David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) | Hacker News Reader

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013)

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62 pointssamclemens40 comments

The complete list can be found here http://www.davidbowie.com/news/bowie-s-top-100-books-complet... as explained in the comments. It has the 100 books whereas there are only 75 of them here.

Interesting to see him studying traditions he stepped into. Like African American origins of rock, sort of starting from Richard Wright to soul and rock histories. I thought J. R. R. Tolkien would have been in there.

Been listening to a lot of his stuff, focussing on the sort of literary thread about his Berlin era that you can read about on his wikipedia page[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie#1976.E2.80.9379:_B...

There are some corkers here. Wonderful to imagine Bowie reading The Leopard (I wonder if he enjoyed the masterful Visconti film of it, too).

So he didn't seem to like Sci-Fi too much; only two standards (1984, Clockwork Orange) among the top 100 as far as I can see.

Well, he starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth, so does that make up for it?

It's a great reading list, but I was also surprised not to find Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" in there. I had always assumed his song "Oh! You Pretty Things" was about that book. While the book and the song share themes, they are apparently independent. I did like this passage I found online about the themes though [1]:

The resonance of “Oh! You Pretty Things” comes from how it uses these Nietzschean SF trappings as a metaphor for how a generation regards its successor with longing, fear and resentment (never more so than with the so-called Greatest Generation and their children the Boomers), or, even closer to home, how a parent can regard his or her children. Once you become a parent, you lose precedence in your own life—your own needs and desires are shunted aside, and you spend years as servant and guide to your replacement, who will go on to have richer experiences and greater opportunities than you ever had (that’s if you’re lucky). More bluntly, once you reproduce, your genetic purpose is fulfilled and all that remains is age, redundancy and death.

[1] https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/oh-you-pretty-th...

by author:

Beano (comic, ’50s)

Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)

Raw (comic, ’80s)

Viz (comic, early ’80s)

Paris Review, The - Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley

Ackroyd, Peter - Hawksmoor

Alighieri, Dante - Inferno

Amis, Martin - Money

Baldwin, James - Fire Next Time, The

Barnes, Julian - Flaubert’s Parrot

Bellow, Saul - Herzog

Braine, John - Room At The Top

Broyard, Anatole - Kafka Was The Rage

Bulgakov, Mikhail - Master And Margarita, The

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward - Zanoni

Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange

Burgess, Anthony - Earthly Powers

Cage, John - Silence: Lectures And Writing

Camus, Albert - Stranger, The

Capote, Truman - In Cold Blood

Carter, Angela - Nights At The Circus

Chabon, Michael - Wonder Boys

Chatwin, Bruce - Songlines, The

Cohn, Nik - Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock

Cork, Richard - David Bomberg

Crane, Hart - Bridge, The

Danto, Arthur C. - Beyond The Brillo Box

DeLillo, Don - White Noise

Diaz, Junot - Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, The

Döblin, Alfred - Berlin Alexanderplatz

Dos Passos, John - 42nd Parallel, The

Edwards, Frank - Strange People

Elliot, T.S. - Waste Land, The

Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying

Figes, Orlando - A People’s Tragedy

Fitzgerald, F. Scott - Great Gatsby, The

Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary

Friedrich, Otto - Before The Deluge

Gillete, Charlie - Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll, The

Ginzburg, Eugenia - Journey Into The Whirlwind

Guralnick, Peter - Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom

Hall, James A. - Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art

Harding, Douglass - On Having No Head

Hirshey, Gerri - Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music

Hitchens, Christopher - Trial Of Henry Kissinger, The

Homer - Iliad

Isherwood, Christopher - Mr. Norris Changes Trains

Jacoby, Susan - Age Of American Unreason, The

Jaynes, Julian - Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, The

Kerouac, Jack - On The Road

Kidd, David - All The Emperor’s Horses

Koestler, Arthur - Darkness At Noon

Laing, R. D. - Divided Self, The

Di Lampedusa, Giusseppe - Leopard, The

Larson, Nella - Passing

Lautréamont, Comte de - Maldodor

Lawrence, D.H. - Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Lebowitz, Fran - Metropolitan Life

