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7 Desert island Books

Don’t Break the Spines

of my desert island books

Terry Barr
3 min readAug 9, 2022

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Photo by John-Mark Smith on Unsplash

Janice Harayda issued a challenge yesterday that I should have seen coming:

I’m thankful that she set the bar at seven, though as I formulate my response, I’m betting that I’ll end up cursing that number in the end. I’m the kid who had much rather stayed at home to read a book than go out and roam the suburban neighborhood that my friends found to be full of opportunities to find their inner Dennis Hopper/Eve Babowitz.

Right now, I’m reading Mark Rozzo’s Everybody thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, and I just finished Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow. Neither of these would accompany me to that island, but I’m grateful to have read them anyway, though after finishing Straub’s novel last night, I almost had to call my older daughter and make sure that she never reads it because it would feed into our mutual fear of death.

Just thought I’d add these here so that you’ll note how difficult narrowing books to seven all-time

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Terry Barr
Terry Barr

Written by Terry Barr

I write about music, culture, equality, and my Alabama past in The Riff, The Memoirist, Prism and Pen, Counter Arts, and am an editor for Plethora of Pop.

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