David Bowie: his 100 favourite books (three of them Italian)

David Bowie always pursued the idea of total art, in which music was just one piece of a much larger mosaic that also took in cinema, visual art, literature, theatre and more. And naturally, the English artist was also an omnivorous reader, moving between fiction, non-fiction, politics and cultural history with the same ease with which he moved through musical genres.

His top 100 favourite books, which he himself posted on Facebook in October 2013, includes "Mystery Train" by Greil Marcus, a cornerstone of rock criticism often cited as one of the most incisive analyses of American music ever written. Alongside the non-fiction, there's a strong presence of late-20th-century fiction: "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, with its anatomy of media noise and contemporary paranoia; "Between The Sheets" by Ian McEwan; "1984" by George Orwell; "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac.

Italy is not left out. Bowie's list in fact includes Dante Alighieri's "Inferno", Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's "Il Gattopardo" ("The Leopard"), and Alberto Denti di Pirajno's "Una tomba per un delfino" ("A Grave for a Dolphin"). This last title, written by the former Italian colonial governor in Libya, is said to have played a specific role in inspiring one of the Thin White Duke's most celebrated songs, "Heroes". The book tells the story of a love affair between a young Somali woman and an Italian soldier, a tale Bowie described as "magical and beautiful", one that echoes the theme of stubborn love within a political and symbolic space marked by conflict.

So here is the list of David Bowie's 100 favourite books

• The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
• Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 by Jon Savage
• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
• Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
• A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924 by Orlando Figes
• The Insult by Rupert Thomson
• Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
• The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
• Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard, Sylvestre Bonnard
• After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History by Arthur C. Danto
• Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
• David Bomberg by Richard Cork
• Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
• The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
• Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
• Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
• Money by Martin Amis
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
• The Life and Times of Little Richard by Charles White
• A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• The Devil's Mode by Anthony Burgess
• Raw (graphic novel magazine)
• Viz (magazine)
• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
• Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
• In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan
• The Paris Review. Interviews
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
• Tales of Beatnik Glory by Ed Sanders
• Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music by Greil Marcus
• Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara
• Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich
• Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner
• Octobriana and the Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
• The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll by Charlie Gillett
• The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf
• Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg
• Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• City of Night by John Rechy
• Herzog by Saul Bellow
• Puckoon by Spike Milligan
• The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
• The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima
• The Fire Next Time. Two Letters by James Baldwin
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Inside the Whale by George Orwell
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Private Eye, British satirical magazine
• On Having No Head. Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas Harding
• Silence by John Cage
• Strange People by Frank Edwards
• The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
• All The Emperor's Horses by David Kidd
• Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
• Room at the Top by John Braine
• A Grave for a Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Street by Ann Petry
• Black Boy by Richard Wright
• The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• Beano (comic)
• The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
• Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
• English Journey by J.B. Priestley
• Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman
• The Bridge by Hart Crane
• Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
• Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
• Passing by Nella Larsen
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
• BLAST by Wyndham Lewis
• McTeague by Frank Norris
• The History of Magic and Its Rite and Ritual with a Clear and Precise Exposition of Its Procedure, Its Rites and Its Mysteries by Eliphas Lévi
• Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• Inferno, from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• Iliad by Homer

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