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The Four

Brilliant Book Ideas for David Bowie Lovers, Artists

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Hot beverages and books go best hand-in-hand.

Anthony Ascione from Brilliant Books in Traverse City can help you make sure your list of must read books is never empty.

His latest recommendation dissects the life and mind of a man who is considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

David Bowie: The Oral History by Dylan Jones 

“Got to give a shout-out to my man Bowie,” Ascione says. “I am currently in a date with Bowie Musicals so I’ve been digesting a lot of David Bowie related material. I was recently shown a list of David Bowie’s 100 favorite books and I was embarrassed that I had only read three of them. I like anything that gets me in the mind of an artist and in the mind of anyone who was such a foundational, formative artist. I’m a huge Bowie fan. It was a lot of fun to read this one. And the neat thing is, it’s not just a biography of him or an autobiography. It’s actually told through interviews, It’s the oral history of David Bowie, so it’s people who knew him personally just talking, telling their stories about this amazing man who i think touched so many people and changed so many lives and gives you a really cool insight to who he was, the things he did and why he did the things he did and how people, his contemporaries, were reacting to the things he did because they were so new, and they were so novel. He was changing things, he was a game-changer. It’s really neat to hear what people thought of him.”

The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair

When we have so little daylight during the winter, people tend to wind down sooner.

If your favorite way of relaxing is with a book in hand, Ascione knows one that the artist in your life will especially love.

“The Secret Lives of Color is a really neat, nonfiction book that I enjoy, and it’s literally the history of color,” Ascione says. “Each page is coated with the color it’s talking about and it goes on in graduation. For instance in the section on nude, it talks about how nude is sort of a fashion color that was supposed to be flash-tone, but now in the 20th century what we consider to be quote unquote flesh-tone, there’s a whole range of that. So how do you keep that color relevant? How do you keep using that word and make it an inclusive word? Or dragon blood red, it talks about the history of extracting dragon blood resin and how it was this bright, bright red from the tree and it made people think it was blood, so they called it this. This is another one I think is really good as a bedtime book because I’m the type of person where I read a book and it’s like I’ve got to get to the end of this chapter. Or OK that chapter was so good, I’m going to read one more, and then it’s 2 a.m. and I’ve finished my book, but I’m exhausted the next day. This one is little bites. Two, three pages about a color. It’s really easy to read this one as quickly or as slowly as you want to. It would be perfect for an artist, the artist in your life. Or anyone who likes pretty colors. I like pretty colors.”

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