Garys Books: Bowie’s Bookshelf

Sunday, June 11, 2023

Bowie’s Bookshelf

Book: Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Book That Changed David Bowie’s Life
Basic Information : Synopsis : Expectations : Thoughts : Evaluation : Book Group : New Words : Book References : Good Quotes : Table of Contents : References

Basic Information:

Author: John O’Connell

Edition: ePub on Libby from the Sacramento Library

Publisher: Gallery Books

ISBN: 9781982112547 (ISBN10: 1982112549)

Start Date: May 6. 2023

Read Date: Unfinished

320 pages

Genre: Biography, Book Group

Language Warning: Low

Rated Overall: 3 out of 5

Synopsis:

After an introduction, the author gives a brief review of 100 books which the author felt influenced Bowie that most. Each book has a chapter. There are a few paragraphs about the book. Then a few paragraphs talking about how it affected Bowie. The author then concludes each chapter with what piece reflects Bowie’s thinking about the book and what book would be a subsequent read to the current book.

Expectations:

Recommendation: Peter in Book Group

When: February 2023

Why do I want to read this book: Book group book.

What do I think I will get out of it? A better idea of who David Bowie was.

Thoughts:

I like the idea of tying in the books a person, particularly a musician, has read with how it affects the person’s work. In Bowie’s case, the more I read of the book and the books Bowie read, the less I liked who he was. I do not think the author meant it that way. The author seems like a true believer.

I did not finish the book. But I did read about ⅔’s of it. This was enough to give me an idea of what the author was trying to do. I have removed chapters in my notes where I did not find anything I felt was worthwhile.

Turns out that Bowie is not the only rock n' roller with an affinity for books. Charlie Watts was a book collector. It is unclear to me if it influenced his work as much as Bowie's books influenced him

Introduction

Bowie was a reader. When he had to swear off of cocaine for a production, he read. When traveling, he had a traveling bookcase-I thought I read it as a capacity of 1,500 books. How in the world did anybody lug that thing?

Bowie realized early on that he enjoyed teaching himself much more than he enjoyed being taught.

Jorge Luis Borges, laureate of libraries and labyrinths, to choose his hundred favorite books and write an introduction to each. Borges only made it to number 74. In a lot of ways, this book is patterned after what Borges was trying to do. Instead O’Connell is looking at Bowie’s library and figuring out what influenced Bowie and what songs where affected by a particular book. Interesting concept.

Like everything else about us, our adult cultural habits are shaped by our childhoods

Nat Tate hoax of 1998

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)

if you behave the way you want to be, you will become it: you become who you are by practicing. This points out the importance of having good models, ones which you want to emulate.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience,” he admitted in 2003 to The Word magazine. “My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it. This is Bowie speaking. There is a certain sense where this is right. But a larger sense where this is wrong. Take for instance a baby. When a baby cries and screams, no one is happy with the result. But as the baby grows the baby understands and matures to understand what channels are acceptable. In the same way, the artist may find something acceptable to themselves, but needs to find a way to communicate that to their audience.

I do not remember what this had to do with Lolita.

James Hall, Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1974)

At school, Steiner believed, children no longer studied the Bible or Greek and Roman literature as closely as they once had. Consequently, their ability to “read” art grounded in biblical or mythological imagery was limited. Interesting thought. How well do I understand references to classical works?

Richard Cork, David Bomberg (1988)

This is about the painter, not the singer/guitarist from Chicago. If there’s a moral to be drawn from Bomberg’s career, it’s that what one generation considers heretical, the next will hail as genius.

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writing (1968)

Maybe this is the one which I will use as my January book.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

[This] showed Bowie how different art forms could spring from the same source and complement one another.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958)

Spiritually and morally, everything in life is a compromise. So what happens if one does not compromise? Is it better to compromise and work towards a goal, than to be defeated in an uncompromising way?

Douglas Harding, On Having No Head (1961)

If we cannot see ourselves the way others see us, how do we know who we are? A good question.

