Considering his many musical personas and creative influences across his 66 years, its perhaps not entirely shocking to learn that David Bowie is well-read.
However, a personal list of the music icons’ reading habits has revealed the full breadth and scope of the tomes that inspired the British national treasure.
A list of 100 of Bowie’s favourite books has been unveiled as part of the launch of the David Bowie Is art exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the exhibit’s first international opening since its hugely successful debut at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, as The Independent reports.
Bowie’s literary list spans the ages and styles, with fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, analysis, collections, comics, and contains everything from classic novels (A Clockwork Orange, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, White Noise), through to rock criticism (Mystery Train, Sweet Soul Music, The Sound Of The City), modern milestones (White Noise, A Confederacy Of Dunces), plenty of highbrow reads (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), and even a compilation of long-running British comic rag, The Beano.
Bowie’s favourite author – occupying three entries in the 100 strong list – is George Orwell. The writer’s Inside The Whale and Other Essays and The Road To Wigan Pier, as well as 1984, which directly inspired a song of the same name by Bowie, as well as the general futuristic setting of his 1974 record Diamond Dogs. In fact, the musician once tried to develop a stage musical of the dystopian novel, but was eventually denied the rights.
Bowie’s favourite author – occupying three entries in the 100 strong list – is George Orwell.
‘Bowie’s 100 books’ list was sent to the exhibition’s curators by archivists, who look after a historical goldmine of Bowie paraphernalia including 75,000 costumes, sheet music, memorabilia, handwritten lyrics, photography, film, music videos, set designs, instruments – basically an exhaustive collection of everything amassed from Bowie’s career, many of which feature in the David Bowie Is exhibition.
An audio guide for the exhibition also features an interview with the icon where he admits that if hadn’t have entered the rock pantheon he “would have written novels,” referring to his catalogue of songs as “little stories set to to music.”
Geoffrey Marsh, the co-curator of David Bowie Is, described the exhibition’s central star as “a voracious reader” with a “magpie” approach to his art that had always been influenced by his daily consumption of pages and pages of text. “He’s fascinated with ideas and fascinated that there’s so much stuff out there that most people don’t get access to,” the curator tells Canadian magazine, Quill and Quire.
“There’s a great bit in the exhibition that describes when he used to travel around on the [London] Underground as a teenager, he would always go and buy a book, something with a pretentious title on it. He’d carry it in his pocket so he’d look really cool – this was during the period of French existentialism,” continues Marsh. “After a while, he actually started reading them.”
If looking at the musician’s immense library has you wondering how he found the time amongst his burgeoning music career, Marsh explains “the idea that he sits down and reads every book cover to cover, I don’t think that’s what he does. I think he’s more interested in ideas – and what he’s really interested in is how he can rework those ideas,” he says.
“He is the ultimate postmodernist, sampling stuff even before postmodernism arrived. I don’t think it’s a direct connection to him. It’s much more complicated.”
The moral of the story? Good art is influence by good art. That or Bowie would be an arguably less titanic figure of pop culture had he developed in the age of the 160 character tweet – though probably no less fascinating.
Grab your library card/Kindle/mouse to discount online book seller and check out Bowie’s full list below.
On the music front, following the release of his first album in a decade, The Next Day (one of the year’s highest selling vinyl releases), Bowie has recorded with Arcade Fire on their new album, Reflektor. While that record’s producer James ‘LCD Soundsystem’ Murphy is featuring on a new deluxe edition of The Next Day, as Consequence Of Sound reports, featuring remixes and some new material, presumably the leftover sessions that were being touted as a new release earlier this year.
David Bowie’s 100 Favourite Books
Interviews with Francis Bacon – David Sylvester – early 80s – Paperback
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse – early 60s – Paperback
Room at the Top – John Braine – early 60s – Paperback
On Having No Head – Douglass Harding – mid-60s – Paperback
Kafka Was The Rage – Anatole Broyard – 1995 – Hardcover
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess – mid-60’s – Paperback
City of Night – John Rechy – mid 60’s – Hardback
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz – 2007 – Hardback
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – 1980’s – Paperback
Iliad – Homer – late-70’s – Paperback
As I lay Dying – William Faulkner – early- 80’s – Paperback
Tadanori Yokoo – Tadanori Yokoo – 1973 – Paperback
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin – late 70’s – ?
