
David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) - samclemens
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/david-bowies-list-of-top-100-books.html
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louhike
The complete list can be found here [http://www.davidbowie.com/news/bowie-s-
top-100-books-complet...](http://www.davidbowie.com/news/bowie-s-
top-100-books-complete-list-52061) as explained in the comments. It has the
100 books whereas there are only 75 of them here.

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brianzelip
Interesting to see him studying traditions he stepped into. Like African
American origins of rock, sort of starting from Richard Wright to soul and
rock histories. I thought J. R. R. Tolkien would have been in there.

Been listening to a lot of his stuff, focussing on the sort of literary thread
about his Berlin era that you can read about on his wikipedia page[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie#1976.E2.80.9379:_B...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie#1976.E2.80.9379:_Berlin_era)

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bshimmin
There are some corkers here. Wonderful to imagine Bowie reading _The Leopard_
(I wonder if he enjoyed the masterful Visconti film of it, too).

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auggierose
So he didn't seem to like Sci-Fi too much; only two standards (1984, Clockwork
Orange) among the top 100 as far as I can see.

~~~
ideonexus
It's a great reading list, but I was also surprised not to find Arthur C.
Clarke's "Childhood's End" in there. I had always assumed his song "Oh! You
Pretty Things" was about that book. While the book and the song share themes,
they are apparently independent. I did like this passage I found online about
the themes though [1]:

 _The resonance of “Oh! You Pretty Things” comes from how it uses these
Nietzschean SF trappings as a metaphor for how a generation regards its
successor with longing, fear and resentment (never more so than with the so-
called Greatest Generation and their children the Boomers), or, even closer to
home, how a parent can regard his or her children. Once you become a parent,
you lose precedence in your own life—your own needs and desires are shunted
aside, and you spend years as servant and guide to your replacement, who will
go on to have richer experiences and greater opportunities than you ever had
(that’s if you’re lucky). More bluntly, once you reproduce, your genetic
purpose is fulfilled and all that remains is age, redundancy and death._

[1] [https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/oh-you-pretty-
th...](https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/oh-you-pretty-things/)

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gPphX
by author:

Beano (comic, ’50s)

Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)

Raw (comic, ’80s)

Viz (comic, early ’80s)

Paris Review, The - Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by
Malcolm Cowley

Ackroyd, Peter - Hawksmoor

Alighieri, Dante - Inferno

Amis, Martin - Money

Baldwin, James - Fire Next Time, The

Barnes, Julian - Flaubert’s Parrot

Bellow, Saul - Herzog

Braine, John - Room At The Top

Broyard, Anatole - Kafka Was The Rage

Bulgakov, Mikhail - Master And Margarita, The

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward - Zanoni

Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange

Burgess, Anthony - Earthly Powers

Cage, John - Silence: Lectures And Writing

Camus, Albert - Stranger, The

Capote, Truman - In Cold Blood

Carter, Angela - Nights At The Circus

Chabon, Michael - Wonder Boys

Chatwin, Bruce - Songlines, The

Cohn, Nik - Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock

Cork, Richard - David Bomberg

Crane, Hart - Bridge, The

Danto, Arthur C. - Beyond The Brillo Box

DeLillo, Don - White Noise

Diaz, Junot - Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, The

Döblin, Alfred - Berlin Alexanderplatz

Dos Passos, John - 42nd Parallel, The

Edwards, Frank - Strange People

Elliot, T.S. - Waste Land, The

Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying

Figes, Orlando - A People’s Tragedy

Fitzgerald, F. Scott - Great Gatsby, The

Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary

Friedrich, Otto - Before The Deluge

Gillete, Charlie - Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll, The

Ginzburg, Eugenia - Journey Into The Whirlwind

Guralnick, Peter - Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream
Of Freedom

Hall, James A. - Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art

Harding, Douglass - On Having No Head

Hirshey, Gerri - Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music

Hitchens, Christopher - Trial Of Henry Kissinger, The

Homer - Iliad

Isherwood, Christopher - Mr. Norris Changes Trains

Jacoby, Susan - Age Of American Unreason, The

Jaynes, Julian - Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral
Mind, The

Kerouac, Jack - On The Road

Kidd, David - All The Emperor’s Horses

Koestler, Arthur - Darkness At Noon

Laing, R. D. - Divided Self, The

Di Lampedusa, Giusseppe - Leopard, The

Larson, Nella - Passing

Lautréamont, Comte de - Maldodor

Lawrence, D.H. - Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Lebowitz, Fran - Metropolitan Life

Lévi, Eliphas - Transcendental Magic, Its Doctine and Ritual

Lewis, Wyndham - Blast

Marcus, Greil - Mystery Train

McEwan, Ian - In Between The Sheets

Milligan, Spike - Puckoon

Mishima, Yukio - Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, The

Mitford, Jessica - American Way Of Death, The

Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita

Norman, Howard - Bird Artist, The

Norris, Frank - McTeague

O’Hara, Frank - Selected Poems

Orwell, George - 1984

Orwell, George - Inside The Whale And Other Essays

Packard, Vance - Hidden Persuaders, The

Pagels, Elaine - Gnostic Gospels, The

Paglia, Camille - Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily
Dickinson

Petry, Ann - Street, The

di Pirajno, Alberto Denti - A Grave For A Dolphin

Priestley, J.B. - English Journey

Rechy, John - City Of Night

Sadecky, Peter - Octobriana And The Russian Underground

Saunders, Ed - Tales Of Beatnik Glory

Savage, Jon - Teenage

Selby, Hubert Jr. - Last Exit To Brooklyn

Spark, Muriel - Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, The

Steiner, George - In Bluebeard’s Castle

Stoppard, Tom - Coast Of Utopia, The

Sylvester, David - Interviews With Francis Bacon

Thomson, Rupert - Insult, The

Thurman, Wallace - Infants Of The Spring

Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy Of Dunces

Waterhouse, Keith - Billy Liar

Waters, Sarah - Fingersmith

Waugh, Evelyn - Vile Bodies

Weschler, Lawrence - Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders

West, Nathanael - Day Of The Locust, The

White, Charles - Life And Times Of Little Richard, The

Wilson, Colin - Outsider, The

Wolf, Christa - Quest For Christa T, The

Wright, Richard - Black Boy

Yokoo, Tadanori - Tadanori Yokoo

Zinn, Howard - A People’s History Of The United States

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dschiptsov
No Sartre or Camous? No Hundred Years of Solitude? No Pamuk? No Henry Miller?
No Nabokov's "Dar", no "Ishmael", no " Stepenwolf", no "Dorian Gray", no
"Brave New World"? No "mockingbird", no "Atlas", no motorcycle maintenance? No
dr.Zhivago? What kind of a list it is?

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replicant2020
No Thomas Pynchon? No David Foster Wallace? No Heidegger? No Kundera? No
Kerouac?

Oh what a terrible person, to have not read everything in an arbitrary list of
authors and books that I feel like name dropping.

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laxatives
Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I'm reading
Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There's some amazing chapters,
but I can't help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel
that isn't written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by
someone who wants to write what sounds "cool". Its almost like emotional
pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much
depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest
research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as
many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible,
without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of
obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex/concave mirrors
and "it just works".

