Reckless Daughter

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
by David Yaffe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think that Joni Mitchell's Blue is the best album ever, so I was very interested to learn more about her. This book was a sympathetic biography, Yaffe is clearly a fan, but it was thoroughly researched and seemed to show Mitchell in an objective way. I'm not musical and I was a bit lost in some of the parts about chord progressions and tunings, but they were fairly brief and sprinkled through the book rather than all in one long incomprehensible section. My favorite part of the book were the stories about how, when, and because of whom she came to write various songs. I read this during April, which is National Poetry Month, which seems fitting as Mitchell was definitely a poet.

Camille "Paglia had included Join in a collection called Break, Blow, Burn, an anthology of what she considered to be the forty-three greatest poems in English, beginning with a Shakespeare sonnet and ending with 'Woodstock'." (p. 356)

This title counts toward 2 of my reading challenges, the Canadian Book Challenge and the 2018 Nonfiction Reading Challenge.