Bowie Book Club Podcast (Greg Miller & Kristianne Huntsberger)

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read a very entertaining tract about consciousness, hallucinations, poetry, religion and a crackpot theory that ties them all together - in short, what you expected to read in college as a liberal arts major. It's Julian Jayne's magnum opus - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Inside the Whale, a book of literary criticism by George Orwell, who we've decided was a time traveller (Netflix, get in touch).
 

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd, a wildly entertaining story of occultism, the churches of London, police procedures and how time isn't as straightforward as you might think.

This time we read Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, a giant, sprawling look at the 20th century, featuring one of the most romantic exorcisms every committed to print. 

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Madame Bovary a groundbreaking (and salacious, we guess?) novel of one woman's struggle against bourgie norms. And Greg really apologizes about his Vitamin Flintheart.

We catch up with @manmademoon's choice for this month - Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell's (not H. Lewis Allways') masterful piece of reporting on poverty AND talk to our Virgilian guide through the songs of David Bowie - Chris O'Leary, whose Rebel Rebel is an essential reference for any Bowie fan.

This time we read Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar - the story of a dreamer in Northern England who just can't keep his stories straight.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read three issues from the second volume of the underground/art/indie/lowbrow/highbrow comic book compliation Raw, edited and published by Art Speigelman and Francoise Mouly. Also, Greg proves that an insufferable child becomes an insufferable adult.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood, a (semi-)fictional look at one of Bowie's obsessions - Berlin between the wars.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Berlin Alexanderplatz, a classic of German modernism by Alfred Doblin, and another trip to Berlin in the 'twenties for us.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Viz, the scatological UK comic that rose from hand-stapled obscurity to become a titan of juvenilia in the '80s and '90s. Plus, we reveal our ill-conceived conspiracy theories about the Bowie List, or lack thereof.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time, we read The Divided Self by R.D. Laing, a treatise about schizophrenia and injecting humanism into the science of psychology. And Greg says "So yeah" about 50 times.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read In Cold Blood, a non-fiction novel about a gruesome killing in Kansas by Truman Capote who may have shared our fancy for wild speculation.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016.

This time we do a super quick roundup of our 2019 books and shout out some folks who are WAY ahead of us on the book list live from the floor of Podcon2, where we saw a bunch of great pdocasts and learned how to make this a little bit less of a mess.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we just gossiped about this and that - though it all seems to come back to Bowie, as usual.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guaralnick a compendium of all things related to the musical genre, and most emphatically NOT about Motown.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This is another gossipy episode with a little bit about the tome we're about to read - Silence by John Cage

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Sound of the City by musicologist and BBC DJ Charlie Gillett, a veritable bible for pop music nerds. Spoiler alert: Greg does not sing in this one (or any one, ever).

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read a really weird D & D manual called Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual by Éliphas Lévi, half-poet, half-socialist, and all beard.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Metropolitan Life by Fran (not Annie) Lebowitz, a snarky little collection of vignettes about life in the big city way back when.

This time we read Kafka Was the Rage - Anatole Broyard's unfinished memoir of life in Greenwich Village just after WWII, where everyone was an intellectual and sex had just been discovered.

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read McTeague by Frank Norris, which is surprisingly not about a rogue cop who's always getting kicked off the force and reinstated because he's just too damn good out on those streets.

Apologies for the sound quality - we're still figuring out how to do this whole remote thing!

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, and tried to talk about anything else beside the poem (and you know...that other thing that's going on).

Apologies again for the recording weirdness! We're such a bunch of fireworms (that'll make more sense after you listen to this one). We'll get it together at some point.

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Stuff we Mentioned

• From Ritual to Romance

• How the Wasteland Sounds Now

• We didn't mention this (Greg spaced), but the British library has a cool webpage about the influences on The Waste Land.

• The source of the whole green face powder thing - an article about "Low" and T.S. Eliots influences.

• TS Eliot, midfield enforcer, tamed by marriage

• TS Eliot was a bad boyfriend

• William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock

• Twelve Moons by Mary Oliver

• Post-Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

• Loitering by Charles D'Ambrosio

• Degrees of Grey in Phillipsburg by Richard Hugo

• The Hugo House in Seattle

• The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

• Did Bowie Pinch a Cactus from T.S. Eliot? - well, did he?

• How to Do Nothing

• OMG, Alec Guiness is the best

What's Up Next

Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia

What Song Did We Choose?

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read The Life and Times of Little Richard - the Authorized Biography by Charles "Dr. Rock" White, which contains lots of scatalogical pranks, sermons and stories of debauchery from one of the wildest voices ever. Rock and roll.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Black Boy, Richard Wright's searing story of growing up in the Jim Crow south and his further self-education as a young man in Chicago and his further self-education as a young man in Chicago.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club* where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Teenage by Jon Savage and you JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW WE'RE FEELING ABOUT IT OK? /slams bedroom door/

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read The Street by Ann Petry, a harsh but gripping tale, which **almost** led to the worst song choice in the history of this podcast.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we took a little wander through Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall and read about a lot of saints with swords (sometimes stuck in their heads)

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Our Bookshop

Visit our lists on bookshop.org and help support the podcast (and independent bookstores too!)

Stuff We Talked About

• James Hall's obituary in the Guardian
• Article about the first English dictionaries
• Mountweazel!
• The random paintings we attempted to decipher.
• Our episode about David Bomberg.
• We didn't talk about it, but here's Nick Cave's handwritten dictionary h/t to Austin Kleon's excellent recent blog post on dictionaries

What Are We Reading?

• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
• The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner
• Bleak House by Charlie Dickens (as always)
• Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
• The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
• Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

What Song Did We Choose?

