Brain Pickings:

Creativity is a combinatorial force — it rests on our ability to fuse, usually unconsciously, existing concepts, memories, bits of information, pieces of knowledge, and fragmentary impression into novel ideas that we call our own. A mind of exceptional creativity, then, is a mind brimming with vibrantly diverse bits that can be fused together into a boundless array of possible combinations. One way to fully appreciate the power of such cross-disciplinary curiosity is to look at the intellectual diet of those we revere as geniuses, whatever their field of exceptional ability — take, for instance, the reading lists of Carl Sagan, Alan Turing, and Nick Cave.

Naturally, I was thrilled to come across the itemized intellectual diet of one of the most celebrated creative icons in modern history, David Bowie. A new retrospective of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario features 75 of Bowie’s must-read books — a fascinating tour of his cross-disciplinary curiosity and the fuel for his combinatorial creativity. Although all but two of the books were published within Bowie’s lifetime — with the exceptions published within two years of his birth — he makes up for the presentism bias with an extraordinary diversity of disciplines, topics, and sensibilities, ranging from poetry to history to theory of mind, with plenty of fiction and a few magazines for good measure.

I was especially delighted to discover that Bowie too is fascinated by the routines, habits, and creative wisdom of great writers — among his favorite books is the vintage gem Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series, which also gave us Malcolm Cowley’s theory of the four stages of writing, William Faulkner on literature and life, and the entrepreneurial story of how the Paris Review reinvented the art of the interview.

Here are Bowie’s booktrysts, in reverse chronological order:

- The Age of American Unreason (public library) by Susan Jacoby (2008)
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (public library) by Junot Diaz (2007)
- The Coast of Utopia (trilogy) (public library) by Tom Stoppard (2007)...

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