The person who has everything, in book terms, is usually a serious reader who has covered the obvious ground: the Booker shortlists, the major American novels, the books that show up on every best-of list. What they often haven't read is the specific, the slightly obscure, the books whose reputations are smaller than their quality — the books that booksellers recommend to people they want to genuinely surprise.
J.A. Baker's The Peregrine is the book that most serious readers haven't read and that almost everyone who has read it considers indispensable. Baker spent ten years following peregrine falcons across the Essex countryside, and the result is one of the most obsessive and beautiful pieces of prose in the English language. Robert Macfarlane calls it the greatest nature book in English. It is almost entirely unknown outside of a small circle of nature writers and people who have been given it by other people who were given it. If the person you are buying for hasn't read it, they will be grateful for a long time. The nature writing shelf at byallo carries it.
John Williams's Stoner is the novel that was published in 1965, sold poorly, went out of print, was rediscovered in the 1980s, went out of print again, and was rediscovered a second time in the 2000s when it became a quiet word-of-mouth bestseller in Europe. It is still the case that many serious readers haven't read it, partly because its subject — the inner life of a professor who never achieves anything remarkable — sounds unpromising. The novel is devastating. It is the most accurate account in English fiction of what it means to love your work in a world that doesn't recognize that love. The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries it.
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is Robinson's first novel, stranger and wilder than the Gilead books that made her famous. Two sisters in a small Idaho town, raised after their mother's drowning by a series of increasingly unsuited female relatives, eventually by an aunt who is not suited at all to the ordinary demands of domestic life. The novel is about transience, memory, and what it means to be attached to the things that are already slipping away. It is luminous in the specific way that the best literary fiction is luminous — the language is doing more than conveying information. The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries it.
James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son is the essential Baldwin that most people who have only read The Fire Next Time or Between the World and Me haven't yet reached. Written in the 1950s, it is Baldwin's first essay collection, and it is proof that he arrived completely formed. The essays are sharper than most critics writing today and more willing to hold multiple positions simultaneously. If the serious reader on your list has read The Fire Next Time but not this, it is the obvious next gift. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries it.
Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu is the book for readers who have engaged with philosophy but not with this specific tradition. Merton's free interpretations of the Taoist master Zhuangzi are not a translation — they are collaborations across two thousand years. The result is strange and funny and genuinely illuminating in ways that are different from what Western philosophical traditions offer. For serious readers who have not read widely in Taoist thought, this is the best entry point. The philosophy shelf at byallo carries it.
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is the founding text of American conservation philosophy — Leopold's account of a Wisconsin farm across the seasons, followed by his Land Ethic — and it is the book that serious readers in the nature writing tradition often mean to read and haven't. It is the book that Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez were writing in response to, whether or not they say so. For someone who has read widely in nature writing, this is where it begins. The nature writing shelf at byallo carries it.
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is the novel that serious readers of American fiction often put off because its reputation for violence is accurate and its demands are real. It is also, by most reckonings, the most ambitious American novel of the twentieth century. The Judge is one of the great monsters of literature — a character who is not just evil but who has a coherent philosophy of evil that the novel treats with full seriousness. For the serious reader who has been putting it off, this is the nudge. The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries it.