In the fall of 2013, The Art Gallery of Ontario held an exhibit aptly named, David Bowie Is, which featured hundreds of his personal effects. Among the finds was a list of Bowie's Top 100 Must Read Books from which we've derived our own Sweet Sixteen.
A dazzling, disturbing study of obsession, narrated by one of literature’s most unreliable voices. Beauty, language, and moral rot are braided so tightly you can’t pull them apart.
A fractured, modernist portrait of America as machine, myth, and hustle. Newsreels, inner monologues, and raw ambition collide into a restless national fever dream.
A chilling anatomy of surveillance, propaganda, and enforced reality. Power doesn’t just control behavior here—it rewires thought itself.
A Southern funeral becomes a polyphonic descent into madness and grief. Each voice tells a different truth, and none of them are stable.
American history retold from the bottom up, centering workers, radicals, and the dispossessed. It reframes the national story as struggle rather than destiny.
A searing coming-of-age memoir shaped by racism, hunger, and intellectual rebellion. Survival and self-definition are acts of resistance.
A real murder told with novelistic precision and eerie calm. The book blurs journalism and art while staring directly at American violence.
A master painter dissects art, violence, and chance with brutal clarity. Creation here is instinctive, risky, and unapologetically human.
An emotionally detached man commits a murder almost by accident. Absurdity, alienation, and moral indifference take center stage.
The Devil arrives in Soviet Moscow with satire, magic, and chaos in tow. A wild blend of political critique, theology, and surreal comedy.
A glittering dream rots from the inside. Wealth, longing, and reinvention end in illusion and loss.
Two fierce essays on race, faith, and America’s moral reckoning. Urgent, prophetic, and devastatingly intimate.
A restless pilgrimage fueled by speed, jazz, and spiritual hunger. Freedom is chased harder than it is understood.
A modernist epic that tries to weld myth, machinery, and American ambition into one ecstatic vision. Brooklyn Bridge becomes altar, antenna, and nervous system—carrying history, desire, and ruin across the same span.
Poems that move like conversations overheard on city streets. Art, love, and pop culture blur into lived experience.
A scandalous hymn to the body written against the deadening chill of class, industry, and repression. Erotic not for shock, but for insisting that tenderness, touch, and vitality are radical acts.
