David Bowie's Top 100 Must Read Books

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/news/special_feature_how_read_bowie

The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, 2008

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007

The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard, 2007

Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage, 2007

Fingersmith, Sarah Waters, 2002

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens, 2001

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler, 1997

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes, 1997

The Insult, Rupert Thomson, 1996

Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon, 1995

The Bird Artist, Howard Norman, 1994

Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard, 1993

Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto, 1992

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, 1990

David Bomberg, Richard Cork, 1988

Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick, 1986

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1986

Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd, 1985

Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey, 1984

Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter, 1984

Money, Martin Amis, 1984

White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1984

Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, 1984

The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984

A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1980

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980

Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1980

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1980

Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess, 1980

Raw (a ‘graphix magazine’) 1980-91

Viz (magazine) 1979 –

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, 1979

Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz, 1978

In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan, 1978

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1977

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976

Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders, 1975

Mystery Train, Greil Marcus, 1975

Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara, 1974

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich, 1972

In Bluebeard’s Castle : Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner, 1971

Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky, 1971

The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillete, 1970

The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf, 1968

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn, 1968

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967

Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg, 1967

Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. , 1966

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965

City of Night, John Rechy, 1965

Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964

Puckoon, Spike Milligan, 1963

The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford, 1963

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima, 1963

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, 1963

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962

Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell, 1962

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, 1961

Private Eye (magazine) 1961 –

On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding, 1961

Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage, 1961

Strange People, Frank Edwards, 1961

The Divided Self, R. D. Laing, 1960

All The Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd,1960

Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse, 1959

The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, 1958

On The Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957

The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, 1957

Room at the Top, John Braine, 1957

A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, 1956

The Outsider, Colin Wilson, 1956

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949

The Street, Ann Petry, 1946

Black Boy, Richard Wright, 1945

ok

i checked to see if i was listed, don't think i am *Remove Bookmark from this Thread*

love douglas harding

great list, prob the best "famous artist recommends some books" list i've ever seen -- rivaled only by richey edwards's list (which has some overlap with this one). i've read about 14 of these, but 'mystery train' would probably get my vote as the best. well, apart from 'lolita.'

what about books before 1945?

also, need more translations to be considered a great list

good list. I can see him sitting around the house and reading his favourite bits from the Viz Letterbocks to Iman, Iman shaking her head.

Think I've read 15 of them. & have copies of a couple more that are still on the to read list.

But will add several more to the to read list.

I counted 17 of these I've read. They all fit comfortably into the category of literature, with none of the music-related or pop culture ones.

yeah i've only read a handful of these but it seems like a good, no-bullshit list

lol @ no WS Burroughs, considering how much Bowie pilfered from him

it's possible age made him realize how much those Burroughs novels suck.

FP'd you for that.

good, no-bullshit list

In other words, pretty fucking boring.

you're welcome!

ah emily beat me to it

wtf is boring about it?

Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, Orlando Figes...

I could go on. Either complete middlebrow hell or school syllabus literature. Now, that's not to say these authors are terrible or unredeemable or anything like that (well, except maybe Amis for sheer cuntery), but they are incredibly boring choices.

Looking forward to the piss-my-pants excitement of emil.y's book list.

List of Books

good books are so boring

Eh, is that supposed to be a put-down? If someone wanted to curate an exhibition of my life I could easily come up with a much more exciting list of books. And I mean easily.

xxp lol, Kevin thinks Martin Amis is good.

this is a bit like one of those observer supplement 'what will you be reading on your summer holiday' things except instead of asking giles coren, michael onddatje, michael gove and idk julian cope or someone they just asked david bowie 100 times

i'm sure you or anyone else here could come up with a 'more exciting' list of books, but it's just a list of a guy's favorite books, i kind of appreciate that he didn't just stuff it with the usual 'transgressive' stuff like burroughs and dennis cooper and other ppl that no one actually enjoys reading.

that said, just realized camille paglia's on that list, yecchhhh.

'transgressive' stuff like burroughs and dennis cooper and other ppl that no one actually enjoys reading.

Lol wtf. Yeah, nobody enjoys reading Burroughs. Nobody. It is clearly impossible.

I have no problem with David Bowie having a list of books that he loves that is consummately middlebrow, btw. Nor am I claiming the inclusion of Burroughs would have made it particularly interesting (hint: it wouldn't). I responded to people hyping up a good, no-bullshit list, not really the list itself. Bowie can do what the fuck he wants.

Burroughs sucks

I don't read Burroughs for the "transgressive" thrills, dude was visionary

This is a good non fiction list and an ok fiction list

and Bowie clearly read him A LOT, his ideas are littered throughout Bowie's work, just seems like an intentional omission

xp

i'm trolling a bit there, 'junky' is a good book, but "no one reads burroughs" is not a crazier thing to say than "george orwell and muriel spark are boring."

At least this list represents something more substantial than the now-traditional and widely publicized revelation by the respective wives of the Republican and Democratic nominees for president of each one's favorite cookie recipe. emil.y's lack of endorsement is about as meaningful as the list itself.

Burroughs' best book is his book of interviews tbh

Angela Carter is prety fucking awesome

xp

I have no idea what you're even talking about now, man. Seriously, non sequiturs much? Also, if the list represents something more substantial than whatever-the-hell-it-is you're gibbering on about, then you also consider my lack of endorsement substantial, by your reasoning. Which is fine by me.

"george orwell and muriel spark are boring."

Nobody said this. What I said was "this list is boring". If you do want to make an inference, then you can take it as "the inclusion of George Orwell and Muriel Spark (amongst others) make this list boring". Why? Because they make this list like a thousand million other lists of Anglocentric literature. They make this list your GCSE reading list. If you think that's not boring, then good for you. Personally, I have affection for a whole bunch of stuff I had to read for GCSE, but I've also moved on and expanded my horizons.

marijuana

Angela Carter is incredibly facile.

