Date
Tue September 6, 2011
2011 Toronto Book Award Shortlist Announced!
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Special Feature: How to Read Like Bowie - David Bowie's Top 100 Books
Submitted by Grace on September 26, 2013 - 11:36am
David Bowie Is, the newest exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is an essential destination for fans of music, fashion and pop culture. But book lovers should pay attention too; the curators of the exhibit, who had to select a mere 300 items from Bowie's personal archive of over 70,000, felt it was important to include many books that have affected the cultural chameleon. Curator Geoffrey Marsh describes Bowie as "a voracious reader" who is reputed to read as much as "a book a day". Marsh went on to speak about Bowie's interest in the life of the mind and its power to transcend the rigid class barriers of postwar England, the era where Bowie honed the early versions of his musical and cultural persona. Best of all, curators Marsh and Victoria Broackes have released a list of Bowie's favourite reads. So if you've ever wanted to read like one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century (and still going strong in the 21st!), check out this list of excellent books. The list shows an amazing depth and breadth of interest, taste and genre from the icon, who has himself been the subject of more than 60 books. There was never any doubt that Bowie is a genius, but if there had been, this list should more than quiet any critics. So 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. And one last fun Bowie fact? The curators had to make custom mannequins for Bowie's costumes from recorded measurements, due to Bowie's 26.5 inch waist. David Bowie Is runs at the AGO from September 25-November 27, 2013. The exhibit originated in a record-breaking run at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. David Bowie's Top 100 Must Read Books:The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, 2008 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007 The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard, 2007 Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage, 2007 Fingersmith, Sarah Waters, 2002 The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens, 2001 Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler, 1997 A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes, 1997 The Insult, Rupert Thomson, 1996 Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon, 1995 The Bird Artist, Howard Norman, 1994 Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard, 1993 Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto, 1992 Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, 1990 David Bomberg, Richard Cork, 1988 Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick, 1986 The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1986 Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd, 1985 Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey, 1984 Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter, 1984 Money, Martin Amis, 1984 White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1984 Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, 1984 The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984 A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980 Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1980 Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1980 Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess, 1980 Raw (a ‘graphix magazine’) 1980-91 Viz (magazine) 1979 – The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, 1979 Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz, 1978 In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan, 1978 Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1977 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976 Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders, 1975 Mystery Train, Greil Marcus, 1975 Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara, 1974 Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich, 1972 In Bluebeard’s Castle : Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner, 1971 Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky, 1971 The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillete, 1970 The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf, 1968 Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn, 1968 The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967 Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg, 1967 Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. , 1966 In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965 City of Night, John Rechy, 1965 Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964 Puckoon, Spike Milligan, 1963 The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford, 1963 The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima, 1963 The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, 1963 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962 Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell, 1962 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, 1961 Private Eye (magazine) 1961 – On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding, 1961 Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage, 1961 Strange People, Frank Edwards, 1961 The Divided Self, R. D. Laing, 1960 All The Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd,1960 Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse, 1959 The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, 1958 On The Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957 The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, 1957 Room at the Top, John Braine, 1957 A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, 1956 The Outsider, Colin Wilson, 1956 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955 Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1948 The Street, Ann Petry, 1946 Black Boy, Richard Wright, 1945 The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker, 1944 The Outsider, Albert Camus, 1942 The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 1939 The Beano, (comic) 1938 – The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell, 1937 Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood, 1935 English Journey, J.B. Priestley, 1934 Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman, 1932 The Bridge, Hart Crane, 1930 Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh, 1930 As I lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930 The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos, 1930 Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, 1929 Passing, Nella Larsen, 1929 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence, 1928 The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, 1922 BLAST, ed. Wyndham Lewis, 1914-15 McTeague, Frank Norris, 1899 Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, Eliphas Lévi, 1896 Les Chants de Maldoror, Lautréamont, 1869 Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856 Zanoni, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1842 Inferno, from the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, about 1308-1321 The Iliad, Homer, about 800 BC Related item from our archives |
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And a whopping 12 per cent by women? What ever happened to the feminist Bowie of Suffragette City?