Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."
~Helen Exley
So many dangerous books that make us think, so little time. I am grateful to the dangerous books. Perhaps all books are. Those who would ban books often ban titles that are important to me. It takes courage for an author to write a dangerous book.
A book that is deemed dangerous to the community may cause the world to shift and change. Plays, speeches, movies, and songs count.
Books ask us to question and to look at more than one side of things. The stories involve us with characters and we are sucked into their world and see things with their eyes and that makes us more aware of other ways of seeing the world.
In the 60’s as I entered college, my world opened up as I read dangerous books from that time and the years before.
A list of people’s favorites
http://www.goodreads.com/...
A site about the 60’s mentions books
http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/...
Literature also reflected what was happening in the political arenas and social issues of America in the sixties. A book which described some of the turmoil of race relations as they affected people in America, Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a small southern town and social distinctions between races.
Writing about race and gender, women of color like Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou and Margaret Walker Alexander helped create new insights on feminism as it developed in America. Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), and Mary McCarthy (The Group) spoke of women in roles outside those of the happy wife and mother of the fifties. Women like Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique , and Gloria Steinem , led the way for many women. Disillusionment with the system was the theme of books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Marshall McLuhan, author of books on communications and the scope of the "global village," popularized his belief that mass communications were a driving force in the development of modern society in works like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media . The Peter Principle, by Laurence Peter, came to epitomize incompetence. In 1963, Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are, about a boy named Max who must face some of his childhood fears. This controversial book with its illustrations, also by Sendak, won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and has become a classic in children's literature...
Books that define the time:
The Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
The Games People Play -Eric Berne
Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
Unsafe at any Speed - Ralph Nader
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Children's Book Award Winners of the 60's
Newbery Award Winners - Began in 1922 (awarded to the most distinguished children's book of the previous year)
- Onion John by Joseph Krumgold
- Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
- The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
- It's Like This, Cat by Emily Neville
- Shadow of a Bull by Maia Wojciechowska
- I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino
- Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
- The High King by Lloyd Alexander
A list of the Best Sellers of the 60’s is here
http://www.caderbooks.com/...
The books that I read that really made me think when I was young include the usual suspects of Dickens, Alcott, Austen, Dumas and other classics. But when I left high school in 1962, a whole world of books opened up for me as paperbacks came into fashion not just for westerns, but for world class literature.
A song and speech that kept me going all these years
We Shall Overcome
Pete Seeger
http://www.youtube.com/...
Martin Luther King, Jr. (speech)
We Shall Overcome
http://www.youtube.com/...
A baker's dozen of books/plays that were dangerous for me.
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The Octopus by Frank Norris
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Hiroshima by John Hersey
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
I have read so many authors who have opened my mind and my heart: Baldwin, O’Neill, Heinlein, Herbert, Tolkien, L’Engle, Le Guin, Hersey, MacLean, Michener, Kenneth Roberts, Shute, Stone, Uris, Steinbeck, Rumer Godden, Le Carré, Wouk, Potok, Malamud, Welty, Faulkner, Maugham, Graham Greene, Tennessee Williams, Wiesel, Styron, Walker, Wilder, Ginott, Irving, Oates, Keanelly, Eco, Wright, Rushdie, White, Angelou, Kafka, McCullers, Orwell, Huxley, Vine Deloria Jr, Heller, Solzhenitsyn, Hemingway, Plath, Warren, Buck and many more.
What dangerous and enlightening books have you read? Which authors or books would be on your list?