*farts*

Yah this sounds totes facile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_at_the_Circus

David Bowie appears to be better-read than 99.9% of humans currently alive, so there's that.

i wrote all of these books

kudos

nbd

u r sweet

i pretended to actually enjoy reading all these books

i read all these books, to poop on

whatever-the-hell-it-is you're gibbering on about

Sorry. Let me explain it a bit more clearly for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyX9IWhevSI

oh, no offense was intended, emil.y -- i think my surprise at your dismissal of the list as boring and predictable stems mostly from the fact that i live in a country where absolutely none of those authors (except orwell) would get anywhere near any school syllabus. i don't think i'd even heard of half of those authors when i was a teen.

this is more of a college list in the US

agree that the fiction is the least interesting part of the list - it's fairly broadsheet conventional from a UK perspective - the non-fiction is better than that (I like seeing Arthur Danto on there!), I think it's a really likeable taste-map, art-schooler digging into postwar culture, dabbling here and there, having fixations (he read a lot of fiction in 84!), sharpest when he's near visual art.

I mean if you gave me this list to set me up with a conversation with someone (and you didn't tell me that person was D Bowie, that would be a distraction) I would definitely think I could get on with them, though I would largely skip fiction as a subject. Julian Jaynes, that is where I'd start. Or maybe Danto.

(I assume he was asked for post-war books. Otherwise I'd wonder about the 1945 start date)

If someone wanted to curate an exhibition of my life I could easily come up with a much more exciting list of books. And I mean easily.

non-sarcastic, non-insinuating question: what books would be on this list? I want to expand my horizons as well.

yes! would be genuinely interested in even a top-of-your-head list emil.y

yes, co-sign on that

It could have its own thread, so as not to get entangled with DB's list.

Started:
A museum has commissioned a major retrospective of your life and want a list of (x) must-read books to go with it. What is on that list?

i was about to ask that! please post that list and please post it here in this exact thread xp

I was going to say, this probably isn't the best thread to post on as I've put myself in a position where people are likely to be actively trying to criticise my list. But I do like list-making, and I may well contribute to the other thread later.

garfunkel keeps a list of every book hes ever read deal w that bowie http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html

when VH-1 did one of those greatest-album things in the early 2000s he was interviewed about Prince's 1999. "I love this," he said, kissing his vinyl copy.

Garfunkel was good on a bunch of those, I wish I could remember some of the other stuff he said.

wait did garfunkel kiss 1999 or did bowie kiss 1999 this is important

garfunkel

good

I know "Little Red Corvette" is in Art Garfunkel's top 50

Any list on which I discover at least one interesting new (to me) title is a worthwhile list, so by that standard Bowie's list is good. I think it helps to have the more obscure titles situated amongst the more well-known works to give you a sense of the list-maker's sensibility. For instance I'd never heard of Jaynes or bicameralism before, and while it sounds totally bonkers, I'm glad to have heard about it.

Most recent addition to Art Garfunkel's "Favorites":

157. Jun 2012 E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey 2011

still think this was a good list

Agreed.

One thing I love about Bowie, at least my impression as a casual fan, is that while he is probably among the most "intellectual" pop/rock stars, well, ever, he was never sneering or snobby about it, never one of those people who looked down his nose at the crude tastes of the mass audience he felt embarrassed to have. He seemed like someone who genuinely loved learning, knowledge, analysis, and sincerely hoped that others might catch a bit of his bug too, although with no sense of a moral crusade about it either. Anyone who knows his career better than I do can correct me if I'm wrong.

Not going to be charitable to the fiction element - as Emil.y said a lot of middlebrow junk but Spark, Selby, Mishima, Lampedusa I like.

I suppose though its more of a mix of what someone who wanted to escape and make something, and in their mid-20s, would be reading. Fiction yes but Hitchens, music writers, O'Hara poems, magazines, the odd comic, random curios (Paglia), the odd stone cold canon classic (Bovary), antiquity (Homer), other bits that don't fit anywhere. No Burroughs but Lautremont so his exclusion is odd but yes he is a colelctor/curator but not in any rigorous sense. Relaxed.

One thing I love about Bowie, at least my impression as a casual fan, is that while he is probably among the most "intellectual" pop/rock stars, well, ever, he was never sneering or snobby about it, never one of those people who looked down his nose at the crude tastes of the mass audience he felt embarrassed to have.

OTM. This attitude dovetailed with his posture in interviews: gracious, patient, able to explain. One of the few rockers I can see in a college lecture hall.

he is a colelctor/curator but not in any rigorous sense. Relaxed.

or......a reader

jk lol

You'd keep Bowie miles away from any college lecture hall. Bowie's list is a pick n' mix, continuous untutored learning. Anyone is potentially in.

Bowie vs Scaruffi poll: http://www.scaruffi.com/fiction/best100.html

In the 90s when he restyled himself as a prophet of the internet, a lot of what he said was actually quite insightful.

I'd want him in a lecture hall because I know he'd dress better than the competition.

Fair enough - better hair too.

In the 90s when he restyled himself as a prophet of the internet, a lot of what he said was actually quite insightful.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Tuesday, 12 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See, that's from all the Ballard he was reading. 's ok tho'

Angela Carter is prety fucking awesome

― you are kind, I am (waterface), Tuesday, 1 October 2013 19:49 (2 years ago)

Angela Carter is incredibly facile.

― emil.y, Tuesday, 1 October 2013 19:52 (2 years ago)

*farts*

― emil.y, Tuesday, 1 October 2013 19:52 (2 years ago)

Doing an impression of the Nights At The Circus character?