Viv Albertine was guitarist in girl punk band The Slits and has recently published her memoirs – Boys, Clothes, Music – to both critical acclaim and huge sales.

Last night (Thursday 11 September) she came to give a sell-out talk at the Idler Academy HQ in London’s Notting Hill. We asked her to its her five favourite books of all time.

1. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier (Penguin Classics). This is the ultimate teenage angst book. We passed it around at school like we were handing round a little wrap of heroin.

2. Mildred Pierce by James Cain (Phoenix). Such a drab yet perfect title. Street poetry and an archetypical portrait of the mother-daughter relationship… if you’re not careful.

3. The Journals of Anais Nin (Peter Owen). Very sexually frank and personally revealing. A huge inspiration for me.

4. How Proust can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton (Penguin). I love Proust and this is a beautifully written and sensitive self help book using Proust’s writings as life guides. What could be better? Proust really knew about people.

5. The Outsider by S E Hinton. Written in 1967 when Susan Hinton was 15 years old. I love this book, very inventive and edgy. I especially love the names of the characters e.g. Ponyboy Curtis, Sodapop Curtis, Dallas Winston, Two Bit Matthews. Later made into great little gang movie by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983.