Barry’s Top 40

An impressive list from BookPeople’s elder statesman, Barry Baker:

I have spent the better part of the last 20 years as a professional book buyer (including used, rare, new and remainder titles). 10 of those years here at BookPeople. I was also a frequent visitor in the 70s to Grok Books on San Antonio Street (and Oat Willies at the front of the building). So I have a pretty fair idea of what constitutes a good read and what doesn’t. Here are my personal picks of 40 “good reads” from the last 40 years (and all of them are still in print).

1. The Fixer…Bernard Malamud

2. Catcher in the Rye… J.D. Salinger

3. The Magus…John Fowles

4. Ironweed…William Kennedy

5. The Magic Journey…John Nichols

6. Prayer for Owen Meaney…John Irving

7. Complete Stories…Flannery O’Connor

8. Battle Cry…Leon Uris

9. Dispatches…Michael Herr

10. Left Hand of Darkness…Ursula K. Le Guin

11. Goodbye to a River…John Graves

12. Monkey Wrench Gang…Edward Abbey

13. Painted Bird…Jerzy Kosinski

14. Complete Stories…Roald Dahl

15. Up in the Old Hotel…Joseph Mitchell

16. Civil War: A Narrative…Shelby Foote

17. Blind Assassin…Margaret Atwood

18. Crime and Punishment…Fyodor Dostoevsky

19. Way of Zen…Alan Watts

20. Tropic of Cancer…Henry Miller

21. Johnny Got His Gun…Dalton Trumbo

22. Lolita…Vladimir Nabokov

23. Trout Fishing in America…Richard Brautigan

24. In Cold Blood…Truman Capote

25. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas…Hunter S. Thompson

26. Cats Cradle…Kurt Vonnegut

27. River Why…David James Duncan

28. Sometimes a Great Notion…Ken Kesey

29. Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…Robert M. Pirsig

30. Confederacy of Dunces…John Kennedy Toole

31. The Trial…Franz Kafka

32. Gravity’s Rainbow…Thomas Pynchon

33. Electric Kool Aid Acid Test…Tom Wolfe

34. Tramp Abroad…Mark Twain

35. East of Eden…John Steinbeck

36. Walden…Henry David Thoreau

37. Stranger in a Strange Land…Robert Heinlein

38. Leaves of Grass…Walt Whitman

39. Catch 22…Joseph Heller

40. For Whom the Bell Tolls…Ernest Hemingway