~~~
replicant2020
I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a
chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not
every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some
chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for
the reader to get the message.

One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of
addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't
really say how true this is for lack of experience.

The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed to combine
elements of comedy and tragedy, not just in alternating parts but often within
the same body of text. Some chapters are so tragic as to be darkly comic, in
particular some of the descriptions on the backgrounds of members of AA.

Plus, don't forget that Infinite Jest isn't his only work :). I haven't read
The Pale King but have heard that it does away with a lot of the verbosity of
I.J. and feels a lot more focused, and there are other works of fiction and
also his more journalistic essay-ish type pieces, for example those from A
Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the collection, though the titular
piece in particular I found very funny).

I'd also highly recommend Oblivion: Stories, even if Infinite Jest didn't gel
with you, as I think it's as emotionally powerful but a lot more focused than
Infinite Jest. It doesn't attempt the comedy/tragedy mix that I.J. seems to
try for, and as a result the stories are shorter but just as affective.

~~~
laxatives
The addiction and depression thing really bothered me too. There was so much
detail on those topics I figured he must have gone through a lot of it himself
before I read up on his life. Yet, there's so much that's just patently false.
He goes on and on about the depravity of marijuana addiction and has a
character try to commit suicide from overdosing on 4-5 hits. Ridiculous. I
guess this is some parallel world where things aren't exactly as they are in
real life, but that just seems like an easy out.

I'm barely half way through the book, but some of the chapters written in
ebonics are atrocious. He starts out the chapter totally over the top and it
seems like he forgets he was writing in ebonics by the end. There's just so
many places it feels like his editor just said "fuck it".

There are definitely a few sections that I get lost in, but they are so few
are far between. I could probably count them on one hand. More than half the
book I am pretty neutral about and then there is a significant portion I read
and just look up and think, this author is full of shit. I guess its just his
style, but when he was describing "eschaton", he has no idea how the game
would actually be played. I guess the way it ends up kind of describes that
the depths of the game were really beyond those playing it, but thats kind of
pattern throughout the book. He has this grand idea and exposition, but it
just sort of devolves out of laziness, or style, or I don't know what. I'm
kind of terrified I'm going to reach the end of the book and he's going to
devolve again and introduce some stupid non-sequiter to wrap things up
cleanly, without any introduction or background.

