Bowie's Bookshelf

The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie's Life

John O'Connell

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982112554
• Print ISBN:
  9781982112547
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.” —David Bowie

Three years before David Bowie died, he shared a list of 100 books that changed his life. His choices span fiction and nonfiction, literary and irreverent, and include timeless classics alongside eyebrow-raising obscurities. Discover them all in this “unconventional biography of an artist who helped define modern music and pop culture” (Mental Floss).

In 100 short essays, music journalist John O’Connell studies each book on Bowie’s list and contextualizes it in the artist’s life and work. How did the power imbued in a single suit of armor in The Iliad impact a man who loved costumes, shifting identity, and the siren song of the alter-ego? How did The Gnostic Gospels inform Bowie’s own hazy personal cosmology? How did the poems of T.S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara, the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Anthony Burgess, the comics of The Beano and The Viz, and the groundbreaking politics of James Baldwin influence Bowie’s lyrics, his sound, his artistic outlook? How did the 100 books on this list influence one of the most influential artists of a generation?

Totally original, “entertaining, and informative” (Vogue), Bowie’s Bookshelf is one part epic reading guide and one part biography of a music legend.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Anthony Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange” (1962)
• 2. Albert Camus, “The Outsider” (1942)
• 3. Nik Cohn, “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom” (1969)
• 4. Dante Alighieri, “Inferno” (c.1308–20)
• 5. Junot Díaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2007)
• 6. Yukio Mishima, “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” (1963)
• 7. Frank O’Hara, “Selected Poems” (2009)
• 8. Christopher Hitchens, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001)
• 9. Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita” (1955)
• 10. Martin Amis, “Money” (1984)
• 11. Colin Wilson, “The Outsider” (1956)
• 12. Gustave Flaubert, “Madame Bovary” (1856)
• 13. Homer, “The Iliad” (8th Century BC)
• 14. James Hall, “Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art” (1974)
• 15. Saul Bellow, “Herzog” (1964)
• 16. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922)
• 17. John Kennedy Toole, “A Confederacy of Dunces” (1980)
• 18. Greil Marcus, “Mystery Train” (1975)
• 19. The Beano (1938–present)
• 20. Fran Lebowitz, “Metropolitan Life” (1978)
• 21. Richard Cork, “David Bomberg” (1988)
• 22. Alfred Döblin, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929)
• 23. George Steiner, “In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture” (1971)
• 24. D. H. Lawrence, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1928)
• 25. Petr Sadecký, “Octobriana and the Russian Underground” (1971)
• 26. Comte de Lautréamont, “Les Chants de Maldoror” (1868)
• 27. John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writing” (1961)
• 28. George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949)
• 29. Peter Ackroyd, “Hawksmoor” (1985)
• 30. James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963)
• 31. Angela Carter, “Nights at the Circus” (1984)
• 32. Eliphas Levi, “Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual” (1856)
• 33. Sarah Waters, “Fingersmith” (2002)
• 34. William Faulkner, “As I Lay Dying” (1930)
• 35. Christopher Isherwood, “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” (1935)
• 36. Jack Kerouac, “On the Road” (1957)
• 37. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “Zanoni” (1842)
• 38. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale and Other Essays” (1940)
• 39. John Rechy, “City of Night” (1963)
• 40. David Sylvester, “The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon” (1987)
• 41. Julian Jaynes, “The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (1976)
• 42. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby” (1925)
• 43. Julian Barnes, “Flaubert’s Parrot” (1984)
• 44. J. B. Priestley, “English Journey” (1934)
• 45. Keith Waterhouse, “Billy Liar” (1959)
• 46. Alberto Denti di Pirajno, “A Grave for a Dolphin” (1956)
• 47. Raw (1986–91)
• 48. Susan Jacoby, “The Age of American Unreason” (2008)
• 49. Richard Wright, “Black Boy” (1945)
• 50. Viz (1979–present)
• 51. Ann Petry, “The Street” (1946)
• 52. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, “The Leopard” (1958)
• 53. Don DeLillo, “White Noise” (1985)
• 54. Douglas Harding, “On Having No Head” (1961)
• 55. Anatole Broyard, “Kafka Was the Rage” (1993)
• 56. Charles White, “The Life and Times of Little Richard” (1984)
• 57. Michael Chabon, “Wonder Boys” (1995)
• 58. Arthur Koestler, “Darkness at Noon” (1940)
• 59. Muriel Spark, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961)
• 60. John Braine, “Room at the Top” (1957)
• 61. Elaine Pagels, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979)
• 62. Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood” (1966)
• 63. Orlando Figes, “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924” (1996)
• 64. Rupert Thomson, “The Insult” (1996)
• 65. Gerri Hirshey, “Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music” (1984)
• 66. Arthur C. Danto, “Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective” (1992)
• 67. Frank Norris, “McTeague” (1899)
• 68. Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Master and Margarita” (1966)
• 69. Nella Larsen, “Passing” (1929)
• 70. Hubert Selby Jr., “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1964)
• 71. Frank Edwards, “Strange People: Unusual Humans Who Have Baffled the World” (1961)
• 72. Nathanael West, “The Day of the Locust” (1939)
• 73. Tadanori Yokoo, “Tadanori Yokoo” (1997)
• 74. Jon Savage, “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture” (2007)
• 75. Wallace Thurman, “Infants of the Spring” (1932)
• 76. Hart Crane, “The Bridge” (1930)
• 77. Eugenia Ginzburg, “Journey Into the Whirlwind” (1967)
• 78. Ed Sanders, “Tales of Beatnik Glory” (1975)
• 79. John Dos Passos, “The 42nd Parallel” (1930)
• 80. Peter Guralnick, “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom” (1986)
• 81. Bruce Chatwin, “The Songlines” (1987)
• 82. Camille Paglia, “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” (1990)
• 83. Jessica Mitford, “The American Way of Death” (1963)
• 84. Otto Friedrich, “Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s” (1972)
• 85. Private Eye (1961–present)
• 86. R. D. Laing, “The Divided Self” (1960)
• 87. Vance Packard, “The Hidden Persuaders” (1957)
• 88. Evelyn Waugh, “Vile Bodies” (1930)
• 89. Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980)
• 90. Wyndham Lewis, “Blast” (1914–15)
• 91. Ian McEwan, “In Between the Sheets” (1978)
• 92. David Kidd, “All the Emperor’s Horses” (1961)
• 93. Malcolm Cowley, “ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1” (1958)
• 94. Christa Wolf, “The Quest for Christa T.” (1968)
• 95. Tom Stoppard, “The Coast of Utopia” (2002)
• 96. Anthony Burgess, “Earthly Powers” (1980)
• 97. Howard Norman, “The Bird Artist” (1994)
• 98. Spike Milligan, “Puckoon” (1963)
• 99. Charlie Gillett, “The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll” (1970)
• 100. Lawrence Weschler, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder” (1995)
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Selected Bibliography
• Copyright