One Nightstand With Japanese Breakfast

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

“Like a fine wine, I like to pair my books with my travels,” says Michelle Zauner, an author and musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast. “So I was going to Madrid for the first time and read Death in the Afternoon [by Ernest Hemingway]. I started reading The Magic Mountain in Switzerland, and then of course ended up getting really sick.”

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain follows a man who visits his cousin at a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the Swiss Alps, and inadvertently ends up staying for seven years. So Zauner’s accidental bout of method reading only deepened her connection to the novel, which quickly became one of her all-time favorites.

“It's a book about the passage of time and the meaning of life [where] you're kind of unsure if he's actually convalescing or if these doctors are quacks,” Zauner tells me of the 904-page German tome. “Everything I was reading at the time, I was mapping onto my life as a touring musician. How one decision that you make in your life robs you from another one.”

That same year she also tackled another famously demanding novel: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. “It was 2023 and I was largely upstate and starting to work on the new album. [Infinite Jest] took me about six weeks of very regimented reading because it's not only a large book, but so much of it is made up of footnotes in this impossibly tiny font,” she says. While that might scare some off, Zauner isn’t one to be shy away from a book’s page count — or its controversial reputation: “I genuinely think it's a great novel but I also enjoy books that are an ‘eye roll’ or have some kind of strange connotation behind it.”

For all her love of doorstoppers, though, it was Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams — a slim, stylized Matryoshka doll of a novel — that first helped her fall in love with reading. “If I could choose a writer that I would like to emulate it would be Laurie Moore. I just think that she's an unparalleled, intelligent, brilliant, funny writer that every person would probably love to write like,” Zauner says.

And it was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping that taught her how to write poetically about tragedy — an art she went on to master in her memoir Crying in H Mart. “Marilynne Robinson just uses language so exceptionally in this way that is so evocative and has stuck with me for so long,” she says of the novel, which follows two sisters who are raised by a series of relatives after their mother’s suicide. “Shared tragedy can often create two pathways for people and it's interesting to see that unfold throughout this book.”