David Bowie's 100 Favorite Books, From Homer to James Baldwin

In 2013, the V&A museum in London staged a major exhibition on David Bowie, titled “David Bowie Is.” After its London staging, it then moved to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. As part of the Ontario staging of the show, the curators included Bowie’s own list of his 100 favorite books, which had previously been shared by the artist on his website and which provides further illumination on his interests and inspirations.

Bowie’s reading habits were diverse, spanning many genres and different historical periods as well as both fiction and non-fiction. He consumed so much written material that Nicolas Roeg, who directed him in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, made a joke about his reading habits after seeing that Bowie had brought a portable library to the shoot of the movie.

Being able to own a book in a tangible way also mattered a lot to Bowie. He was once quoted as saying the following about his own collection: “I’m a real self-educated kind of guy. I read voraciously. Every book I ever bought, I have. I can’t throw it away. It’s physically impossible to leave my hand! Some of them are in warehouses. I’ve got a library that I keep the ones I really really like.” Here is a look at one hundred of those favorites.

Bowie's 100 Favorite Reads

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) The 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) Hall’s 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 Gillete

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 Chatterley’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 1980s)

84) Private Eye (satirical magazine, 1960s – 1980s)

85) Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara

86) The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

87) Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

88) Maldodor by Comte de Lautréamont

89) On the Road by Jack Kerouac

90) Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders 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