A great deal has been written this week about the late rock star David Bowie. This talented artist touched so many lives with his music, his art, and his life, it’s almost hard to imagine he is no longer among the living here on earth. His dramatic transformations throughout his career set the standard for all rock stars after him. Blackstar, his final album, was released on January 8, his 69th birthday, two days before his death. He will be missed. The fact that the well-read and well-travelled Bowie had some connections to Greece and Cyprus is not a surprise.
Among his top 100 books is the classic tale of the Trojan War, The Iliad by Homer. Bowie’s reading list is incredibly diverse, including Homer’s epic poem along with Dante’s Inferno, The Stranger by Albert Camus, and The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. When asked in Vanity Fair magazine what happiness was, Bowie replied, “Reading.” The list of Bowie’s top 100 books, in no particular order, was posted on his official website on October 1, 2013. A selection from the list is included below.
He visited Cyprus with his first wife Angie during the early 1970s and commemorated the beautiful island in the song Move On, released in 1979 with the lyrics “Cyprus is my island/When the going’s rough/I would love to find you/Somewhere in a place like that.” Angie Bowie had actually been born on Cyprus and continued to visit the island with her and Bowie’s son, Duncan, after the couple divorced in 1980.
The fact that Bowie used a Greek newspaper to speed his way through the crowded streets of New York City highlights the inventive mind of this unique artist. Bowie and his wife, supermodel Iman, made New York their home in 1993, a year after their marriage. The intensely private Bowie would hold up a Greek newspaper and pretend to read to avoid attracting a crowd in public when getting out of a cab or taking the subway. Onlookers would imagine he was an average Greek who happened to resemble David Bowie. May he rest in peace.
Selected Works from David Bowie’s Top 100 Books
Interviews With Francis Bacon?by David Sylvester
Billy Liar?by Keith Waterhouse
Room At The Top?by John Braine
On Having No Head?by Douglass Harding
Kafka Was The Rage?by Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange?by Anthony Burgess
City Of Night?by John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao?by Junot Diaz
Madame Bovary?by Gustave Flaubert
Iliad?by Homer
As I Lay Dying?by William Faulkner
Tadanori Yokoo?by Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz?by Alfred Doblin
Inside The Whale And Other Essays?by George Orwell
Mr. Norris Changes Trains?by Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art?by James A. Hall
David Bomberg?by Richard Cork
Blast?by Wyndham Lewis
Passing?by Nella Larson
Beyond The Brillo Box?by Arthur C. Danto
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind?by Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle?by George Steiner
Hawksmoor?by Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self?by R. D. Laing
The Stranger?by Albert Camus
Infants Of The Spring?by Wallace Thurman
The Quest For Christa T?by Christa Wolf
The Songlines?by Bruce Chitin
Nights At The Circus?by Angela Carter
The Master And Margarita?by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Lolita?by Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog?by Saul Bellow
Puckoon?by Spike Milligan
Black Boy?by Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby?by F. Scott Fitzgerald