posted on 02 Jan 2020

Bowie’s Bookshelf: the hundred books that changed David Bowie’s life by John O’Connell

Since David Bowie’s untimely death at the age of just 69 in 2016, there have been numerous articles and musings about his love of books and reading. To a large extent these have been prompted by the actions of the singer himself when, in 2013, he published a list of his 100 favourite books. For this book, John O’Connell has used this list to try and plot how these favourites influenced Bowie’s development as an artist, musician and cultural pop icon.

If, like me, the first thing you do when you pick up the book is to take a quick trip down the index list of the books that have been included, you’ll almost certainly be struck by the randomness of it – these were books Bowie loved but they weren’t chosen to represent a manifesto or intellectual philosophy. As a result, plotting these books into Bowie’s oeuvre does inevitably have a slightly artificial and manipulated feel to it – it’s as if O'Connell feels duty bound to bend all them to fit some portion of the singer’s career however tenuously.

Given that this is, for me, a significant weakness in the overall structure of the book, I don’t think it necessarily makes the  contents any less entertaining. Each of the hundred books prompts a short one or two page analysis and some speculation about how it fits into Bowie’s presumed intellectual landscape and inevitably some of these are stronger and more entertaining than others.

The truth of the matter was that Bowie was a faddish reader, often drawn to esoteric and cultish books on the fringes of what might be best described as late 60s counter-cultural fodder – alternative religions and magic, obscure Germanic philosophy that flirts with fascism, outsider literature. This is oddly blended with classics of the late 19th and 20th century, music journalism (as I guess you might expect) and art. O’Connell does his best to see a shape of sorts in all of this but I’m really rather sceptical that it makes sense to draw a direct line between anyone’s reading history and their artistic output. Clearly the one influences the other but I’m also sure that it’s a complex relationship that would resist such definitive links. I couldn’t help but feel that Bowie as reader and Bowie as artist are in some way reduced by this attempt to weave a web of identifiable inspirations between books and songs.

After each short book review, O’Connell makes a suggestion for further reading and a song from the Bowie repertoire to accompany it and whilst this is fun in its own way, it all adds to the self-conscious artifice of the whole endeavour.

In truth, I found the book’s introduction by some distance the best part of the whole. Here O’Connell writes about Bowie and his reading habits unencumbered by the superstructure of the dreaded list of a hundred and what he has to say is all the better for that. Here we encounter the different life phases of Bowie’s career and we can see how his descent into the drug-wasted wraith-like figure that almost sunk his career and reputation is accompanied by a sort of manic reading habit that fed his somewhat bizarre world view during that time. However, perhaps the most entertaining and delightful picture of Bowie the reader comes right at the very beginning of the introduction:

“As a Sunday Times location report explained, ‘Bowie hates aircraft so he mostly travels across the States by train, carrying his mobile bibliotheque in special trunks which open out with all his books neatly displayed on shelves..’”

That Bowie was bookish and a varied and avid reader all his life is a matter of record and it would be churlish and myopic to suggest that his reading didn’t have an influence on his artistic output – that is, after all, what reading is all about. What I’m less happy to do is to accept that its possible in most cases to link the reading of a specific book to the creation of another piece of art as if there is some kind of symbiotic relationship between the two. It does happen on the rare occasion but when it does it is nearly always signalled by the artist and if you need a third party to point it out, you’re probably missing something.

 

Terry Potter

January 2020