Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

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Nostalgia is me.  Tonight, I am looking at books that were important in the 60’s.  For me the 60’s meant graduating from high school, graduating from college and getting married along with my first teaching job and then moving to my present location where we have lived for 49 years.  I went from small libraries to even smaller ones.  In between, there were bookstores on the main drag in East Lansing, but only for three years.  I ended up the 60’s depending on a scifi/fantasy catalog that came once a month.

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Of course there was a great deal of pain in those years as we lost Medgar Evers, JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X.  There was the horror of so many people injured and killed to get voting rights.  These true stories are told by Taylor Branch in his trilogy below and in March a graphic trilogy by John Lewis.

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  Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963

   Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65

  At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68

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I wasn’t sure I could mention The Lord of the Rings though I read it in the 60’s, but bookgirl made this point below:

bookgirl

October 17 · 08:15:13 PM

...Then again, 1965 was when Ballantine published The Lord of the Rings. Buying those three books sometime between 1968 and 1970 was a highlight of my early teens.

  

 

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List:  (These books shaped my life)

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/18.Best_Books_of_the_Decade_1960_s

My favorites of the lengthy list:  (There are so many more on the list that I liked, but I can’t list them all so you get to add to them below)  (I will go with other decades in the future) (A few of these I read later in life than the 60’s)

To Kill a Mockingbird
by

Harper Lee

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by

Ken Kesey

Catch-22
by

Joseph Heller

A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1)
by

Madeleine L'Engle

Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)
by

Frank Herbert

Flowers for Algernon
by

Daniel Keyes

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
by

John le Carré

A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)
by

Ursula K. Le Guin

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by

Maya Angelou

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by

Malcolm X

The Last Unicorn (The Last Unicorn, #1)
by

Peter S. Beagle

The Chosen
by

Chaim Potok

Dragonflight (Dragonriders of Pern, #1)
by

Anne McCaffrey

The Book of Three (The Chronicles of Prydain, #1)
by

Lloyd Alexander

Ramona the Pest (Ramona, #2)
by

Beverly Cleary

The Mouse and the Motorcycle (Ralph S. Mouse, #1)
by

Beverly Cleary

Up the Down Staircase
by

Bel Kaufman

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Also the play and the movie

A Man for All Seasons
by

Robert Bolt

The Source
by

James A. Michener

Letter from the Birmingham Jail
by

Martin Luther King Jr.

Mila 18
by

Leon Uris

Rhinocéros
by

Eugène Ionesco

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
by

Hannah Green

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
by

Aldo Leopold

Black Like Me
by

John Howard Griffin

The Mask of Apollo
by

Mary Renault

That Quail, Robert
by

Margaret A. Stanger

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
by

Vincent van Gogh

How Children Fail
by

John Holt

Lisa, Bright and Dark
by

John Neufeld

I Heard the Owl Call My Name
by

Margaret Craven

The Heaven Tree Trilogy
by

Edith Pargeter

The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)
by

Dorothy Dunnett

When The Legends Die
by

Hal Borland

Lisa and David
by

Theodore Isaac Rubin

The Mouse That Roared
by

Leonard Wibberley

Journey into the Whirlwind by

Evgenia Ginzburg

The First Circle
by

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I read In the First Circle which added things he couldn’t say in the first book.

(The First Uncensored Edition)

(Foreword…In 1968 an expurgated version titled The First Circle came out in many languages. The loss in English of the preposition “In”…subtly shifts the novel’s focus from people in a place to the place itself; the present version eliminates this distortion…Compared with the version previously available in English, the plot has been altered, depictions of some major characters have been substantially modified, new characters have been introduced, and many entirely excised chapters have been reinstated. For readers familiar with the previously available English version, In the First Circle will be a revelation).

The Learning Tree
by

Gordon Parks

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Next week:  The books of the 70’s.  So many great books were published in that decade also.  

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Jai McDowall sings 'To where you are'

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Head Full Of Dreams - an AIDS Walk Austin diary ($100 match today)

anotherdemocrat

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/10/17/1804809/-Head-Full-Of-Dreams-an-AIDS-Walk-Austin-diary-100-match-today