The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

Cast as the star of 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie trav­eled to New Mex­i­co for the shoot, meet­ing with direc­tor Nico­las Roeg soon upon arrival. “I took with me hun­dreds and hun­dreds of books,” Bowie said to The Face mag­a­zine a few years lat­er. “And I had these cab­i­nets” — a mod­ern­ized Jacobean trav­el­ing library — “and they were rather like the box­es that ampli­fiers get packed up in, and I was going through all these books and they were pour­ing out all over the floor — there were just moun­tains of books. And Nick was sit­ting there watch­ing me and he said, ‘Your great prob­lem, David, is that you don’t read enough.’ ”

Due to Bowie’s hyper-seri­ous state of mind in those days, he went on to recall, “it did­n’t occur to me at the time that it was a joke.” Though he changed his ways of think­ing and even dropped the trav­el­ing library, Bowie seems to have main­tained his for­mi­da­ble read­ing habits for the rest of his life. (In 1987, he even posed for one of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion’s “READ” posters.) A few years ago we fea­tured his Top 100 Book List, whose vari­ety encom­pass­es every­thing from The Out­sider to Sex­u­al Per­son­ae to A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces.

“My dad was a beast of a read­er,” Bowie’s son Dun­can Jones, an avid Twit­ter user, tweet­ed last week. “One of his true loves was Peter Ackroyd’s sojourns into the his­to­ry of Britain & its cities. I’ve been feel­ing a build­ing sense of duty to go on the same lit­er­ary marathon in trib­ute to dad.” And so Jones’ infor­mal David Bowie book club begins with Ack­roy­d’s 1985 post­mod­ern nov­el Hawksmoor, which tells the par­al­lel sto­ries of an ear­ly 18th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don archi­tect and a late 20th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don detec­tive and which Joyce Car­ol Oates called “a wit­ty and macabre work of the imag­i­na­tion, intri­cate­ly plot­ted, obses­sive in its much-reit­er­at­ed con­cerns with mankind’s fall­en nature.”

Jones calls the book “an amuse cerveau before we get into the heavy stuff,” the “heavy stuff” pre­sum­ably includ­ing oth­er such Bowie picks as White Noise, A Clock­work Orange and Last Exit to Brook­lyn. If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate in the Jones-led dis­cus­sion of Hawksmoor on his Twit­ter page, you’ve got until the first of Feb­ru­ary to get it read. If you feel like you don’t read enough, con­sid­er this the Bowiest pos­si­ble way to ful­fill a new year’s res­o­lu­tion to do more of it.

Note: Sep­a­rate­ly you can also check out The Bowie Book Club Pod­cast where two friends spend a month read­ing a book on Bowie’s list. Find those episodes here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.