Where's George? Readers discussion

Bowie’s top 100 books - the complete list

“Lend us a book we can read up alone”

It’s likely that most people reading this will have already seen either the original story on openbookstoronto.com last week, or a version of it referring back to that original list of “DAVID BOWIE'S TOP 100 BOOKS”.
There have also been numerous suggestions of a Bowie Book Club to tackle each of the 100 volumes. However, there was a problem with that particular openbookstoronto.com feature in that only 75% of the books were actually listed!
For anybody planning on completing this epic voyage of discovery, we’ve listed every single one of the 100 books here (in no particular order) for your reference.
You may have also noticed the two chaps in the middle of our montage. Well, it’s none other than David Bowie sporting a Clockwork Orange T-shirt (the book by Anthony Burgess is in the list) with his old chum, George Underwood.
George kindly supplied the previously unpublished photograph, which according to him was taken aboard Amtrak somewhere between New Orleans and Chicago on the first US tour in 1972.

And so, on to that COMPLETE list of David Bowie’s Top 100 (count 'em) Books.

Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
Room At The Top by John Braine
On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
City Of Night by John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Iliad by Homer
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
David Bomberg by Richard Cork
Blast by Wyndham Lewis
Passing by Nella Larson
Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodieby Muriel Spark
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Puckoon by Spike Milligan
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
McTeague by Frank Norris
Money by Martin Amis
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
Strange People by Frank Edwards
English Journey by J.B. Priestley
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
1984 by George Orwell
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
Beano (comic, ’50s)
Raw (comic, ’80s)
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillete
Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
The Street by Ann Petry
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.
A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
The Bridge by Hart Crane
All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Teenage by Jon Savage
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Viz (comic, early ’80s)
Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)
Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Maldodor by Comte de Lautréamont
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders by Lawrence Weschler
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Leopard by Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
The Insult by Rupert Thomson
In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

#BowieBookClub

I saw this listing awhile back and was very impressed. I like a few David Bowie songs, but not exactly a fan. When I started paying attention to him Vanilla Ice was trying to prove he didn't rip off Under Pressure. I remember when he married Iman and they seemed to be very happy together. I thought he aged well, and seemed to be an interesting person.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1984 by George Orwell
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
On The Road by Jack Kerouac

I will say none of these books that I've read from this list fall into my favorites listing. However many of what I haven't read are on my to-read list.

Would anyone be interested in doing a Bowie Book Club? We live in different places so we should be able to use our local libraries and not take from another Georger. We could plan to do a book a month? Or one every two months? What are your thoughts...

Nice to see he was varied in his subjects for reading; but I'm not really surprised. I've read at least 3 from his list:
City of Night by John Rechy
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The first two I rated 5 stars, Selby's work in particular I don't think anyone who's read it will ever forget. It is certainly NOT for everyone.

Gatsby is crap. Pure & simple. IMHO. As is As I Lay Dying by Faulkner which I started several years ago and don't think I finished the second chapter. I'm sure I must have read 1984. I did see the movie. The same goes for Camus' The Stranger.

I would consider reading some of these. At present none are on my "to read" list. I have enjoyed other works by Capote, Isherwood, Camus, Baldwin & Waugh

I've only read five of them (The Iliad, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Confederacy of Dunces, and The Stranger), and the first two were because they were assigned in school. I adored Confederacy of Dunces, and I think everyone should probably read 1984 and The Stranger at some point in their life.

But to be honest, if he actually read and loved The Iliad, I might look to another celebrity for book suggestions ;)

I had to read some of the Iliad in school but not the full thing. A Clockwork Orange is on my to read list. I haven't ever read anything else here.

Mamabee wrote: "I've only read five of them (The Iliad, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Confederacy of Dunces, and The Stranger), and the first two were because they were assigned in school. I adored Confederacy of Dunces..."

I've read The Odyssey a couple of times (one for a high school class and once for a college class) and have grown to love it and think of it often. I've yet to read the Iliad, and wondering if I would have a similar experience.