1979 Popular Books and Bestsellers

1979 Books & Bestsellers

1979 Fiction Top Ten Books

(according to Publisher’s Weekly)
1. The Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum
2. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
3. Overload by Arthur Hailey
4. Memories of Another Day by Harold Robbins
5. Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
6. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
7. The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart
8. The Establishment by Howard Fast
9. The Third World War: August 1985 by Gen. Sir John Hackett et al.
10. Smiley’s People by John Le Carré

1979 Non-Fiction Books

1. Aunt Erma’s Cope Book by Erma Bombeck
2. The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet by Herman Tarnower and Samm Sinclair Baker
3. How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years by Howard J. Ruff
4. Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin
5. The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise by Nathan Pritikin and Patrick McGrady Jr
6. White House Years by Henry Kissinger
7. Lauren Bacall By Myself by Lauren Bacall
8. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong
9. Restoring the American Dream by Robert J. Ringer
10. The Winner’s Circle by Charles Paul Conn

1979 New York Times Bestsellers

Gnomes by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet
Lauren Bacall by Myself by Lauren Bacall
The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet by Herman Tarnower and Samm Sinclair Baker
Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin
Aunt Erma’s Cope Book by Erma Bombeck
The Brethren by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

1979 Notable Literature

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
Theory of International Politics by Kenneth Waltz
Practical Ethics by Peter Singer
States and Social Revolutions by Theda Skocpol
1979 Nobel Prize in Literature
Most Popular Books of 1979, according to GoodReads
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