Formatted Contents Note: |
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962) -- Albert Camus, The Outsider (1942) -- Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969) -- Dante Alighieri, 'Inferno' (c.1308-20) -- Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) -- Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963) -- Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems (2009) -- Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) -- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) -- Martin Amis, Money (1984) -- Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956) -- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856) -- Homer, The Iliad -- James Hall, Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1974) -- Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964) -- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) -- John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) -- Greil Marcus, Mystery Train (1975) -- The Beano (founded 1938) -- Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life (1978) -- Richard Cork, David Bomberg (1988) -- Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) -- George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-Definition of Culture (1971) -- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1930) -- Petr Sadecký, Octobriana and the Russian Underground (1971) -- Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) -- John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writing (1968) -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 29. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985) -- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1962) -- Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) -- Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (1856) -- Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) -- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930) -- Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) -- Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) -- Edward Bulwer Lytton, Zanoni (1842) -- George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940) -- John Rechy, City of Night (1963) -- David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (1987) -- Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) -- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984) -- J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934) -- Keith Waterhouse, Billy Liar (1959) -- Alberto Denti di Piranho, A Grave for a Dolphin (1956) -- RAW (1986-91) -- Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (2008) 49. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945) |
Summary, etc.: |
""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. // 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? // Heartfelt, analytical, and totally original, Bowie's Bookshelf is one part epic reading guide and one part biography of a music legend"-- |