Bowie’s Books

by John O’Connell

Bloomsbury 288pp £16.99

The Week Bookshop £13.99

In 2013, David Bowie drew up a personal canon of the 100 books that had influenced him the most, for a V&A exhibition about his work. This “democratic” list ranged across periods and genres, said Bob Stanley in The Observer: it featured Viz and the Beano as well as Homer and Dante, Madame Bovary as well as Nik Cohn’s masterly celebration of the 60s pop scene,

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. In Bowie’s Books, the journalist John O’Connell investigates the list, by writing 100 short essays which give “snapshots” of Bowie’s life and his imaginative world. It’s a “handy, amusing” guide with a gratifyingly light touch.

Bowie “wasn’t just trying to sound kooky or clever” when he talked about his love of reading, said Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Times. In the 1970s, he travelled with a “mobile library in trunks” containing around 1,500 volumes. While recovering from a heart attack in 2004, he read prodigiously and “found time to write book reviews for the US chain store Barnes & Noble”. Literature found its way into his songs, such as the snippets of Nadsat (the slang from A

Clockwork Orange) in Suffragette City. Reading, it seems, enabled Bowie to do something he did in many other respects: “slip into someone else’s skin and try it on for size”. This “splendid book” is a paean to his “rummaging intelligence”. O’Connell can be a “spry and erudite guide”, said Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian, but at times he “reaches awfully far”. Would Bowie really have appreciated the “important role played by teeth” in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying because of his “troublesome dentistry”? Do ageing rock stars really “feel a bit like” the protagonist of Lampedusa’s The Leopard? While Bowie’s Books is lively and diverting, it is ultimately shackled by its somewhat artificial format.