What's Up Next

• Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read On Having No Head by Douglas Harding, a slender guidebook to quick and painless enlightenment.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read George Orwell's classic work of numerology, 1984.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016.

We survived another year, and that means we get to dust off the ole Choosenator and see what new books it brings us. This time we had a little canine assistance - our trusty guide led us through the wilds of Seattle (ok, through quiet residential neighborhoods) and pointed us at the correct numbers for the books for 2022!

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Our Bookshop

Visit our lists on bookshop.org and help support the podcast (and independent bookstores too!)

Our 2022 Books

• The Iliad - Homer Simpson
• Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock - Nik Cohn
• Money - Martin Amis
• Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
• In Between the Sheets - Ian McEwan
• Coast of Utopia - Tom Stoppard
• The Leopard - Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
• Room at the Top - John Braine
• On the Road - Jacky Kerouac
• In Bluebeard's Castle - George Steiner
• Mr. Wilson's Cabinet O' Wonders - Lawrence Weschler
• A People's Tragedy - Orlando Figes

Our 2021 Favorites

Kristianne:

• The Enchanted
• Tale for the Time Being
• The Anthropocene Review and The Book of Delights
• Piranesi

Greg:

• A Little Devil in America
• Gormenghast
• Tadanori Yokoo
• Piranesi
• The Dakota Winters and The Perfume Burned His Eyes

Other Stuff

Kristanne listened to House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door while walking her dog.

Greg couldn't remember that Sir Derek Jacobi read the audio version of Hawksmoor - here's our episode about that book

Buy records and books from Hex Enduction Records and Books in Lake City, Seattle. Even if you're not in Seattle, they have a giant Discogs page - they're good folks with good stuff!

Coming Up

We'll start things off next month with a relatively new, very modern tome - The Iliad. See y'all then!

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Homer Tarantino's gory classic of bromanticism - The Iliad

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Our Bookshop

Visit our lists on bookshop.org and help support the podcast (and independent bookstores too!)

Stuff We Talked About

• We read different translations of this here gruesome volume - Kristianne had the Robert Fagles and Greg read the Carolyn Alexander

• Want to understand the Iliad? This is the only infographic you need

• The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

• The War that Killed Achilles by Carolyn Alexander

• Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves

• A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

• The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

• Our ridiculous episode about The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

• Shakespeare's Second Best Bet

• The Myths and Legends Podcast

• Christa Wolf's book on Cassandra that we should've read!

What Are We Reading? (That Isn't Related to the Iliad)

Greg:

• Devil House by John Darnielle (also Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester)

What Song Did We Choose?

What's Up Next

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock - Nik Cohn

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read a book of literary criticism/history about Gustave Flaubert that (suprise!) turns out to be a novel that's not really about a bird at all (or is it?) - Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard - a play where a lot happens just off stage and there's a lot of talking about thinking.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read a doorstop of a history of the Russian Revolution: Orlando Figes' "A People's Tragedy".

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read * Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, a novel of deception, doublecross, and people being absolute fucksters to each other.

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Our Bookshop

Visit our lists on bookshop.org and help support the podcast (and independent bookstores too!)

Stuff We Talked About

• The Handmaiden - movie version of Fingersmith by cue ChatGPT Park Chan-Wook
• London Labor and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew

What Are We Reading?

Greg:

• Spring by Ali Smith
• Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

Kristianne:

• Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart
• The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts
• Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

What Song Did We Choose?

What's Up Next

• Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman - if you're a fan of gin n' ginger ale or of extremely stylized dialog, you're going to love this one.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read we read The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos, a big sweeping tale of America at the turn of the 20th century, including getting chased by a farmer with a shotgun, which happened all the time back then.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read The Beano, a British comic that has been teaching the fundamentals of anarchy to the youth of the UK decades before Johnny Rotten gave his first snarl.

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Beyond the Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto - if you like art, philosophy and the philosophy of art, you might get through this a little easier than we did.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, a quaint little preview of the non-stop psychological prodding we endure now.

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Follow us! (Not in a creepy way)

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Our Bookshop

Visit our lists on bookshop.org and help support the podcast (and independent bookstores too!)

Stuff We Talked About

• Salon article on the book
• article on Bowie's brief spell as an ad man in The Drum
• our episode on A People's Tragedy

What Are We Reading

Greg:

• The Pickwick Papers (of course!) by Charles Dickens
• Rim of Morning by William Sloane
• Gone to the Wolves by John Wray

Kristianne:

• The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
• Julia by Sandra Newman

Our Best of 2023!

Greg:

• Fingersmith in a 3-way split with White Noise and 42nd Parallel
• Dreaming as Delerium by J. Allen Hobson
• The House with a Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Kristianne:

• also Fingersmith!
• How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
• Thistlefoot by Gennarose Nethercott
• East of Eden by Johnny Steinbeck
• Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson

What Song Did We Choose?

What's Up Next

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Welcome to another episode of the **Bowie Book Club**, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Nowhere to Run by Gerri Hirshey - interviews with foundational artists of soul music asthey deal with aging, and (in the case of Screaming Jay Hawkins) serve drinks out of a skull or something.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, an overheated occult pot-boiler that manages to keep the hot esoteric gobbletygook flying for over 400 pages! Spoiler alert: Greg wrote this description and it may (does) not reflect the views of the other half of this podcast.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read (sort of) A Grave for a Dolphin by Ally Teeth (or Alberto Denti, Duke of Pirajno, if you must), a story about a manic pixie dream fish and the marine biologist (at least that's what AI thinks) who loved her.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Orlando by Virginia Woolf, a book that essentially proves that David Bowie and Tilda Swinton are one person.

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie’s favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, a hard-boiled story of mysterious realms, stiff drinks and super-powered artifacts. Apologies for the jingling sounds in the background - we had a very active feline collaborator on this one.