Bowie a bookworm - Favourite 100 books

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-100-favourite-books-reading-list/

It may come as little surprise that David Bowie, one of the most creative, influential and experimental musical icons of all time, had a particularly strong love of literature. The singer was known for always having his head in a book whenever he could, often using the books he read to inform his songwriting.

Despite proudly revealing that he left school with just one ‘O’ level qualification, David Bowie went on to amass an armoury of impressive books during his lifetime and it’s a collection that shows of The Starman perfectly as an artist. Bowie had a library unlike any other.

Bowie, who died aged 69 in 2016, previously said: “When I’m relaxed, what I do is read” and detailed that his desire to read would sometimes lead to him devouring “three or four books” inside a week, an insatiable appetite for art, ran through Bowie’s blood. He wasn’t bound by a particular theme, genre or writer either.

In one interview, with Vanity Fair, Bowie was once asked: “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” in a bid to get under the hood of the creative body that is the Thin White Duke. Bowie, with a serious face, simply responded: “Reading,” and left the interviewer a little agog. This sparkling rock star preferred not to be chasing girls or strutting across catwalks, Bowie now preferred snuggling up with a good book.

His love for literature continued to grow and when, back in 1976, he flew to Mexico to film the movie The Man Who To Earth and, knowing he needed to keep his creative influences beside him, the singer shipped a gigantic 400 books across to the set: “I was dead scared of leaving them in New York, because I was knocking around with some dodgy people and I didn’t want them nicking any of my books,” he explained in a 1997 interview. Judging by the fact he considers Iggy Pop not to be a ‘dodgy’ character, we dread to think who he was hanging around with at the time.

The decision to carry a monster collection of books to Mexico had a permanent impact on his life and, with the use of portable cabinets, decided to continue the pattern every time he hit the road on tour: “I had these cabinets — it was a travelling library — and they were rather like the boxes that amplifiers get packed up in… because of that period, I have an extraordinarily good collection of books,” he once said. It’s the stuff of dreams for any bibliophile.

An exhibition exploring the life of Bowie, entitled David Bowie Is, arrived in Toronto and explored the costumes, photos, instruments, set designs, lyric sheets behind his long and illustrious career.

Curator of the show, Geoffrey Marsh, also unveiled Bowie’s Top 100 favourite books and described him as a “voracious reader”. With the likes of George Orwell, Ian McEwan, Jack Kerouac and many more the exhibition detailed Bowie’s unsurprising eclectic taste.

See the full list below.

David Bowie’s 100 Favourite Books:

1. Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
2. Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
3. Room At The Top by John Braine
4. On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
5. Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
7. City Of Night by John Rechy
8. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
9. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
10. Iliad by Homer
11. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
12. Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
13. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
14. Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
15. Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
16. Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
17. David Bomberg by Richard Cork
18. Blast by Wyndham Lewis
19. Passing by Nella Larson
20. Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
21. The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
22. In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
23. Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
24. The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
25. The Stranger by Albert Camus
26. Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
27. The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
28. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
29. Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
30. The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
31. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
32. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
33. Herzog by Saul Bellow
34. Puckoon by Spike Milligan
35. Black Boy by Richard Wright
36. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
37. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
38. Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
39. The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
40. McTeague by Frank Norris
41. Money by Martin Amis
42. The Outsider by Colin Wilson
43. Strange People by Frank Edwards
44. English Journey by J.B. Priestley
45. A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
46. The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
47. 1984 by George Orwell
48. The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White
49. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
50. Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
51. Beano (comic, ’50s)
52. Raw (comic, ’80s)
53. White Noise by Don DeLillo
54. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
55. Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
56. Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
57. The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillette
58. Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
59. The Street by Ann Petry
60. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
61. Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.
62. A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
63. The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
64. Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
65. The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
66. The Bridge by Hart Crane
67. All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
68. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
69. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
70. The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
71. Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders
72. The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
73. Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
74. Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
75. Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
76. The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
77. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
78. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
79. Teenage by Jon Savage
80. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
81. The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
82. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
83. Viz (comic, early ’80s)
84. Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)
85. Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
86. The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
87. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
88. Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
89. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
90. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
91. Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
92. Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
93. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
94. The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
95. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
96. A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
97. The Insult by Rupert Thomson
98. In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
99. A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
100. Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg