David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

In This Episode:

This episode of On Books is dedicated to David Bowie. I’ll read a piece from Sara Benincasa called “Thank You, David Bowie, From The Weird Kid“, as well as share some highlights from David Bowie’s Top 100 Books.

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

In 2013, David Bowie published his Top 100 Books on his Facebook page. Here’s the list (in no particular order).

• 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
• Beano (comic, ’50s)
• Raw (comic, ’80s)
• 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 Chatterly’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 (comic, early ’80s)
• Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)
• Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
• The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
• Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
• Maldodor by Comte de Lautréamont
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac
• Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders by Lawrence Weschler
• Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• Transcendental Magic, Its Doctine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
• The Leopard by Giusseppe 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 by Orlando Figes
• Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

4.542 Billion Years

Read More:

• Thank You, David Bowie, From The Weird Kids by Sara Benincasa
• Bowie’s Top 100 Books – The Complete List