David Bowie's Favorite Books Categorized

When David Bowie released his list of favorite books, he did something he rarely did: he revealed himself.

Bowie is important to me. My first concert was the Station to Station tour in 1976. One of the first albums I ever purchased, on cassette, was Diamond Dogs. I didn’t realize at the time that Bowie had been trying to acquire the rights to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four so he could create a rock opera of sorts based on Orwell’s great dystopian masterpiece. The Orwell estate refused to grant Bowie the rights, so Bowie pivoted and created Diamond Dogs, his own dystopian vision set in the bleak Hunger City, where jackals feasted on corpses. The album still pays tribute to Nineteen Eighty-Four with songs such as “We Are the Dead,” “Big Brother,” and “1984.”

I’m surprised that neither the sci-fi classic The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis nor Christiane F. (Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo) by Christiane Vera Felscherinow, the story of a young German girl who becomes hooked on heroin to bond with the boy she loves, made Bowie’s top 100. Both books became cult films that are still relevant today and loom large in Bowie’s legend. The Christiane F. soundtrack is made up of Bowie songs, mainly from his Berlin Trilogy, and he makes a cameo appearance in the film. He starred, of course, in Nicolas Roeg’s memorable film adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth.

I’ve read 30 of the books on Bowie’s list, which is why I write about certain books and categories more than others.

To try to understand David Bowie’s favorite books, I broke them into categories: British Fiction, American Fiction, Cold War/Berlin, Art, Music, Comics, The Black Experience, Eclectic, Nonfiction, and more. Most of the books on Bowie’s list are British or American. Eighty-seven of the books were written by men and thirteen by women.

British Fiction

Bowie’s favorite British literature includes the young criminals and redemption of A Clockwork Orange; the 250-year-old murders of Hawksmoor; Martin Amis’s Money, a tale of life lived without restraint; Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, which remains a bestseller; the love between two women in the London slums of Fingersmith; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the tale of a staid marriage and the wife’s passionate love affair; the glittering lives, and the darkness beneath them, of Vile Bodies; the slowly revealed secrets of Flaubert’s Parrot; the dreamlike stories of In Between the Sheets; Billy Liar, whose hero’s daydreams are his only hope; Room at the Top, the story of an “angry young man” of the fifties; and The Insult, whose protagonist has gone blind. My favorite is Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, featuring Miss Brodie’s creative, beautiful, and dangerous belief in herself.

Common themes in Bowie’s British fiction are outsider stories, dark tales, people trying to break out of their oppressive surroundings, and lives lived without moderation. These British novels are creative, out-of-the-box, and deeply felt.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
Money by Martin Amis
Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
Room At The Top by John Braine
Puckoon by Spike Milligan
The Insult by Rupert Thomson 1966
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard (Czech born)
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

American Fiction

Bowie’s favorite American fiction includes The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby would appeal to Bowie: he was a man who created his own charismatic persona. Gatsby also defined Roaring Twenties style and came from nowhere to pursue his dreams. McTeague by Frank Norris is interesting because it’s something of a socialist novel. The protagonist of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus is part woman, part swan. I think that says it all. City of Night by John Rechy is classic gay literature. The hero of Saul Bellow’s Herzog is a man who is falling apart, but as he does, he discovers himself. White Noise by Don DeLillo illuminates America’s consumer culture. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon is one of the most entertaining reads on the list.

I’m not surprised to see Kerouac’s On the Road on the list; Bowie’s half-brother, Terry, turned him on to Kerouac when he was a teen. A slew of darker, uniquely American works are among Bowie’s favorites: The Bridge by Hart Crane, The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Tales of Beatnik Glory by Ed Sanders, and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
McTeague by Frank Norris
Nights At the Circus by Angela Carter
City Of Night by John Rechy
Herzog by Saul Bellow
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.
The Bridge by Hart Crane
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Day of The Locust by Nathanael West
Tales of Beatnik Glory by Ed Sanders
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

More David Bowie’s Favorite Fiction

Bowie’s list includes 10 novels that are neither British nor American. I’m a fan of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a classic and creative Russian novel in which the devil visits Moscow. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is a story with characters you will not forget. It will make you say “Wow” several times, and the prose is beautiful.

