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A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR'Brilliant. The unwritten Bowie book that needed writing'CAITLIN MORAN'Splendid. Provides plenty of evidence of Bowie's restless, rummaging intelligence, and his pleasure in the fact that books allow readers to slip into someone else's skin and try it on for size'THE TIMES'A witty and enlightening analysis of Bowie's 100 essential books... A handy, amusing, light-touch precis'OBSERVER'What is your idea of perfect happiness?''Reading.''What is the quality you most like in a man?''The ability to return books.'Three years before he died, David Bowie made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life – a list that formed something akin to an autobiography. From Madame Bovary to A Clockwork Orange, the Iliad to the Beano, these were the publications that had fuelled his creativity and shaped who he was. In Bowie's Books, John O'Connell explores this list in the form of one hundred short essays, each offering a perspective on the man, performer and creator that is Bowie, his work as an artist and the era that he lived in.Brilliantly illustrated throughout and the perfect gift for Bowie fans and book lovers, Bowie's Books is much more than a list of books you should read in your lifetime: it is a unique insight into one of the greatest minds of our times, and an indispensable part of the legacy that Bowie left behind.

Named one of Entertainment Weekly's 12 biggest music memoirs this fall. “An artful and wildly enthralling path for Bowie fans in particular and book lovers in general.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “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.