My humble addition to the ‘favorite 40 books’ game we’ve got going here at BookPeople. Still feel like I’m leaving some big ones out. This is subject to change at any time. P.S. Don’t forget about the party on Saturday. -Peter
1. The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia: Post-Post-Post Modern? This story is a three dimensional work of pure beauty and genius. I swear this book knows when you are reading it.
2.Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger: The realest, saddest thing I had ever read by the age of 15.
3.The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky: What I would give to live this man’s life for one day.
4.The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: As American as apple pie and traffic jams. Everybody secretly loves a faker.
5.Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara: Supremely underrated.
6.Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac: Where our hero goes deep into the woods and finds some peace, for once. We all know how it really ends for old Jack, but it’s nice to pretend.
7. Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Brion Gysin Story: The life and times of the coolest guy you’ve never heard of.
8. How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, John Fahey: So wait, great art sometimes requires horrible experiences? Bummer.
9. To Live’s to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, John Kruth: See above.
10/11. Trout Fishing in America/In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan: If you don’t dig Richard Brautigan it’s probably your fault, not his.
12. The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda
13.The Motel Life, Willy Vlautin
14/15.From Bauhaus to Our House/ The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
16. Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray
17. Inferno, Dante Alighieri: The best book of the divine comedy.
18. The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
19. Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan: Though he skips everything we ever asked about, it’s still an amazing portal into his world.
20. The Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax
21. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
22. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley: So much better than 1984
23. Actual Air, David Berman: one of the most enjoyable books of poetry ever.
24. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
25. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
26. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
27. The Collected Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
28. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
29. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, Martin A. Lee
30. Arkansas, John Brandon
31. The Tennis Handsome, Barry Hannah
32. Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme
33. Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins
34. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
35. The Illuminatus Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson: “Immanentize the eschaton”
36. Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes
37. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking: making the insane world of interplanetary physics semi-understandable
38.Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years, Carl Sandburg: My favorite historian/folk-singer writing about my favorite president
39. My Boy Scout handbook: I learned a lot from this
40. Everything ever by Kurt Vonnegut: Can you really choose just one?
BookPeople 
Wow – not a female author on the list!
There’s plenty of female authors I enjoy on the regular, but to lie, and change my favorite books purely to satisfy some notion of literary “equality” seems worse than leaving them off.
My list does include some homosexual and physically-handicapped authors…if we’re gonna play that game.
Who are some of your favorite female writers?
Flannery O’ Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Emily Dickinson…Susan Casey writes expertly-crafted sports articles and Molly Young wrote a really great piece for last month’s Believer magazine. I’m reading ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Tea Obreht right now and enjoying it immensely.
Great list – and textually diverse!