Time to crack the books, Bowie fans. To celebrate the international tour of the critically-adored exhibit David Bowie… Is, which features art, film, costumes and photography from the music icon’s career, the London Evening Standard has a list of David Bowie’s 100 favorite reads.
The list was released by the archivist who helped curate the Bowie exhibit, which originally opened in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and is currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Comprised of novels, poetry, non-fiction and a few magazines, the list shows Bowie to be something a voracious and varied reader. In fact, Bowie is such a fan of the written word, reports the LES, that if he hadn’t become a musician, he’d have chosen a career as a novelist.
Superfans can peruse the list below to see how many Bowie-approved books they’ve already read — and add the rest to their “To Read” list.
The Top 100 David Bowie Approved-Reads
-The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby
-The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
-The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard
-Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage
-Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
-The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens
-Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler
-A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes
-The Insult, Rupert Thomson
-Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
-The Bird Artist, Howard Norman
-Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard
-Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto
-Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia
-David Bomberg, Richard Cork
-Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick
-The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
-Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd
-Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey
-Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter
-Money, Martin Amis
-White Noise, Don DeLillo
-Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes
-The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White
-A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
-A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
-Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester
-Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
-Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
-Raw magazine
-Viz magazine
-The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
-Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz
-In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan
-Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley
-The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
-Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders
-Mystery Train, Greil Marcus
-Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara
-Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich
-In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner
-Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky
-The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillete
-The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf
-Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn
-The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
-Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg
-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr.
-In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
-City of Night, John Rechy
-Herzog, Saul Bellow
-Puckoon, Spike Milligan
-The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford
-The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima
-The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
-A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
-Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell
-The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
-Private Eye magazine
-On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding
-Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage
-Strange People, Frank Edwards
-The Divided Self, R. D. Lain
-All The Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd
-Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse
-The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
-The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard
-Room at the Top, John Braine
-A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno
-The Outsider, Colin Wilson
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
-Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
-The Street, Ann Petry
-Black Boy, Richard Wright