David Bowie’s 100 Must-Read Books

David Bowie BooksAmong David Bowie artifacts on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario this fall are handwritten writings, sketches, and over 50 original costumes, comprising what the gallery describes as an “interactive trip through Bowie’s numerous personae and legendary performances, highlighting his artistic influences.” In addition to the 300-piece collection, which was culled from thousands of objects borrowed from Bowie’s own archive, curators Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes have released an intriguing list of his must-read books. From familiar classics, such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Saul Bellow’s Herzog, to a pair of late-’70s/early-’80s zines, many re-reads and discoveries lie therein. Open Book Toronto shared the list of 100 books today:

 

Interviews with Francis Bacon | David Sylvester
Billy Liar | Keith Waterhouse
Room at the Top | John Braine
On Having No Head | Douglass Harding
Kafka Was The Rage | Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess
City of Night | John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Diaz
Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert
Iliad | Homer
As I lay Dying | William Faulkner
Tadanori Yokoo | Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz | Alfred Döblin
Inside the Whale and Other Essays | George Orwell
Mr. Norris Changes Trains | Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art | James A. Hall
David Bomberg | Richard Cork
Blast | Wyndham Lewis
Passing | Nella Larson
Beyond the Brillo Box | Arthur C. Danto
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind | Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle | George Steiner
Hawksmoor | Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self | R. D. Laing
The Stranger | Albert Camus
Infants of the Spring | Wallace Thurman
The Quest For Christa T | Christa Wolf
The Songlines | Bruce Chatwin
Nights at the Circus | Angela Carter
The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark
Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog | Saul Bellow
Puckoon | Spike Milligan
Black Boy | Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea | Yukio Mishima
Darkness at Noon | Arthur Koestler
The Waste Land | T.S. Elliot
McTeague | Frank Norris
Money | Martin Amis
The Outsider | Colin Wilson
Strange People | Frank Edwards
English Journey | J.B. Priestley
A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole
The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West
Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell
The Life and Times of Little Richard | Charles White
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock | Nik Cohn
Mystery Train | Greil Marcus
Beano | Comic
Raw | Graphic Comic
White Noise | Don DeLillo
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom | Peter Guralnick
Silence: lectures and writing | John Cage
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews | Edited by Malcolm Cowley
The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll | Charlie Gillete
Octobriana and the Russian Underground | Peter Sadecky
The Street | Ann Petry
Wonder Boys | Michael Chabon
Last Exit to Brooklyn | Hubert Selby, Jr
A People’s History of the United States | Howard Zinn
The Age of American Unreason | Susan Jacoby
Metropolitan Life | Fran Lebowitz
The Coast of Utopia | Tom Stoppard
The Bridge | Hart Crane
All The Emperor’s Horses | David Kidd
Fingersmith | Sarah Waters
Earthly Powers | Anthony Burgess
The 42nd Parallel | John Dos Passos
Tales of Beatnik Glory | Ed Saunders
The Bird Artist | Howard Norman
Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music | Gerri Hirshey
Before the Deluge | Otto Friedrich
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson | Camille Paglia
The American Way of Death | Jessica Mitford
In Cold Blood | Truman Capote
Lady Chatterly’s Lover | D.H. Lawrence
Teenage | Jon Savage
Vile Bodies | Evelyn Waugh
The Hidden Persuaders | Vance Packard
The Fire Next Time | James Baldwin
Viz | Comic
Private Eye – Satire Magazine
Selected Poems | Frank O’Hara
The Trial of Henry Kissinger | Christopher Hitchens
Flaubert’s Parrrot | Julian Barnes
Maldodor | Comte de Lautréamont
On The Road | Jack Kerouac
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders | Lawrence Weschler
Zanoni | Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctine and Ritual | Eliphas Lévi
The Gnostic Gospels | Elaine Pagels
The Leopard | Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
Inferno | Dante Alighieri
A Grave for a Dolphin | Alberto Denti di Pirajno
The Insult | Rupert Thomson
In Between the Sheets | Ian McEwan
A People’s Tragedy | Orlando Figes
Journey into the Whirlwind | Eugenia Ginzburg