A lot of Bowie fans tend to find their personal favourites amongst the early stuff. I for one love Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold The World: the first for being a masterclass in song writing, the second for its brain-bursting hard rock. Two more different albums you will never find.

The even-earlier stuff from the Decca years is also well worth a listen. Here you can hear him finding his feet as a song writer, not always successfully but a fascinating listen nonetheless.

Going back pre-Hunky Dory, both Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold The World are well worth having; the former is an odd mix of folk, psychedelia and proto-spacerock, and contains two outright classics, the title song of course, and Letter To Hermione. TMWSTW is his proro-hard rock album, with some genuinely heavy songs and playing. The Width Of A Circle is pretty extraordinary.

Pin-Ups? I'd go for that, but then again I've got virtually everything he's done. Still, there are a lot of inspired covers there, as well as a spectacularly misjudged Can't Explain, which Bowie once inexplicably named his favourite cover that he'd done.

80s: personally, I can live without Let's Dance, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, and even the best songs won't take up much space. Assuming you're not sick of the singles from Let's Dance, take them and Criminal World, that's all you need. Tonight has three terrific songs: Loving The Alien, Blue Jean and Dancing With The Big Boys. Never Let Me Down is pretty lumpy, but the title song, Time Will Crawl and Bang Bang are worth having.

I wouldn't write Tin Machine off completely: there's some bracing stuff on both albums, especially if you don't scrutinise the lyrcis too closely: Under The God, You Belong In Rock & Roll, Run, I can't Read, Goodbye Mr Ed, One Step and Amlapura. Avoid Stateside and I'm Sorry at all costs, as they are bellowed by scary drummer Hunt Sales.

I'm a fan of the other 90s albums, except for Hours, which i've never been able to get into; Black Tie White Noise is very good in parts, and the Buddha of Suburbia is terrific. I don't know if you've got as far as the Noughties, but Heathen is an essential work. Considerably better than good. Reality is pretty decent too.

Live albums: the 70s classics David Live and Stage are by no stretch of imagination essential. His singing on David Live is pretty ropy, the arrangements are patchy, and the band don't sound that interested. By contrast, the band on Stage are superb, yer man is in superb voice, and the arrangements are mostly carbon copies of the studio originals! The exceptions are Breaking Glass and the Ziggy songs.

It's getting late, so I'll leave it at that for now. Enjoy!

the great late period album is 'Heathen'. A spectacular late entry.

A BBC Omnibus special is a great rockumentary. The scene with the Dame fully fuelled in the back of the merc with 'a fly in my milk' will stay with me forever.
'A reality' DVd is one of his best too.

I am in exactly the same situation as the OP. many years with just a ChangesBowie for company and suddenly it's all clicked and I'm getting the lot.

What I want is a book. What's the best biography to read? As I realise I know next to nothing about the man.

Bowie's run of LPs from The Man Who Sold The World to Scary Monsters is pretty incredible – not a duff one among them.

I don't think he was quite the finished article on Space Oddity, so I'm not including it, but it's still an LP worth having. I have Pin-Ups but I really never listen to it.

As for the Deram stuff, I really couldn't recommend buying it, but it's worth a listen. It's really far too twee and music hall for me, but there's the odd interesting track – Silly Boy Blue, She's Got Medals, Sell Me a Coat. And it takes a hard heart not to raise a smile at The Laughing Gnome.

From a 60s nut's perspective, the Deram stuff is wonderful and if you can find the 'Space Oddity' film that was made for German TV in '69 you'll be doing yourself a favour.
However, the jewels in the crown are the three Mod 45s from '66 on Pye.

I love this record - aside from some nice alternative versions of ver hits and a few obscure covers, it's a wonderful time capsule of BBC radio from the late 60's & early 70's, great soundclips of Peely & Brian Matthew, plus an introduction to the band's new guitarist, "Michael from Hull", who'd only joined a few days earlier... that's music history being made before your very ears!

PS Seconded - TMWSTW, Buddha Of Suburbia, and the All Saints instrumentals compilation hangs together far better than it has any right to...

Being brutally honest and frankly in an effort to save you time, disappointment and money: stop at Scary Monsters. Bowie is not going forward anywhere to new creative heights nor 'returning to form'. His time is over. He was vital to the 70s and still echoed thru the early 80s. Like Gorbachev, he had a fantastic historical purpose and after that his powers and relevance are gone, spectacularly so in both their cases. The fall off in Bowie's work is vertiginously steep. It doesn't repay exploration. Enjoy his 60s and 70s work - and add the Lou and Iggy albums.

in your ongoing discovery of the great man and his works; you still have lots of thrilling stuff to encounter.
I concur with itfc about the early Decca/Deram material, which has some wonderfully quirky suburban vignettes and character studies, and some great tunes (Love You Til Tuesday, There Is A Happy Land and London Boys to name but three at random).

Stuff you may not have come across from the maligned 80s is mainly based around film/TV soundtracks - the original Cat People theme, far superior to the Let's Dance version; This Is Not America; When The Wind Blows; the Baal EP. The other outstanding one-off single of that decade not already mentioned is The Alabama Song, coupled with a fantastic, stripped down version of Space Oddity.
I'm also a fan of Tin Machine, and there are some great songs on both albums, including a brilliant cover of Roxy's If There Is Something on TMII.

