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In 2013, the curators of the touring museum exhibit “David Bowie Is” released a list of David Bowie’s 100 favorite reads, providing us with deeper insights into his literary tastes. Covering fiction and non-fiction, the list spans six decades, moving from Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945) to Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2008). As we once noted in another post, “his list shows a lot of love to American writers, from … Truman Capote to … Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Díaz, Jack Kerouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fellow Brits George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishima and Bulgakov.”  You can read the full list below, and, if you choose, also explore a related book from 2019–Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life.

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 (co*ic, ’50s)


52. Raw (co*ic, ’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. se*ual 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 (co*ic, 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 co*te 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

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