These are the favorite books of Dua Lipa, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Co.

Culture

Pop stars and literature
How, who… read? What you can learn from the book recommendations of Dua Lipa, Dylan and Bowie

A new insight is currently spreading on the Internet: Hey, pop stars can read! At the center of the countless surprised comments is the 28-year-old singer and actress Dua Lipa. Because she has not only sold more than 100 million records and has 90 million followers on Instagram alone, not only starred in “Barbie” – but also has her own book club.

On her website and in her newsletter of the same name, “Service95”, she has been presenting books and interviewing writers such as Emma Cline and Hanya Yanagihara since 2021. And just a mouse click away, she also naturally writes about lifestyle and beauty She was accused of holding up books just to give herself some fancy, intellectual make-up. Why doesn’t a young woman just talk about things she knows something about? Botox, babies, connective tissue?

Apparently the world now assumes that the most important prerequisite for a pop career is severe dyslexia, combined with illiteracy and dyslexia. But: That wasn’t always the case! I can remember times when many pop stars read, raved about favorite books and even wrote books themselves. I eventually made lists of titles that I borrowed from the local library. Be sure to try it out – you never know where it will take you!

Alice in Wonderland and a walrus on LSD

For example John Lennon. He made songs like “A Day In The Life” out of newspaper notes and set the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll (“Alice in Wonderland”) to music in “I Am The Walrus”. Lennon’s comments on the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” then took me straight to the LSD bible “The Psychedelic Experience” and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Groovy reading! (For a list of Lennon’s favorite books, see www.faroutmagazine.co.uk)

Or Patti Smith. She started out as a poet and eventually became a rock singer by setting her rhymes to music. She also had a huge crush on the French adventurer and poet Arthur Rimbaud, and “The Drunken Ship” and “A Time in Hell” were piled up next to my bed and I sailed away to other Parisian writers like Charles Baudelaire. What a trip. (For a list of Smith’s favorite books, see www.service95.com)

Bob Dylan’s reading list was even more serious for me. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” bored me almost to death, Melville’s “Moby Dick” was a revelation, but “The Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs blew everything up. Crazy homoerotic alien fantasies, as if put together from confused snippets (that’s what I learned). The world can hardly be described better. When I left the book lying around open, there was a family conference afterwards with the question of which sanatorium was the best place to put me in. Thanks Bob! (For a list of Dylan’s favorite books, see www.faroutmagazine.co.uk.)

With David Bowie’s favorite books, the reading light never goes out

A life’s work for me to this day is David Bowie’s Top 100: Gustave Flaubert, Anthony Burgess, Homer, RD Laing, Yukio Mishima, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more – if you want to become even remotely familiar with their work, you’ll never be able to turn off the reading light out of. (For a list of Bowie’s favorite books, see www.faroutmagazine.co.uk. And up www.radicalreads.com there are the heartfelt books by Sufjan Stevens, Tina Turner, Britney Spears).

However, the most surprising book I read is not a tip, but was written by a musician: Joe Strummer of The Clash. It is entitled “The Future Is Unwritten”, loosely translated: The future is an empty book. And that’s it, it consists of pure, white pages. When I was once asked what that was all about, I replied: “You know, the rock musicians – they can’t read or write.”