Lévi, Eliphas - Transcendental Magic, Its Doctine and Ritual

Lewis, Wyndham - Blast

Marcus, Greil - Mystery Train

McEwan, Ian - In Between The Sheets

Milligan, Spike - Puckoon

Mishima, Yukio - Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, The

Mitford, Jessica - American Way Of Death, The

Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita

Norman, Howard - Bird Artist, The

Norris, Frank - McTeague

O’Hara, Frank - Selected Poems

Orwell, George - 1984

Orwell, George - Inside The Whale And Other Essays

Packard, Vance - Hidden Persuaders, The

Pagels, Elaine - Gnostic Gospels, The

Paglia, Camille - Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson

Petry, Ann - Street, The

di Pirajno, Alberto Denti - A Grave For A Dolphin

Priestley, J.B. - English Journey

Rechy, John - City Of Night

Sadecky, Peter - Octobriana And The Russian Underground

Saunders, Ed - Tales Of Beatnik Glory

Savage, Jon - Teenage

Selby, Hubert Jr. - Last Exit To Brooklyn

Spark, Muriel - Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, The

Steiner, George - In Bluebeard’s Castle

Stoppard, Tom - Coast Of Utopia, The

Sylvester, David - Interviews With Francis Bacon

Thomson, Rupert - Insult, The

Thurman, Wallace - Infants Of The Spring

Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy Of Dunces

Waterhouse, Keith - Billy Liar

Waters, Sarah - Fingersmith

Waugh, Evelyn - Vile Bodies

Weschler, Lawrence - Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders

West, Nathanael - Day Of The Locust, The

White, Charles - Life And Times Of Little Richard, The

Wilson, Colin - Outsider, The

Wolf, Christa - Quest For Christa T, The

Wright, Richard - Black Boy

Yokoo, Tadanori - Tadanori Yokoo

Zinn, Howard - A People’s History Of The United States

No Sartre or Camous? No Hundred Years of Solitude? No Pamuk? No Henry Miller? No Nabokov's "Dar", no "Ishmael", no " Stepenwolf", no "Dorian Gray", no "Brave New World"? No "mockingbird", no "Atlas", no motorcycle maintenance? No dr.Zhivago? What kind of a list it is?

No Thomas Pynchon? No David Foster Wallace? No Heidegger? No Kundera? No Kerouac?

Oh what a terrible person, to have not read everything in an arbitrary list of authors and books that I feel like name dropping.

"On the road" is there.

I forgot Philip K. Dick and Yukio Mishima!

Oh, sorry, because it is His list it must be exceptional.

His list is interesting because he is an interesting person. He is also a highly original and highly influential person. Trying to get-to-know what his influences are is a (probably flawed) but understandable exercise.

I think it would be fair to argue that he, himself, was an exceptional character. It's very human to want to try to understand exceptional people. Is that wrong of us?

Where did I argued against his personality? I just considered this particular list being rather poor and provided some suggestions.

Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I'm reading Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There's some amazing chapters, but I can't help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel that isn't written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by someone who wants to write what sounds "cool". Its almost like emotional pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible, without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex/concave mirrors and "it just works".

I think it's an incredibly challenging book, but also a masterpiece. It's really hard work to get through in places, and some chapters are much, much better than others. Some parts of it are astonishingly and gleefully excellent, some parts work less well (I was more interested in tennis than in Quebec separatism, to be honest).

For me, it bears comparison with Ulysses in that both are works of epic length and a singular uniqueness. Sometimes when I read a book I can conceive, even without being a writer myself, of how it came into being; with Infinite Jest I just can't even begin to imagine how that book appeared.

I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for the reader to get the message.

One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't really say how true this is for lack of experience.

The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed to combine elements of comedy and tragedy, not just in alternating parts but often within the same body of text. Some chapters are so tragic as to be darkly comic, in particular some of the descriptions on the backgrounds of members of AA.

Plus, don't forget that Infinite Jest isn't his only work :). I haven't read The Pale King but have heard that it does away with a lot of the verbosity of I.J. and feels a lot more focused, and there are other works of fiction and also his more journalistic essay-ish type pieces, for example those from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the collection, though the titular piece in particular I found very funny).

I'd also highly recommend Oblivion: Stories, even if Infinite Jest didn't gel with you, as I think it's as emotionally powerful but a lot more focused than Infinite Jest. It doesn't attempt the comedy/tragedy mix that I.J. seems to try for, and as a result the stories are shorter but just as affective.

The addiction and depression thing really bothered me too. There was so much detail on those topics I figured he must have gone through a lot of it himself before I read up on his life. Yet, there's so much that's just patently false. He goes on and on about the depravity of marijuana addiction and has a character try to commit suicide from overdosing on 4-5 hits. Ridiculous. I guess this is some parallel world where things aren't exactly as they are in real life, but that just seems like an easy out.

I'm barely half way through the book, but some of the chapters written in ebonics are atrocious. He starts out the chapter totally over the top and it seems like he forgets he was writing in ebonics by the end. There's just so many places it feels like his editor just said "fuck it".

There are definitely a few sections that I get lost in, but they are so few are far between. I could probably count them on one hand. More than half the book I am pretty neutral about and then there is a significant portion I read and just look up and think, this author is full of shit. I guess its just his style, but when he was describing "eschaton", he has no idea how the game would actually be played. I guess the way it ends up kind of describes that the depths of the game were really beyond those playing it, but thats kind of pattern throughout the book. He has this grand idea and exposition, but it just sort of devolves out of laziness, or style, or I don't know what. I'm kind of terrified I'm going to reach the end of the book and he's going to devolve again and introduce some stupid non-sequiter to wrap things up cleanly, without any introduction or background.

it's cool that you are brave enough to voice and form an opinion on literature at such a young age. that sort of confidence will be an asset in your future, especially in college discussion classes. but one word of caution, if you're going to bash works that are considered masterpieces by many literary experts, then you should make sure you can hold your own against them. otherwise, stick to praising the parts you like, and focus less on the parts you hate. know thyself.

