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The 15 Best David Bowie Books

By Corey Seymour

Today marks four years since David Bowie died—two days after his 69th birthday, when he also released his final, monumental album, Blackstar . And while there was no shortage of books about him during his lifetime, the market has virtually exploded since his passing. It’s no big secret why: The nature of Bowie’s fame, genius, influences, and influence is an all-encompassing thing that’s relevant to art and photography, fashion, theater and performance, and every shade and school of critical analysis. (There’s also no dearth of scandalous tell-alls and tabloid-y, fly-by-night biographies, which we’re ignoring here out of respect—a man who orchestrated his passing with the level of discretion and artistic triumph that Bowie did doesn’t deserve to be feasted on by scavengers.)

Here’s our pick of the best Bowie books for every person, occasion, and special interest—whether you’re merely interested in looking at some pictures or have committed yourself to a self-taught course in Advanced Bowie Studies.

All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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The Rise of David Bowie, 1972–1973 by Mick Rock

For pure visual splendor focusing on Bowie’s most well-known persona, Ziggy Stardust, nothing beats this volume of Bowie-blessed photographs from the artist’s official photographer and creative partner—with half of the photos in it published for the first time. For mesmerizing, fly-on-the-wall documentation of Bowie’s glitter-clad, glam-rock, his/her Ziggy, nothing beats this.

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On Bowie by Rob Sheffield

Still personal—but less weird than Brooker’s search for meaning—is Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield’s tribute, written at lightning speed in the immediate aftermath of Bowie’s passing. Like The Last Interview , it’s a slim volume that packs a punch: While Sheffield’s knowledge of Bowie runs deep, this is neither a showy book nor an academic one, and while his sense of loss is palpable, On Bowie isn’t maudlin or morose—it’s deeply informed, often hilarious, and properly celebratory.

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The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference by Paul Morley

Morley, a veteran British rock critic, pours blood, sweat, and tears on the pages in this freewheeling, deeply informed, and, yes, ragingly personal admixture of biography, memoir, loving tribute, cultural theory, and enlightened self-help book. Pretentious? At times, wildly—but that’s part of its immense charm. Morley—who conjured the theoretical framework and title of the David Bowie Is exhibitions—states early on that “everybody has their own Bowie,” and it’s his refusal to put constraints on either Bowie or his own rococo rendering of him that that makes these 496 pages so indispensable.

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Strange Fascination: Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley

While this biography was published a decade before Bowie died—look elsewhere for coverage of his death, his legacy, and his last two albums—this is likely the most insightful critical biography we have, deeply learned about not just the songs, but the albums, the tours, the personas, and the artistic vision. You’ll have to put a bit more into it than most of the rest of these books, but you’ll reap more from it as well.

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Bowie by O’Neill by Terry O’Neill

Where Mick Rock’s book trails off, photographer Terry O’Neill’s book picks up: Witness here the end of Ziggy—announced onstage suddenly by Bowie at the end of a 1973 performance in London, stunning his backing band—and the continued evolution of Bowie circa Young Americans and Diamond Dogs . What this volume lacks in monomania, it more than makes up for in more than 500 photos of immense breadth and depth.

‘There’s a Bit of Necessary Bloodletting That Happens With This Sort of Work’: Myriam Gurba on Her Probing New Book of Essays, Creep

David Bowie Is by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh

Almost inarguably the single best one-volume resource on Bowie: 256 pages of photos and fashion culled from Bowie’s personal archive, interspersed with critical essays (by everyone from Jon Savage to Camille Paglia) taking stock of Bowie’s singular place in 20th-century art, music, and performance. If you saw the museum exhibition for which this serves as a catalog, it’s a grace note; if you didn’t, it’s the next best thing to having been there.

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David Bowie: The Oral History by Dylan Jones

If you’re looking for a deeply sourced, authoritative, and occasionally gossipy account of Bowie’s life—from his childhood in London’s suburbs to worldwide fame and artistic triumph—this oral biography from the editor of British GQ can’t be beat. Jones interviewed more than 180 of those closest to Bowie, and while the supernova of the artist’s sound and vision come through loud and clear, it’s equally clear that this didn’t come without tears, toil, trouble, and loss.

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Where’s Bowie? Search For David Bowie in Berlin, Studio 54, Outer Space, and More by Kev Gahan

Had enough of insightful critical biographies? This joyous illustrated book is styled as if it’s for kids—but it’s equally, if not more so, beloved among Bowie-loving grown-ups. (I bought it with the flimsy hopes of hoodwinking my eight-year-old daughter into falling in love with Bowie—three days later she was dropping sage references to Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs into her conversation, and now wears Ziggy-style lightning-bolt earrings. Mission accomplished!) Modeled on the Where’s Waldo? concept, Where’s Bowie? presents shockingly on-point spread after spread of Bowie-centric milieu and asks you to find the Bowies—from the Thin White Duke standing outside Berlin’s Hansa studio to Ziggy Stardust lost in the cosmos—hidden within.

In Memoriam: David Bowie's Top 100 Favorite Books

David Bowie

David Bowie performs at Tweeter Center outside Chicago in Tinley Park,IL, USA on August 8, 2002. Photo by Adam Bielawski

Though one of his songs is titled " I Can't Read ", David Bowie was actually quite the voracious reader. In 2013, he posted a list of his top 100 favorite reads on his Facebook page and we're glad he did—Bowie's list of favorites is diverse and eclectic, ranging from poetry to comics to the kind of trippy reads you'd expect Ziggy Stardust to dig. In memory of one of the world's most iconic artists, put on some David Bowie tunes and crack the spine of one of the books that helped shape the legendary musician.