wiki has the lists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The Letters N and O
Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977) Lolita
Azar Nafisi
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Things I’ve Been Silent About
V. S. Naipaul (born 1932) A House for Mr. Biswas
Sena Jeter Naslund (born 1942) Ahab's Wife or the Star Gazer
Melissa Nathan Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field
Robert Nathan (1894 – 1985) Portrait of Jennie
Gloria Naylor (born 1950) The Women of Brewster Place, Mama Day
Halina Nelken And Yet, I Am Here
Howard Nemerov (1920 – 1991) The Homecoming Game
Irene Nemirovsky Suite Francaise
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), English children's novelist and short story writer. Five Children and It, The Railway Children
John Neufeld Lisa, Bright and Dark
Katherine Neville (born 1945) The Eight
John Nichols (born 1940) The Milagro Beanfield War
Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) Roman History
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Audrey Niffenegger (born 1963) The Time Traveler's Wife
Anaïs Nin (1903 – 1977) A Spy in the House of Love
Larry Niven (born 1938) Ringworld
Charles Nordhoff (1887 – 1947) Mutiny on the Bounty (with James Norman Hall)
Frank Norris (1870 – 1902) McTeague, The Octopus
Kathleen Norris (1880 – 1966) Second Hand Wife, The Cloister Walk
Sterling North (1906-1974) Rascal, The Wolfing
Andre Norton (1912 – 2005) The Witch World, The Stars are Ours!, Star Gate, The Beast Master
Mary Norton (1903-1992) The Borrowers series, Bedknob and Broomstick
Josip Novakovich (born 1956) April Fool's Day
Naomi Novik the Temeraire series
..............................
Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) Them, We Were the Mulvaneys
Barack Obama Dreams from My Father
Genevieve Obert Prince Borghese’s Trail or Peking to Paris : 10,000 Miles over Two Continents, Four Deserts and the Roof of the World in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge
Patrick O'Brian (1914–2000) Golden Ocean, the Aubrey–Maturin series
Tim O'Brien (born 1946) Going After Cacciato
Edwin O'Connor (1918 – 1968) The Last Hurrah
Flannery O'Connor (1925 – 1964) The Violent Bear It Away
Frank O'Connor (1903-1966) Frank O'Connor — Collected Stories
Scott O'Dell (1898-1989) Island of the Blue Dolphins, The King's Fifth, The Black Pearl
Nuala O’Faolain My Dream of You
Chris Offutt (born 1958) The Good Brother, No Heroes
John O'Hara (1905 – 1970) Appointment in Samarra
Olaf Olafsson Journey Home
Robert Olmstead (born 1954) A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go
Tillie Olsen (1913–2007) Tell Me A Riddle
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Stewart O'Nan (born 1961) The Speed Queen
Michael Ondaatje b. 1943 The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, Anil's Ghost, Divisadero
Irene Opydyke and Armstrong In My Hands
Baroness Orczy (1865–1947) The Scarlet Pimpernel
Edward Ormondroyd (children’s stories...a gift from my friend Julie)
David and the Phoenix
Time at the Top
P. J. O'Rourke Eat the Rich
George Orwell
Animal Farm
1984
Ovid Metamorphoses
Janis Owens (born 1960) My Brother, Michael, Myra Sims, The Schooling of Claybird Catts, The Cracker Kitchen
Amos Oz Don’t Call It Night
Cynthia Ozick (born 1928) The Puttermesser Papers
I have read 33 of the authors.
Diaries of the Week
Write On! Well-done stakes.
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Thurgood Marshall Jr. responds
by teacherken
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A review of Jonathan Alter's book on Obama's first year.
by onanyes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
George Orwell and Howard Zinn on Nationalism
by JekyllnHyde
http://www.dailykos.com/...
To Tell The Truth: Procedurals, or How to "How To"
by Word Alchemy
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile
by Black Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Another new series that is off to an interesting start:
This week in the American Civil War: July 1-7, 1860 (Poll)
by The Cheshire Cat
http://www.dailykos.com/...
NOTE: plf515 has changed his book talk to Wednesday mornings early.
sarahnity’s list of DKos authors has grown so much that she has her own diary.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
sarahnity says:
It turns out that we have quite a few authors hanging out here who have published books in the real world. A while ago, I started keeping a list of books by Kossacks, former Kossacks and Kossacks-once-removed. I was posting it each week to the diary series What Are You Reading and Bookflurries, but the list has grown long enough, that I've decided to turn it into a diary and post it as a weekly series on Tuesday evenings.
Not all Kossack authors may wish to lose their anonymity, so I am only including the author's UID if he has outed herself here (gender confusion intended). If you'd like to be included on the list, or if you know of an author who is left off, please leave a comment or email me.
(sarahnity@gmail.com)