Books

Top 10 lists are everywhere – Top 10 restaurants, Top 10 companies to work for, Top 10 best-sellers. What are the Top 10 all-time best books on Texas? When I got to pondering that question, I went to the best authorities I could find. I call them the grandfathers of Texas literature, though I don't know how flattering they find that term.

Jim Lee is professor emeritus and former chair of the department of English at the University of North Texas and a well-known author and raconteur. Among his books: Classics of Texas Fiction and Adventures with a Texas Humanist. His list:

• A Woman of the People, Benjamin Capps

• Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry

• Hold Autumn in Your Hand, George Sessions Perry

• This Stubborn Soil, William Owens

• Farther Off From Heaven, William Humphrey

• Collected Stories, Katherine Anne Porter

• The Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb

• Interwoven, Sallie Reynolds Matthews

• A Personal Country, A.C. Greene

• The Good Old Boys, Elmer Kelton

Don Graham is J. Frank Dobie Professor of Southwestern Life and Literature at the University of Texas at Austin and a prolific author, whose most recent works are Literary Austin and Lone Star Literature. An authority on movies, he is the author of Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas and the forthcoming State Fare: An Irreverent Guide to Texas Movies. His list:

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

• Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry

• In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, Larry McMurtry

• Southwest, John Houghton Allen

• The Old Order, Katherine Anne Porter

• In the Rogue Blood, James Carlos Blake

• Different Fleshes, Albert Goldbarth

• Blood and Money, Thomas Thompson

• Some Part of Myself, J. Frank Dobie

Humbled but undaunted, I put together my own list. It overlaps some with Dr. Lee's list (sometimes the same author but different titles, except in one case) but not at all with Dr. Graham's. Here are my choices:

• Goodbye to a River, John Graves

• The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan

• Love is a Wild Assault, Elithe Hamilton Kirkland

• Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry

• In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, Larry McMurtry

• Wanderer Springs, Robert Flynn

• The Time It Never Rained, Elmer Kelton

• Where Dreams Die Hard, Carlton Stowers

• The Captured, Scott Zesch

• Texas on a Plate, Terry Thompson-Anderson

I make no case that my choices are the most important Texas books. These are my favorites, and therefore it's perfectly appropriate to include a cookbook. In another life, I plan to be a chef-cookbook author!

What are your personal Top 10 Texas books? I can't list them all but if you post them on the Texas Pages blog (www.guidelive.com/texaspages), I'll do a recap in a few months.

Judy Alter is director of the TCU Press in Fort Worth.

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