French Fiction

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (French, but born in Uruguay)

Russian Fiction

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Japanese Fiction

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with The Sea by Yukio Mishima

Classic Fiction

Iliad by Homer
Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Dominican Republic Fiction

The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Italian Fiction

The Leopard by Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
A Grave for A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

Berlin Fiction and Nonfiction

Four of Bowie’s favorite books are set in Berlin, three of them in pre-Nazi Germany: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood, and Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich. These disparate, brilliant reads evoke a sense of Berlin before the onslaught of the Nazi madness.

Bowie became friends with Isherwood in Los Angeles, and it was Isherwood who influenced his decision to move to Berlin. Bowie lived near where Isherwood had lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, during the last days of the Weimar Republic.

Another Bowie favorite, The Quest for Christa T. by East German writer Christa Wolf, is a fluid, experimental narrative about the mysterious life of an East German woman and what happens to the human spirit in a totalitarian state. Christa T. strives to be honest at a time when survival in East Germany requires deception. The book was a sensation on its release in 1968, but it was soon condemned in East Germany. Later, Christa Wolf was a speaker at the Alexanderplatz demonstration in East Berlin five days before the Wall fell.

Four books on Bowie’s list are about the struggle for freedom from oppression in the Soviet Union and Russia. Octobriana and the Russian Underground by Petr Sadecký tells of a comic book heroine who becomes superhuman in a radioactive volcano and leads the Soviet underground’s opposition to Russian and American hegemony. Published in 1971, the book claimed that the comics had circulated only in illegal underground magazines and had inspired a generation of young Russian dissidents. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 by British historian Orlando Figes is a thousand-page tome on the Russian Revolution. Journey into the Whirlwind by Russian author Eugenia Ginzburg documents her imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag after she was caught up in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the beginning of eighteen years in prison, labor camps, and exile. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler is the chilling portrait of an aging Bolshevik imprisoned and tried for treason by the same revolutionary regime he once served.

When David Bowie died in 2016, the German Foreign Office tweeted, “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.”

You might enjoy the essay “Bowie and the Berlin Wall.” Read a sample here.

Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf
Octobriana And the Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg
Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

Read more about David Bowie’s time in Berlin and his impact on the Wall falling here.

The Black Experience

Bowie was an outspoken anti-racist in his words and deeds. He famously called out MTV for not playing videos by Black artists—and his support of and interest in the Black experience was reflected in his favorite books.

Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Street by Ann Petry
Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
Passing by Nella Larson

David Bowie’s Favorite Art, Music, Eclectic, Poetry, Comics, and Nonfiction Books.

Bowie’s son, Duncan, said that his father was a “beast of a reader.” Bowie brought four hundred books with him to New Mexico during the filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth. It’s also interesting to see what he left out. There are few or no biographies, letters, thrillers, diaries, journals, or mysteries on his list.

When Bowie was a boy, he loved Little Richard, who became his musical hero, so it makes sense that The Life and Times of Little Richard by Charles White and Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn are two of his favorite music books. Bowie also included Mystery Train by Greil Marcus, which features the rise of Elvis Presley, with whom Bowie shared a birthday and whom he admired.

Bowie’s love of art is represented by a handful of interesting art books.

Bowie claimed to be nonpolitical, but he included political books such as A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens.

George Orwell is the only writer with two books on the list: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Inside the Whale and Other Essays. A magnificent essayist, Orwell is at his best in “Inside the Whale,” which dissects Henry Miller’s writing as well as literary fashions going back to the 1920s.

Bowie’s list also includes a variety of eclectic nonfiction books that reveal the breadth of his interests.

You might enjoy Brian Eno’s Favorite Books.

Music Books

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
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillete
Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey

Art Books

Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
David Bomberg by Richard Cork
Blast by Wyndham Lewis

Eclectic Books

The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler