David Bowie’s list of 100 favorite books

I came across this list, and I absolutely loved it.

It might take me a while to get everything linked, but I’m definitely assigning myself this homework!

Its fun to mark them as you go. I am adding a printable version of the list for you to download:

  1. Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse

  2. Room at the Top – John Braine

  3. On Having No Head – Douglas Harding

  4. Kafka Was the Rage – Anatole Broyard

  5. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

  6. City of Night – John Rechy

  7. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz

  8. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

  9. Iliad – Homer (translated by E.V. Rieu)

  10. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

  11. Tadanori Yokoo – Tadanori Yokoo

  12. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin

  13. Inside the Whale and Other Essays – George Orwell

  14. Mr. Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood

  15. Halls Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art – James A. Hall

  16. David Bomberg – Richard Cork

  17. Blast – Edited by Wyndham Lewis

  18. Passing – Nella Larsen

  19. Beyond the Brillo Box – Arthur C. Danto

  20. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes

  21. In Bluebeard’s Castle – George Steiner

  22. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd

  23. The Divided Self – R.D. Laing

  24. The Stranger – Albert Camus

  25. Infants of the Spring – Wallace Thurman

  26. The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf

  27. The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin

  28. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

  29. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

  30. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

  31. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

  32. Herzog – Saul Bellow

  33. Puckoon – Spike Milligan

  34. Black Boy – Richard Wright

  35. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

  36. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima

  37. Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler

  38. The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

  39. McTeague – Frank Norris

  40. Money – Martin Amis

  41. The Outsider – Colin Wilson

  42. Strange People – Frank Edwards

  43. English Journey – J.B. Priestley

  44. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

  45. The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West

  46. 1984 – George Orwell

  47. Animal Farm – George Orwell

  48. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

  49. The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

  50. A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn

  51. The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby

  52. Metropolitan Life – Fran Lebowitz

  53. The Coast of Utopia – Tom Stoppard

  54. The Bridge – Hart Crane

  55. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

  56. The Portable Dorothy Parker – Dorothy Parker

  57. The Trial – Franz Kafka

  58. All the Emperor’s Horses – David Kidd

  59. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima

  60. Tales of Beatnik Glory – Ed Sanders

  61. Nowhere to Run – Gerri Hirshey

  62. Before the Deluge – Otto Friedrich

  63. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia

  64. The American Way of Death – Jessica Mitford

  65. Teenage – Jon Savage

  66. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh

  67. The Hidden Persuaders – Vance Packard

  68. The Trial of Henry Kissinger – Christopher Hitchens

  69. Maldoror – Comte de Lautréamont

  70. On the Road – Jack Kerouac

  71. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler

  72. Zanoni – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  73. Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual – Eliphas Lévi

  74. The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels

  75. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  76. Inferno – Dante Alighieri

  77. A Grave for a Dolphin – Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  78. The Insult – Rupert Thomson

  79. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

  80. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters

  81. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

  82. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald

  83. Lady into Fox – David Garnett

  84. Orlando – Virginia Woolf

  85. Seven Years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer

  86. The Spirit of Man – Robert Byron

  87. The Man Who Fell to Earth – Walter Tevis

  88. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

  89. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

  90. Hunger – Knut Hamsun

  91. A Night to Remember – Walter Lord

  92. The Outsider – Albert Camus

  93. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

  94. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

  95. A People's Tragedy – Orlando Figes

  96. The Story of Art – E.H. Gombrich

  97. Lives of the Great Composers – Harold C. Schonberg

  98. The Origin of the Species – Charles Darwin

  99. A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud

  100. Interviews With Francis Bacon – David Sylvester