David Bowie's Top 100 Reads:

  • 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 Brodie by 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
  • Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
  • On The Road by Jack Kerouac
  • Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
  • Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
  • Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine 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

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David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

in Books , Music | October 1st, 2013 14 Comments

david bowie top 50 books

Image by Avro, via Wikimedia Commons

“David Bowie Is,” the extensive retrospective exhibit of the artist and his fabulous costumes, hit Toronto last Friday (see our post from earlier today ), and as many people have reported, in addition to those costumes—and photos, instruments, set designs, lyric sheets, etc.—the show includes a list of Bowie’s favorite books. Described as a “voracious reader” by curator Geoffrey Marsh, Bowie’s top 100 book list spans decades, from Richard Wright’s raw 1945 memoir Black Boy to Susan Jacoby’s 2008 analysis of U.S. anti-intellectualism in The Age of American Unreason .

Bowie’s always had a complicated relationship with the U.S. , but his list shows a lot of love to American writers, from the aforementioned to Truman Capote, Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Diaz, Jack Kerouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fellow Brits George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishima and Bulgakov.  You can read the full list below or over at Open Book Toronto , who urges you to “grab one of these titles and settle in to read — and just think, somewhere, at some point, David Bowie (or, to be more accurate, the man behind David Bowie, David Jones) was doing the exact same thing.” If that sort of thing inspires you to pick up a good book, go for it. You could also peruse the list, then puzzle over the literate Bowie’s lyrics to “I Can’t Read.” You can also explore a new related book– Bowie’s Bookshelf :   The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life .

  • 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 Brodie  by 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 Gillette
  • 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
  • Maldoror  by Comte de Lautréamont
  • On The Road  by Jack Kerouac
  • Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder  by Lawrence Weschler
  • Zanoni  by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
  • Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual  by Eliphas Lévi
  • The Gnostic Gospels  by Elaine Pagels
  • The Leopard  by Giuseppe 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

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site . It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal , Patreon , and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Related Content:

Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World

Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

David Bowie Releases Vintage Videos of His Greatest Hits from the 1970s and 1980s

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Experience of Inventing the Character Ziggy Stardust (1977)

Josh Jones  is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (14) |

david bowie top 50 books

Related posts:

Comments (14), 14 comments so far.

epic reading list, will check some new reads from!

Did you notice this “top 100” list only has 75 books on it? :-)

So you read DB’s news post ;)nnhttp://www.davidbowie.com/news/bowie-s-top-100-books-complete-list-52061

Because, 100 catches your eye.

It’s a copy-paste error, missing the last 25. Follow the link tonhttp://www.openbooktoronto.com/news/special_feature_how_read_bowiento see the full list.

Thats not the most shocking thing, after all the drugs, I’m shocked he reads…that feat takes concentration…lol

Shteperanik errr

http://bowiesattva.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/whats-on-bowies-bookshelves/nnI wrote about this in March 2012.

i love it nghe thuat duong pho

Is this the “top 100 (75)” books recommended by D.B., or a hundred books selected by exihibition curators Marsh and Victoria Broackes “from Bowie’s personal archive of over 70,000 [items]”? The source is very vague on the subject.

No books from before the 20th century…

I feel like “Lolita” has been influential on a lot of musicians. Maybe this is because the amazing manipulation of language and the musicality of the writing. I know that Nick Cave has also cited Lolita as one of his favorite books.

Thanks for posting the list of Bowie’s books! Many here I want to read.

How about the Iliad?

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IMAGES

  1. David Bowie, V&A BOWIE iS, the book in NE16 Gateshead for £28.00 for

    david bowie top 50 books

  2. Rise of David Bowie 1972-1973 HC (2020 Taschen) comic books

    david bowie top 50 books

  3. Vintage Bowie Books: Stage Anthology; Rare '80s Bowie Songbook w

    david bowie top 50 books

  4. BOWIE

    david bowie top 50 books

  5. TIME unveils David Bowie tribute book

    david bowie top 50 books

  6. David Bowie Pictorial Edition Personalised Newspaper Book https

    david bowie top 50 books

COMMENTS

  1. Bowie’s top 100 books

    Tuesday 10.01.13 Newer “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

  2. The 15 Best David Bowie Books

    Bowie selects Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick, and Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey, as well as Charlie Gillett's...

  3. David Bowie

    The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillett, 1970. The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf, 1968. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn, 1968. The Master ...

  4. In Memoriam: David Bowie's Top 100 Favorite Books

    In 2013, he posted a list of his top 100 favorite reads on his Facebook page and we're glad he did—Bowie's list of favorites is diverse and eclectic, ranging from poetry to comics to the kind of trippy reads you'd expect Ziggy Stardust to dig.

  5. David Bowie's Top 100 Books

    Described as a “voracious reader” by curator Geoffrey Marsh, Bowie’s top 100 book list spans decades, from Richard Wright’s raw 1945 memoir Black Boy to Susan Jacoby’s 2008 analysis of U.S. anti-intellectualism in The Age of American Unreason.