Inside the Whale and Other Essays – George Orwell – early 60’s – Paperback
Mr. Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood – late 60’s – Penguin
Halls Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art – James A. Hall – 1975 – Hardback
David Bomberg – Richard Cork – mid-90’s – Hardback
Blast – Wyndham Lewis – 2009 – Paperback
Passing – Nella Larson – 1983 – Hardback
Beyond the Brillo Box – Arthur C. Danto – early 90’s – Hardback
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes – late-70’s – Hardback
In Bluebeard’s Castle – George Steiner – early 70’s – hardback
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd – 1987 – Hardback
The Divided Self – R. D. Laing – 1964 – Paperback
The Stranger – Albert Camus – mid-60’s – Paperback
Infants of the Spring – Wallace Thurman – 1992 – Paperback
The Quest For Christa T – Christa Wolf – 1979 – Hardback
The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin – 1987 – Hardback
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter – 1984 – Hardback
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov – early 90’s – Hardback
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark – late 60’s – Paperback
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – late 60’s – Hardcover
Herzog – Saul Bellow – early 80’s – Hardback
Puckoon – Spike Milligan – 1973 – Paperback
Black Boy – Richard Wright – early 80’s – Hardback
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald – early 70’s – Paperback
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea – Yukio Mishima – 1972 – Paperback?
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler – early 90’s – Paperback
The Waste Land – T.S. Elliot – mid-70’s – Paperback
McTeague – Frank Norris – 2000 – Hardback
Money – Martin Amis – 1984 – Hardback
The Outsider – Colin Wilson – 1964/5 – Hardcover
Strange people – Frank Edwards – early 60’s – Paperback
English Journey – J.B. Priestley – 2011 – Hardback
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – early 2000’s – Paperback
The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West – mid-80’s – Hardback
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell – mid-60’s – Paperback
The Life and Times of Little Richard – Charles White – 1985 – Hardback
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock – Nik Cohn – 70’s – ?
Mystery Train – Greil Marcus – 1976 – Hardback
Beano – Comic – 50’s
Raw – Graphic Comic – 80’s
White Noise – Don DeLillo – 1985 – Hardback
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom – Peter Guralnick – late 80’s – Hardback
Silence: lectures and writing – John Cage – 1975 – Hardback
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews – Edited by Malcolm Cowley – mid-60’s – Hardback
The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll – Charlie Gillete – 1972 – Hardback
Octobriana and the Russian Underground – Peter Sadecky – 1973 – Hardback
The Street – Ann Petry – early 80’s – Hardback
Wonder Boys – Michael Chabon – 1995 – Hardback
Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby, Jnr – late- 60’s – Paperback
A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn – early 2000’s – Paperback
The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby – 2008 – Hardback
Metropolitan Life – Fran Lebowitz – 1978 – Hardback
The Coast of Utopia – Tom Stoppard – 2003 – Hardback
The Bridge – Hart Crane – mid-2000’s – Paperback
All The Emperor’s Horses – David Kidd – Late ‘70’s – Hardback
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters – mid-2000’s – Hardback
Earthly Powers – Anthony Burgess – early 80’s – Hardback
The 42nd Parallel – John Dos Passos – 2006 – Paperback
Tales of Beatnik Glory – Ed Saunders – 1975 – Hardback
The Bird Artist – Howard Norman – 1995 – Hardback
Nowhere To Run: – The Story of Soul Music – 2006 – Hardback
Before the Deluge – Otto Friedrich – 1976 – Hardback
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia – 1990 – Hardback
The American Way of Death – Jessica Mitford – 1970 – Paperback
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote – late 60’s – Paperback
Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence – 1961 – Penguin Paperback
Teenage – Jon Savage – 2007 – Hardback
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh – early 60’s – Paperback
The Hidden Persuaders – Vance Packard – around 1962/3 – Paperback
The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin – early 70’s – Paperback
Viz – comic – early 80’s
Private Eye – Satire Magazine – 60’s through 80’s
Selected Poems – Frank O’Hara – 1974 – Paperback
The Trial of Henry Kissinger – Christopher Hitchens – early 2000’s – Paperbook
Flaubert’s Parrrot – Julian Barnes – 1985 – Hardback
Maldodor – Comte de Lautréamont – late 70’s – Penguin Paperback
On The Road – Jack Kerouac – 1960 – American Paperback
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders – Lawrence Weschler – 1995 – Paperback
Zanoni – Edward Bulwer-Lytton – 1975 – Hardback
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctine and Ritual – Eliphas Lévi – 1975 – Paperback
The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels – 1980 – Hardback
The Leopard – Giusseppe Di Lampedusa – 2001 – Hardback
Inferno – Dante Alighieri – 1985 – Paperback
A Grave for a Dolphin – Alberto Denti di Pirajno – mid 70’s – Hardback
The Insult – Rupert Thomson – 1996 – Hardback
In Between the Sheets – Ian McEwan – 1978 – Hardback
A People’s Tragedy – Orlando Figes – 2000 – Hardback
Journey into the Whirlwind – Eugenia Ginzburg – 2002 – Paperback
