Rebel, Rebel Reader
By Jill Grunenwald, librarian and OverDrive Collection Development Analyst.
I was born in 1981 and my introduction to Grammy winning recording artist David Bowie was not through the numerous studio albums he had already produced by that point but was actually courtesy of the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth which, like any good child of the ’80s, I was completely obsessed with. Later, as I moved through the tenuous time of angsty young adulthood into actual adulthood, I discovered the full range and depth of his music and fully jumped on the Bowie bandwagon.
Today I am all full of the feels.
I also have a suspicion I am not the only one but luckily we can all relive the life and loves of the man behind the music thanks to OverDrive’s offerings.
OverDrive’s selection of Bowie biographies include David Buckley’s Strange Fascination , Sean Egan’s Bowie on Bowie, and Bowie: The Biography by Wendy Leigh. Many of our international library partners also get The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Dogget and When Ziggy Played Guitar by Dylan Jones. For those libraries that have streaming video, I would also recommend adding David Bowie: Origins of a Starman to your collections.
When not in the recording studio, David Bowie was a voracious reader with an eclectic taste in books that rivals his personal discography. Some of his favorites include the iconic A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, John Kennedy Toole’sA Confederacy of Dunces, The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens, The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg.
He was also a fan of many books that are considered literary cannon, including George Orwell’s 1984, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Homer’s The Iliad, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
For Ziggy Stardust’s sake, here’s hoping that there’s not just life on Mars but a library, too.