Skip to content
  1. Free Shipping for Orders Over $150 in USA (apparel not included)

 253-627-4278

 info@hivoltagerecords.com

New Book Bowie's Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie's Life 9781982112547
Regular price $18.00

Shipping calculated at checkout

Out of stock

Please note: While we do our best to insure that cover images are up to date, if you are looking for a specific cover, please send us an email to verify before purchasing.

Bowie's Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie's Life

Author: O'Connell, John

Publication Date: 11/12/2019

Format: Hardcover

“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.” ―David Bowie

Three years before David Bowie died, he shared a list of 100 books that changed his life. His choices span fiction and nonfiction, literary and irreverent, and include timeless classics alongside eyebrow-raising obscurities.

In 100 short essays, music journalist John O’Connell studies each book on Bowie’s list and contextualizes it in the artist’s life and work. How did the power imbued in a single suit of armor in The Iliad impact a man who loved costumes, shifting identity, and the siren song of the alter-ego? How did The Gnostic Gospels inform Bowie’s own hazy personal cosmology? How did the poems of T.S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara, the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Anthony Burgess, the comics of The Beano and The Viz, and the groundbreaking politics of James Baldwin influence Bowie’s lyrics, his sound, his artistic outlook? How did the 100 books on this list influence one of the most influential artists of a generation?

Heartfelt, analytical, and totally original, Bowie’s Bookshelf is one part epic reading guide and one part biography of a music legend.

x