In Memoriam: David Bowie’s Top 100 Favorite Books

Click here to read at The New York Public Library blog.

I love looking at people’s reading recommendation lists. It’s fun to find out a respected reader’s tastes intersect with my own, but I also learn a lot by noting the books I’ve never heard of.

Some of my and David Bowie’s shared “book hits”: Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary, Black Boy, The Waste Land, 1984, and, a surprise to me, Nella Larsen’s Passing, the story of an African-American woman of Danish descent who’s forced to confront the implications of her mixed-race and bicultural identity.

But I’m completely unfamiliar with some of Bowie’s choices: Flaubert’s Parrot, Before the Deluge, Zanoni, Strange People, and The Street, to name only a few. It’s ok. My reading list just got longer.