It seems to me that among anyone willing to have a conversation about the Infinite Jest, the consensus seems to be that it is very flawed and highly overrated.

Clarity is the sister of talent, not verbosity. Even in the age of Java.)

It's self-explanatory -- it's just list of the books ann acclaimed intellectual and magnificent artist loved. It's not a reference book list for philosophy majors.

I haven't read a single book/author you list. Does that make me somehow a bad person, or what is your point?

Read some, the answer, probably, would emerge.

Have you read much Camous?

Not much. Plague, The Fall, and especially The First Man.

I think you were being gently mocked for your spelling there.

(Read L'Étranger, it's great!)

Anyone who hasn't read your list of obscure authors that make you feel special is an idiot!

> of obscure authors

You can't be serious.)

These authors aren't particularly famous outside of your Literature 101 class

"De gustibus non est disputandum."

"Diff'rent strokes, for diff'rent folks."

If you don't like Bowie's list, you can make your own.

I had enough of philosophers and internationally acclaimed authors in high school. Literature teachers have their own canon of books that must be read, and I hated having someone else's idea of an influential book forced down my throat. While it isn't quite as bad as "stop liking things I don't like," an unsolicited "you should like more of the things I like" is still irritating, when I'm not in the right mood for it.

It is not "you should like more of the things I like". These are not mere "modern classics" or "internationally acclaimed authors", most of the titles I have mentioned offhand are remarkable masterpieces, no worse than 1984, Lolita or On The Road which were on the list. And I forgot The Magic Mountain, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, Age of Reason, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, etc.

They may be masterworks, but that doesn't mean everyone will--or should--like them.

I find it more useful to organize influential works like trees rather than as lists. That way, you can find a branch that you like, and walk up and down its nodes.

For instance, if you like Twelve Monkeys, you could walk up the branch to Brazil, further up to _1984_, sidestep to cousin _Catch 22_, skip to uncle _The Trial_, and go up to _Crime and Punishment_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_.

Whereas if you like The Magnificent Seven, you might walk up the branch to The Seven Samurai, sidestep to Yojimbo, and go back down to A Fistful of Dollars.

When you put out lists of finite length, featuring only the brightest stars in the sky, you lose quite a lot of detail in your constellations.

Right on. I'd add that the value of having such a large and diverse canon is that each person finds their own branch or branches that eventually ramify down to tiny twigs unknown elsewhere on the tree, but that have immense personal beauty and significance. The value of canonical taxonomies in lit isn't that all the books are good, but that there's something in them somewhere for anyone. But not necessarily all of it for everyone.

The Idiot and Daemons are incomparably better that Crime and Punishment.

Now you see, how many worthy titles are curiously missing?)

There are more than 100 good books. Therefore, whenever anybody assembles a list of exactly 100, some must necessarily be left out. Also, each person can decide their own criteria for determining whether a book is good.

That is why I think it is more useful--and more polite--to discuss one's own favorites, rather than criticize another's set of favorites for its omissions.

And the primary utility of such an exercise is, in my opinion, to help other people discover works that may appeal to them. So the closer your set of favorites aligns with Bowie's, the more likely it is that you may enjoy those works on the list that you haven't yet read.

The HN guidelines ask you not to be gratuitously negative in comments. This is so gratuitously negative that it could be a parody.

If you'd like to list your favorite books, you should do so (somewhere else, though, since it would be off-topic here). But scorning someone else for not sharing your taste violates the spirit of this site, not to mention was guaranteed to lead the thread further into off-topic bickering.

Imagine that someone less holy would post a list of supposedly remarkable projects in CS without mentioning McCarthy's LISP, Kay's Smalltalk, Armstrong's Erlang, Stallman's Emacs, Cox's Plan9, git of Linus, etc. How would you react?

Like in this example, these books I have mentioned are not even a matter of opinion, they are such masterpieces, without which no list could be considered worth having.

You probably pissing up the wrong tree.

This isn't necessarily meant to be a list of remarkable books or masterpieces. It's just the list of one person's favorite 100.

They're utterly a matter of opinion. Please stop, and please don't be uncivil on Hacker News.

Nope. Certain aesthetics are related to that set of hardwired emotions (as in Minsky's Emotion Machine) we call the Human Nature. The notions of youth, health, beauty, honesty, clarity, straightforwardness, etc.

In software engineering there are other aesthetics. The famous maxim "for people to read and accidentally for machine to execute" sums up almost everything. Clarify, conciseness, readability, modularity, compossibility, loose coupling, design around protocols and interfaces - every decent programming guidelines, such as Google's Common LISP or Python style guides will show you a set of variables to optimize. Norvig's LISP style guide is also nice read.

Like it is in arts, each genre has its own aesthetics, and there are universal ones, such as non verbosity, clarify, following standard, familiar idioms. So, some artifacts are objectively better (according to certain human-universal aesthetics or those derived from laws of complex systems of Nature) than others no matter what conditioning you have in your head. Haskell's syntax, for example, is aesthetically better than Java's no matter what opinion you, or even majority hold.

Do you have sheriff's bage or something?

Yes, I'm the lead moderator of HN. Sorry that wasn't clear.

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