REM period and U2. At other times, sporadically over the years I have experienced this binge listening and I always enjoy the time, its like meeting a new friend and wanting to spend all of yo [...]

M-Train by Patti Smith is a collection of stories by the poet laureate of punk rock. Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.To be honest, I have been a Patti Smith fan since 1978. I have all her albums, seen her in concert, and own several of her books including number 86 of 100 of WIIT. I was really surprised at how well received and the [...]

A very quiet, elegiac book, memories linked one to the next--that's the train, the M train. In tone it reminded me more of the works of W.G. Sebald than of her earlier book Just Kids. It has none of the exuberance of that memoir of youth--in which she recaptured the tone, the feeling, of youth. This is the voice, the mind, of an older person looking back through a tangible scrim of loss. And yet, her memories are very much a child showing you the contents of his pockets, his array of child-treas [...]

In M Train, Patti Smith creates something deeply personal and lyrically beautiful, but not something that will necessarily resonate with a wide audience. Not quite a follow-up to her 2010 National Book Award winning memoir,Just Kids, M Train is Smith's ode to coffee, art, travel, Haruki Murakami, her late husband, growing old, Rockaway Beach, The Killing and other surprisingly disjointed facets of her life. Her fascinations are endless, and she lives quite like you'd expect an artist to live; au [...]

I thrived on this one as she shared how she was influenced by certain books that I favor and suceeded in engaging me on surprising adventures and missions, even ones I would I never consider for myself. She believes in details of writings and specific places as portals that allow one to channel people one cares about. That was a thrill when it came to elements of books I loved like Bolano’s “2666” and Murakami’s “Windup Bird Chronicle” and appetizing for others not yet read, like Bul [...]

Poetic, Meandering Meditation on Loneliness, Love, and LossPatti Smith's latest memoir, M Train, is more rambling and poetic, less coherent and focused than "Just Kids". Yet, I found it almost as moving, but in an entirely different way. "Just Kids" was an emotional tribute to a beautiful connection between two twin souls, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. "M Train" covers wider ground.The M train actually exists in the NY City subway. I'd forgotten it. I may have ridden it once (if ever). It [...]

I remember this tv commercial where a guy comes down the stairs, he is dressed and has his luggage in hand. He stops in the foyer, picks up a dart and throws it at a map of the world on the wall. The idea being that he has the time and resources to travel anywhere at any time. Well, that's Patti Smith, but instead of darts she uses random thoughts, or passages from books, or memories. She is always on the move, both physically and spiritually, seemingly trying to soothe her battered and tortured [...]

"M Train" is perhaps one of the most romantic books of being a writer, and those who likes to read. What can be better than reading and writing in a small hip cafe, and watching the world go by. And on top of that, visit every cool writer's grave site - from Europe to Japan. Patti Smith is not a hard person to figure out. She conveys the spirit of being a book nerd as well as a rock n' roll lunatic. In many ways, it's a very simple image of a writer/artist. Yet it is the simple aspect of it that [...]

Writing this review is difficult because it's hard to explain in words the effect Patti Smith has on me. She is one of the few artists who never let me down. She has this incredible way of turning even the most unpoetic things in life into beautiful prose. In this book of shorts she shares with us memories from her travels, her family and what inspires her creativity.Her stories and stunning prose would be enough to make this a fantastic read for me, but her words always go well beyond that. Eve [...]

Hiçbir şey hakkında yazmak kolay değildir. Böyle başlıyor söze bu kez Patti Smith. Hiçbir şey; gittiği cafeler, ziyaret ettiği mezarlar, gördüğü rüyalar, hayalleri, polaroid makinasıyla çektiği siyah beyaz fotoğraflar Şairlerle gezginlerin bir tımarhanenin sadeliğini bulabileceği ufak bir sığınak.Çoluk Çocuk'tan farklı bir kitap bu, ama onun kadar lirik, iç acıtan bir anlatımı var. Farkına varmadan hafif ama daimi bir keyifsizliğin içine sürükleniyorum. De [...]

"Captivating . . . rich, varied. How to mourn for what’s lost without allowing loss to take over? While leaving space for what’s lost to return in an old or new form? These are the questions at the heart of M Train, [which] takes us on a journey through the 'stuff’ of Smith’s bookshelves and suitcases, as well as of her mind and memory . . . M Train embraces the fragment—moments of reverie [that] arise from the mundane. Integrated into the text are Polaroid photographs [that are] in pr [...]