Evaluation:

I liked the idea behind this book-what an artist reads affects their work, so let's see what they are reading. I realized through reading most of this book, that for the most part, I did not care for David Bowie’s philosophical outlook, at least through what these books showed of him. But I did appreciate that he was a voracious reader and wanted to discover new things through his readings.

Notes from my book group:

How many of these books have you read?

What is your impression of the list? What did it tell about David Bowie?

Do you think the author gave a fair sampling of Bowie’s tastes?

What is so magical about 100 top books? (Or ten or x books?) Why do lists have these types of numbers?

Do you know if your favorite artist is a reader? What the artist reads?

How do you want your life to change because you read this book?

Many of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.

Why the title of Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Book That Changed David Bowie’s Life?

Every person has a world view. What was Bowies? How did it affect the story?

In what context was religion talked about in this book?

Why do you think the author wrote this book?

What would you ask the author if you had a chance?

What “takeaways” did you have from this book?

New Words:
autodidacts-a self-taught person
Ludovico Technique- a fictional behavior modification treatment that features prominently in the book and film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.
pastiche-an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.
Book References:
Glam! by Barney Hoskyns
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Days In The Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971 by Jonathon Green
The Outsider by Camus
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot’s
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Morning of the Magicians by by Louis Pauwels
The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie
The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft
Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune
Metamorphosis by Kafka
The Long Firm by Jake Arnott
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art by James Hall
Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

Good Quotes:

First Line: In July 1975, stick-thin and in the grip of a severe cocaine addiction, David Bowie arrived in New Mexico to shoot The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Like everything else about us, our adult cultural habits are shaped by our childhoods. Chp Introduction
If we cannot see ourselves the way others see us, how do we know who we are? Chp On Having No Head

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Albert Camus, The Outsider (1942)
Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969)
Dante Alighieri, 'Inferno' (c.1308-20)
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)
Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems (2009)
Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Martin Amis, Money (1984)
Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956)
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)
Homer, The Iliad
James Hall, Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1974)
Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
Greil Marcus, Mystery Train (1975)
The Beano (founded 1938)
Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life (1978)
Richard Cork, David Bomberg (1988)
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-Definition of Culture (1971)
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1930)
Petr Sadecký, Octobriana and the Russian Underground (1971)
Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (1868)
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writing (1968)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 29. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985)
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1962)
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (1856)
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935)
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Edward Bulwer Lytton, Zanoni (1842)
George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940)
John Rechy, City of Night (1963)
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (1987)
Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)
Keith Waterhouse, Billy Liar (1959)
Alberto Denti di Piranho, A Grave for a Dolphin (1956)
RAW (1986-91)
Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (2008) 49. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
Viz (1979-present)
Ann Petry, The Street (1946)
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Douglas Harding, On Having No Head (1961)
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage (1990)
Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard (1984)
Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (1995)
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
John Braine, Room at the Top (1957)
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979)
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)
Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (1996)
Rupert Thomson, The Insult (1996)
Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music (1984)
Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (1992)
Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1940)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
Hubert Selby Jnr, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)
Frank Edwards, Strange People: Unusual Humans Who Have Baffled the World (1961)
Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Tadanoori Yokoo, Tadanoori Yokoo (1997)
Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (2007)
Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (1932)
Hart Crane, The Bridge (1930)
Eugenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind (1967)
Ed Sanders, Tales of Beatnik Glory (1975)
John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (1930)
Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom 1986)
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (1987)
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963)
Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (1972), Private Eye (1961-the present)
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (1959)
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957)
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)
Wyndham Lewis, Blast (1914)
Ian McEwan, In Between the Sheets (1978)
David Kidd, All the Emperor's Horses (1961)
Malcolm Cowley (ed.), Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1st Series (1958)
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T (1968)
Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (2002)
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (1980)
Howard Norman, The Bird Artist (1994)
Spike Milligan, Puckoon (1963)
Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock 'n' Roll (1970)
Lawrence Weschler, Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995).