From the 90s, I really rate and admire 1. Outside, which whilst being conceptually 'out there' (though strangely prescient in relation to 'art' such as the work of Gunther von Hagens) is brimming with ideas and has some cracking tunes. I also like Hours for its sense of reflection and melancholy.

As others have stated, Heathen is a 21st century corker, one of the Dame's very best.

In terms of books, I have read a few over the years - In His Own Words (compiled by Barry Miles); The Illustrated Record by Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray; The Bowie Companion by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman; Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford; and a curio, To Major Tom: The David Bowie Letters by Dave Thompson.
Of these, the Sandford book is a pretty insightful biography and the Carr/Murray is an excellent analysis of the music, although it only covers up to Scary Monsters and may be out of print (used copies are available on Amazon). Other books with good reputations are The Complete David Bowie by David Pegg and Strange Fascination by David Buckley. There are other interesting-looking books focusing on the Berlin period and his 1990s 'rebirth', and there are also two new biographies due out early next year, by Chris Welch and Paul Trynka respectively.

The essential documentary, which you may have already come across, is Cracked Actor from 1974, in which our hero is clearly off his head on cocaine and looks 'incurably ill', a prototype Thomas Jerome Newton.
There is also a 'Bowie at 50' documentary knocking around; it has been broadcast regularly on Sky Arts 1 over the last couple of weeks. It's ok, if a little self-consciously 'wacky' and edited in the irritating scattergun style of a 'yoof' programme.

I'll probably echo what's already been said.

Grab his 60s stuff - there's a classic little Mod pop tune called Can't Help Thinking About Me, which is one of my all time favourite Bowie tunes. The Decca stuff is well worth an investigation, if only to see how much Damon Albarn was listening. Look for a comp that has London Boys on it, which is a brilliant ballad about the darker side of the 60s Mod scene.

Space Oddity has another couple of faves of mine on - Memory Of A Free Festival and Letter To Hermoine, which are as good as anything else he has done over the years.

And Pin Ups - I love it, it's actually one of my favourite Bowie albums, mostly because I like it when he rocked out back in the earlier days.

Meanwhile Iggy Pop and Lou Reed's Bowie connected works are pretty much essential I would say.

Go and check out Roxy Music's earlier works if you haven't already. If you like Bowie then I pretty much guarantee you will like Roxy.

Even though it's Iggy's name on the cover in both cases, I've always described them to friends as the two best albums Bowie never made. He really did give Iggy some tremendous material, which proved a wise decision in hindsight. When Bowie chose to record some of the songs himself, the results weren't exactly impressive. Red Money from Lodger is Iggy's Sister Midnight shorn of the claustrophobic intensity it has on The Idiot, and the same album's China Girl becomes all too literal in Bowie's hands, perhaps as a result of the video, but also because the newer version's bright-eyed, poppy arrangement is so at odds with the decidedly darker subject matter.

I've always considered Tonight to be the first out-and-out dog in Bowie's canon, with the two wretched covers of Lust For Life songs - Neighborhood Threat and Tonight itself - being its most flea-bitten parts. The original versions are both magnificent, though, and although everyone knows Lust For Life itself back to front and inside out nowadays, the entire album was an instant classic for me. Even at the height of punk, when Iggy's more venerated early work was being reissued to greater attention than it had ever previously been granted, it was quite clear to me that Lust For Life was a cut above everything else around at the time. And even though Bowie is in many ways simply a sideman on both this album and The Idiot (which came out only six months earlier), his dabs are all over both of them. As much as they represent Iggy recapturing his mojo, they're also unmissable examples of Bowie during his richest period, creatively speaking, as well as his most generous artistically.

...but I would definitely recommend:

Space Oddity
The Man Who Sold The World
The Idiot (Iggy)
Lust For Life (Iggy)
Ziggy Stardust soundtrack
Santa Monica live (which I used to have as a bootleg on blue vinyl)
Heathen
Bowie at the Beeb

and then stop. The essential odd tracks from the 80s and 90s can be found on various best ofs.

I may be a lone voice, but for me it's his best album.

I am, admittedly, a big fan of industrial music (which might be something of an acquired taste), but this is terrific industrial - interesting, dense sounds, great production, top-of-their-game musicians and a completely mystifying concept all wrapped round some brilliant songs: Hallo Spaceboy, Strangers When We Meet, The Heart's Filthy Lesson, We Prick You, etc.

As so often, the Dame wandered into a genre, took some of the best bits and put his own spin on them. Good luck to him!

Exactly what I was looking for... a few LPs still to check out, choice cuts from some of the ropier ones mentioned, my first Iggy purchases ever may be coming up too, and Cracked Actor will have to be checked out.

Lovely!

one of my favourite Bowie albums - the best covers album ever IMO

Not sure why no one has mentioned the groundbreaking 'Outside', with Bowie teaming up with Eno once again, or the sublimely laid back 'Black Tie, White Noise'. Probably available for next to nothing on Amazon these days.

Agree with the comments about the 'Reality' CD and DVD though. Great career spanning set. While on the subject of live albums, 'David Live' beats 'Stage' for me every time.

Enjoy the ride!