Don’t be fooled by the makeup or the costumes.

David Bowie is a reader, big time.

Source: DavidBowie.com

Truman Capote, Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Diaz, Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Mishima and Bulgakov. To name a few.

Bowie identified his favorite 100 books for a retrospective exhibit entitled “David Bowie Is,” and Open Culture provides the complete list.

In no particular order that I can Identify, here are the first five books on the list:

• 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

I have heard of exactly none of these, but I’m definitely intrigued.