Why David Bowie’s Top 100 Books List Had Only 75 Books

When a list of David Bowie’s “Top 100 Must Read Books” was released last week, many people were stunned that the prolific musician could find time to be such a prodigious reader. Outlets like The Guardian, The London Evening Standard, and Time reported Bowie’s eclectic and, frankly, rather excellent taste, and the A.V. Club announced that “David Bowie has once again shown that he's not only far richer, sexier, and more fabulous than you, but probably smarter.”

But glance at the list, and you might observe that Bowie only considers the modern classics to be must-reads: the lists go from the present day back to only 1945, with Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Where are the oldies and goodies, Ziggy Stardust?

Well, a simple arithmetic count of the “top 100” reveals that there were only 75 books!

This calls for a bit of an explanation. The list was announced to coincide with the successful David Bowie Is exhibit moving from the V&A Museum in London to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The show displays more than 300 items from Bowie’s personal archive of clothing, photographs, set designs, and stage costumes. Speaking to Open Book Toronto before the opening, Geoffrey Marsh, the exhibit’s co-curator, mentioned that Bowie was a “voracious reader” who’s known to read as much as a book a day. He released a list of Bowie’s top 100 books to Open Book Toronto, arranged in chronological order from the most recent to the oldest classics. But the site likely missed the last 25 titles when it posted the list, and other publications simply reposted the supposed “100” without counting first. It seems that Open Book Toronto has now included the entire entry. The complete list, posted on Bowie’s official Facebook page, is below, and includes previously-omitted tomes like The Iliad and Dante’s Inferno, as well as novels by Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh. (Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel fame, has done Bowie one better, and posted every book he’s read since 1968—all 1,181 of them.)

1. The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, 2008
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007
3. The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard, 2007
4. Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage, 2007
5. Fingersmith, Sarah Waters, 2002
6. The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens, 2001
7. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler, 1997
8. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes, 1997
9. The Insult, Rupert Thomson, 1996
10. Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon, 1995
11. The Bird Artist, Howard Norman, 1994
12. Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard, 1993
13. Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto, 1992
14. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, 1990
15. David Bomberg, Richard Cork, 1988
16. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick, 1986
17. The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1986
18. Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd, 1985
19. Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey, 1984
20. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter, 1984
21. Money, Martin Amis, 1984
22. White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1984
23. Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, 1984
24. The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984
25. A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1980
26. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980
27. Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1980
28. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1980
29. Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess, 1980
30. Raw (a “graphix magazine”) 1980–91
31. Viz (magazine) 1979-
32. The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, 1979
33. Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz, 1978
34. In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan, 1978
35. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1977
36. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976
37. Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders, 1975
38. Mystery Train, Greil Marcus, 1975
39. Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara, 1974
40. Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich, 1972
41. In Bluebeard’s Castle : Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner, 1971
42. Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky, 1971
43. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillete, 1970
44. The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf, 1968
45. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn, 1968
46. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967
47. Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg, 1967
48. Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr., 1966
49. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965
50. City of Night, John Rechy, 1965
51. Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964
52. Puckoon, Spike Milligan, 1963
53. The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford, 1963
54. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima, 1963
55. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, 1963
56. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962
57. Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell, 1962
58. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, 1961
59. Private Eye (magazine) 1961 –
60. On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding, 1961
61. Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage, 1961
62. Strange People, Frank Edwards, 1961
63. The Divided Self, R.D. Laing, 1960
64. All the Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd,1960
65. Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse, 1959
66. The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, 1958
67. On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957
68. The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, 1957
69. Room at the Top, John Braine, 1957
70. A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, 1956
71. The Outsider, Colin Wilson, 1956
72. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
73. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949
74. The Street, Ann Petry, 1946
75. Black Boy, Richard Wright, 1945
76. The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker, 1944
77. The Outsider, Albert Camus, 1942
78. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 1939
79. The Beano, (comic) 1938 –
80. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell, 1937
81. Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood, 1935
82. English Journey, J.B. Priestley, 1934
83. Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman, 1932
84. The Bridge, Hart Crane, 1930
85. Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh, 1930
86. As I lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930
87. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos, 1930
88. Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, 1929
89. Passing, Nella Larsen, 1929
90. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence, 1928
91. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
92. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, 1922
93. BLAST, ed. Wyndham Lewis, 1914–15
94. McTeague, Frank Norris, 1899
95. Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, Eliphas Lévi, 1896
96. Les Chants de Maldoror, Lautréamont, 1869
97. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856
98. Zanoni, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1842
99. Inferno, from the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, about 1308–21
100. The Iliad, Homer, about 800 B.C.