David Bowie's top 100 must-read books

After spending five months at the V&A in London, the wildly successful David Bowie Is retrospective has moved to Toronto, and the widely read Dame has revealed his top hundred books. They follow and I have marked the ones I remember reading as well in italics. I am a bit bemused by the inclusion of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia as it is a triplet of plays that I saw in the National.

Who would have guessed that both of us would have worked through Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels? Nowt so strange as folk.

• The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby (2008)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007)
• The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard (2007)
• Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage (2007)
• Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (2002)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens (2001)
• Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler (1997)
• A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes (1997)
• The Insult, Rupert Thomson (1996)
• Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon (1995)
• The Bird Artist, Howard Norman (1994)
• Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard (1993)
• Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C Danto (1992)
• Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia (1990)
• David Bomberg, Richard Cork (1988)
• Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick (1986)
• The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin (1986)
• Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd (1985)
• Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey (1984)
• Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (1984)
• Money, Martin Amis (1984)
• White Noise, Don DeLillo (1984)
• Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes (1984)
• The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White (1984)
• A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn (1980)
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980)
• Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester (1980)
• Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1980)
• Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess (1980)
• Raw, a "graphix magazine" (1980-91)
• Viz, magazine (1979 –)
• The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (1979)
• Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz (1978)
• In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan (1978)
• Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed Malcolm Cowley (1977)
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes (1976)
• Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders (1975)
• Mystery Train, Greil Marcus (1975)
• Selected Poems, Frank O'Hara (1974)
• Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich (1972)
• In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner (1971)
• Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky (1971)
• The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillett(1970)
• The Quest for Christa T, Christa Wolf (1968)
• Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn (1968)
• The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
• Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg (1967)
• Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr (1966)
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965)
• City of Night, John Rechy (1965)
• Herzog, Saul Bellow (1964)
• Puckoon, Spike Milligan (1963)
• The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford (1963)
• The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, Yukio Mishima (1963)
• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (1963)
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
• Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell (1962)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (1961)
• Private Eye, magazine (1961 –)
• On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding (1961)
• Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage (1961)
• Strange People, Frank Edwards (1961)
• The Divided Self, RD Laing (1960)
• All the Emperor's Horses, David Kidd (1960)
• Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse (1959)
• The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
• The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard (1957)
• Room at the Top, John Braine (1957)
• A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1956)
• The Outsider, Colin Wilson (1956)
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)
• The Street, Ann Petry (1946)
• Black Boy, Richard Wright (1945)