David Bowie's Reading List
The 6 books that shaped David Bowie — musician & artist.
Constantly reinventing himself across music, art, and performance, Bowie was one of the most well-read artists in rock history.
Influential Books
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess(1962)
Bowie's invented slang and dystopian personas owe a deep debt to Burgess' ultraviolent, linguistically inventive novel.
The Outsider
Colin Wilson(1956)
Wilson's study of the artistic outsider shaped Bowie's self-image as an alien, a stranger, a man who fell to Earth.
Inferno
Dante Alighieri(1320)
Bowie listed Dante on his top 100 books. The Inferno's layered, theatrical vision appealed to his sense of spectacle.
The Trial
Franz Kafka(1925)
Kafka's paranoid, surreal worlds informed Bowie's Berlin-era work and his fascination with alienation.
Silence
John Cage(1961)
Cage's radical ideas about sound and silence influenced Bowie's experimental approach to music and art.
Junky
William S. Burroughs(1953)
Burroughs' cut-up technique and outlaw sensibility directly influenced Bowie's lyric-writing process.