‘I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.’Patti Smith carries us through her esoteric stories of the past and present in this short story/essay collection. M Train reads like an internal journey, a solo exploration. She recalls cafes visited all around the world, writing or simply sitting and reminiscing while drinking an insane amount of coffee that makes my own addiction to caffeine seem laughable. While Smith seems completely content with her own com [...]

Patti Smith wrote a book about nothing and I am less than enchanted.I admit to knowing hardly anything about Patti Smith. She has always been a fascinating figure to me, so when I saw this audio book available at my local library, I put a hold on it, because I wanted to learn more about her and her life. Unfortunately, I didn't learn as much as I thought. I discovered her love for her husband, Fred, and that she lost him while he was still relatively young. I learned that she has two children. I [...]

I saw Patti Smith play live for the umpteenth time this summer. I don't think she could give a bad concert if she tried, but this was one I was a bit wary about: Like all aging rock stars, she was going to play her most popular album (Horses) live in its entirety. It's a setup that, for most artists, becomes a dull exercise in nostalgia and note-perfect reproduction. As Jim Reid of the Jesus And Mary Chain pointed out in an interview when they set out to play Psychocandy live a few years ago, th [...]

You know how they say other people's dreams are boring? Nobody told Patti Smith. Smith recounts what feels like dozens of her dreams in this relatively slim volume - some of which spark interesting reflections and reminiscence, but most of which just struck me as pretty dull. Dreams aside, there are lots of nice moments in this book - ruminations on creativity, loss and love - but there were also long passages devoted to tv show The Killing (and not even the good, Swedish version!) and to Smith' [...]

I read "Just Kids" and thought, "Wow, this is amazing! Why am I not a huge Patti Smith fan?" Then I read "M Train" and realized, "Oh yeah. Now I remember."

I adored reading M Train. It felt like a glimpse into the unique mind of a generous and beautiful soul. Smith has such a lovely writing style- lyrical with wonderful imagery and evocative language. The book is chock-full of insight and revelation. I would suggest attentively reading it because it is written with unclear transitions between past and present, dream and reality. I would also recommend keeping a pen and notepad handy for jotting down the many literary references. M Train left this t [...]

Disclosure: I received an Advance Readers Edition of this book through the FirstReads program.Not so much a follow-up to Just Kids as a stand-alone collection of musings, M Train is just a collection of Patti Smith's clunky thoughts. She's a competent writer, but ultimately, there's not much to see below the shimmery surface. Smith writes in poetic metaphors, but she never actualizes them or examines them in any detail. She details her coincidentally lyrical dreams, but stops there and refuses [...]

Unlike a lot of fans of this book, I could not connect with Patti Smith. It may be that she is too intellectual for me, or it could be that our sensitivities just don't merge. The writing was beautiful, and the essays kept me reading and wondering, but I never "got" exactly what she was trying to say. But it was amazing to be witness to her meanderings on the page. I will probably read "Just Kids" at some point, to see if a more linear tale might be different.

M Treni de tıpkı Çoluk Çocuk gibi çok güzel. Bu kitapla ilgili yazmayı planladığım şeyleri ve çok daha fazlasını kitabın çevirmeni Seda Ersavcı'nın benden önce yazdığını gördüm, tekrara gerek yok, şuradan okuyabilirsiniz: t24/k24/yazi/gundeliginBir de şimdiye dek iki kitabını (Zemberekkuşu'nun Güncesi ve 1Q84) okuduğum Murakami'yi sevemedim. Bir gün yeniden okumaya niyetlenirsem tek sebebi Patti Smith olacak. :)

So I'm going to personalize this review a little bit to relate it to the specific copy of the book that I read. I picked this up at a favorite used bookstore. Being a 2015 hardback copy, I noticed that the dust jacket was unusually worn considering that the book was less than 2 years old at the time of my purchase. I casually flipped through the book, noticing a few dog-eared pages -- nothing unusual for a used book. I also noticed a page in which text had been struck out with black ink, the kin [...]

I came to this poetic memoir with little prior experience of Patti Smith's work. My knowledge of her consisted of various fragments: the album Horses, the 70s photographs which highlighted her androgynous frame and style (and wasn't there a hairy armpit?) her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, an association with New York City and punk rock. All of it a generation, or rather half-generation, before my time. When Sam Shepard died this summer, she wrote a moving obituary-style piece about him - [...]

Other than her co-writing with Springteen and recording “Because the Night,” her knocked-it-out-of-the park cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” and the iconic covers of her albums, "Horses" and “Easter” both photographs taken by her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe, I knew little about Patti Smith. I didn’t know she was a respected and honored writer and photographer. Her earlier book Just Kids sat just at the edge of my consciousness; I was intrigued by the universally [...]