David Bowie’s library: A glimpse into his top 100 favourite books

Shape-shifter, musical genius, cultural catalyst. David Bowie was all of these and more – and another two-word phrase should be added to the list: avid reader. By his own account, he went through three or four books per week. 

Bowie’s insatiable curiosity extended far beyond the realm of music, and literature played a huge part in defining his intellectual world. He borrowed the cut-up technique devised by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs to write lyrics, name-checked Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race in Oh You Pretty Things and referenced the Nadsat language used in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange in his towering final achievement, Blackstar. 

He liked a literary joke too – The Jean Genie is a nod to Jean Genet and his aborted plan for a stage version of George Orwell’s 1984 gave rise to a US TV special titled The 1980 Floor Show. 

Bowie claimed to be unable to throw a book away, and by the time he starred in 1976’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, he had already amassed 400, which he took with him to filming in Mexico. He told an interviewer: “I was dead scared of leaving them in New York, because I was knocking around with some dodgy people and I didn’t want them nicking any of my books. I had these cabinets – it was a traveling library – and they were rather like the boxes that amplifiers get packed up in…because of that period, I have an extraordinarily good collection of books.”

Later, he said of his collection: “Some of them are in warehouses. I’ve got a library that I keep the ones I really really like. I look around my library some nights and I do these terrible things to myself – I count up the books and think, how long I might have to live and think, ‘Fuck, I can’t read two-thirds of these books.’ It overwhelms me with sadness.”
In 2011, when five years was all he had got left, Bowie had whittled his list of favourites down to 100 – though three of them are comics and one is a satirical magazine – for the David Bowie Is.. exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Some of his collection was displayed in the kind of flight cases Bowie used in the 1970s.

Creating the list was a deeply personal endeavour for Bowie. The list spans various genres, from classic literature to avant-garde works, reflecting his broad appreciation for different forms of artistic expression. 

The list features a captivating array of titles that provide a window into Bowie’s mind. From George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984 to Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, the selections showcase his willingness to engage with thought-provoking and challenging narratives. Here’s the full list of Bowie’s favourite books:

1. Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
2. Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
3. Room At The Top by John Braine
4. On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
5. Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
7. Of Night by John Rechy
8. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
9. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
10.  Iliad by Homer
11.  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
12.  Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
13.  Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
14.  Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
15.  Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
16.  Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
17.  David Bomberg by Richard Cork
18.  Blast by Wyndham Lewis
19.  Passing by Nella Larson
20.  Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
21.  The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
22.  In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
23.  Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
24.  The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
25.  The Stranger by Albert Camus
26.  Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
27.  The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
28.  The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
29.  Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
30.  The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
31.  The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
32.  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
33.  Herzog by Saul Bellow
34.  Puckoon by Spike Milligan
35.  Black Boy by Richard Wright
36.  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
37.  The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
38.  Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
39.  The Waste Land by T. S. Elliot
40.  McTeague by Frank Norris
41.  Money by Martin Amis
42.  The Outsider by Colin Wilson
43.  Strange People by Frank Edwards
44.  English Journey by J. B. Priestley
45.  A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
46.  The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
47.  1984 by George Orwell
48.  The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White
49.  Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
50.  Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
51.  Beano comic
52.  Raw comic
53.  White Noise by Don DeLillo
54.  Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
55.  Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
56.  Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
57.  The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillette
58.  Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
59.  The Street by Ann Petry
60.  Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
61.  Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. 
62.  A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
63.  The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
64.  Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
65.  The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
66.  The Bridge by Hart Crane
67.  All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
68.  Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
69.  Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
70.  The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
71.  Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders
72.  The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
73.  Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
74.  Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
75.  Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
76.  The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
77.  In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
78.  Lady Lover by D. H. Lawrence
79.  Teenage by Jon Savage
80.  Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
81.  The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
82.  The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
83.  Viz Comic
84.  Private Eye magazine
85.  Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
86.  The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
87.  Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
88.  Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
89.  On The Road by Jack Kerouac
90.  Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
91.  Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
92.  Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
93.  The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
94.  The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
95.  Inferno by Dante Alighieri
96.  A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
97.  The Insult by Rupert Thomson
98.  In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
99.  A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
100. Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg