David Bowie's 100 favorite books

Rock legend and cultural icon is what he will mostly be remembered for, but Mr. David Robert Jones (1947-2016) better known to the world as David Bowie was also an avid reader. Shortly before his death, he compiled a list of the top 100 books that he thought really inspired his life and work:

• Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

• Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

• Room At The Top by John Braine

• On Having No Head by Douglass Harding

• Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• City Of Night by John Rechy

• The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

• Iliad by Homer

• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

• Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo

• Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

• Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell

• Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

• Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall

• David Bomberg by Richard Cork

• Blast by Wyndham Lewis

• Passing by Nella Larson

• Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto

• The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

• In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner

• Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

• The Divided Self by R. D. Laing

• The Stranger by Albert Camus

• Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman

• The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf

• The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

• Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter

• The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

• The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• Herzog by Saul Bellow

• Puckoon by Spike Milligan

• Black Boy by Richard Wright

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima

• Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler

• The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot

• McTeague by Frank Norris

• Money by Martin Amis

• The Outsider by Colin Wilson

• Strange People by Frank Edwards

• English Journey by J.B. Priestley

• A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

• The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West

• 1984 by George Orwell

• The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White

• Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn

• Mystery Train by Greil Marcus

• The Beano- weekly kids' comic book first published in 1938

• Raw- annual comic book published from 1980 to 1991

• White Noise by Don DeLillo

• Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick

• Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage

• Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley

• The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillete

• Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky

• The Street by Ann Petry

• Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

• Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.

• A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn

• The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

• Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz

• The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard

• The Bridge by Hart Crane

• All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd

• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

• Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

• The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos

• Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders

• The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

• Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey

• Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich

• Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia

• The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

• Teenage by Jon Savage

• Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

• The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard

• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

• Viz, adult-oriented comic book first published in 1979

• Private Eye, satirical magazine first published in 1961

• Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara

• The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

• Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

• Maldoror by Le Comte de Lautréamont

• On The Road by Jack Kerouac

• Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

• Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

• Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi

• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

• Inferno by Dante Alighieri

• A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

• The Insult by Rupert Thomson

• In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan

• A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes

• Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/11/david-bowies-top-100-books
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-100-favourite-books-list/
Bowie's Bookshelf by John O'Connell