David Bowie‘s a hard one to pin down: bold, beautiful, and an all-around bookish badass. Rumored to have read at least a book a day (and perhaps as much as eight), Bowie’s described his songs as “little stories set to music.” And in response to the Proust Questionnaire‘s “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” his one-word response was “Reading.” His love of literature had an undeniable influence on his artistic outputs and chameleon career from a young age: reading the works of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road at 15 gave Bowie the impetus to get out of Bromley.
And influenced by William Burroughs, Bowie used the surrealist author’s cut-up technique (cutting words and phrases from newspapers and magazines and rearranging them) for songwriting inspiration. In a video spot, he likens the technique to “a kind of Western Tarot.” (Decades later, Kurt Cobain also used cut-ups of his own poems to construct song lyrics.) Burroughs interviewed Bowie for Rolling Stone in 1974, in which the two discussed creative control, growing up middle class, the power of art to change the world, the inspiration for Ziggy Stardust, and love and sexuality.
A number of Bowie’s songs and film roles have literary roots: his 1974 album Diamond Dogs featured several songs – “1984,” “Big Brother,” and “We are the Dead” – that were originally written for a televised musical of George Orwell’s 1984, but the author’s estate denied the rights. In 1976, he was perfectly cast as a space traveler in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, based on Walter Tevis’ 1963 novel of the same name. And in 2015, Bowie co-wrote a musical play called Lazarus with Irish playwright Enda Walsh, which was inspired by The Man Who Fell To Earth. Lazarus would be one of Bowie’s last works before his death.
In addition to having been artistically influenced by books, Bowie himself served as inspiration for several famed comic book characters. When asked whether the Lucifer character in his Sandman comic book series was a tribute, Neil Gaiman stated, “Yes, the young, folk singer-period Bowie was the inspiration. I imagined Lucifer as a junkie angel, and young Bowie was the closest we got.” Bowie was also a major influence for writer Grant Morrison’s interpretation of the Joker in Batman RIP, with one issue explicitly titled “The Thin White Duke of Death.”
Fortunately, when Bowie left us in January 2016 to meet the starman in the sky, he left not only his legacy but also a lengthy book list. In fact, his son, Duncan Jones, recognized him as such “a beast of a reader,” that in December 2017, he started a David Bowie Book Club for fans to follow along and discuss his late father’s favorites.
Read on for a collection of David Bowie’s favorite books & comics.
Beano (comic, also rec’d by John Lennon)
Private Eye (magazine)
Raw (comic)
Viz (comic)
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
“There’s a great mysticism in his work. I’ve read everything he’s ever written. That disquieting underbelly that he sees in London, that’s how I perceive it too.” -DB
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
“I really like him, it’s another world.” -DB
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Room At The Top by John Braine
Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (also rec’d by Patti Smith & Salman Rushdie)
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
The Stranger by Albert Camus (also rec’d by Philip Seymour Hoffman)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (also rec’d by Philip Seymour Hoffman)
Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
David Bomberg by Richard Cork
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
The Bridge by Hart Crane
Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Strange People by Frank Edwards
The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (also rec’d by Ernest Hemingway, Kim Gordon & Philip Roth)
Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gilette
Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
On Having No Head by Douglas Harding
Nowhere To Run: The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
Iliad by Homer
Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
The Age Of American Unreason In A Culture Of Lies by Susan Jacoby
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (also rec’d by Bob Dylan & John Lennon)
All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
The Leopard by Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
Passing by Nella Larson
Maldodor by Comte de Lautréamont
Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
Blast by Wyndham Lewis
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus (also rec’d by Bruce Springsteen & Kim Gordon)
In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
Puckoon by Spike Milligan
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (also rec’d by Kim Gordon & Patti Smith)
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
McTeague by Frank Norris (also rec’d by Stephen King)
Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
1984 by George Orwell (also rec’d by John Lennon, Stephen King & Steve Jobs)
“A political thesis and an impression of the way in another country.” -DB
Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
The Street by Ann Petry
A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
English Journey by J.B. Priestley
City Of Night by John Rechy
Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Sanders
Teenage by Jon Savage
Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
The Insult by Rupert Thomson
Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler
The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
(via David Bowie; photo by Steve Shapiro)