Birth Year Project: 1965

Well-Known Books:

• The Comedians, Graham Greene

• Hotel, Arthur Hailey

• Dune, Frank Herbert

• Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman

• An American Dream, Norman Mailer

• The Source, James A. Michener

[Many lesser works by popular writers: Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, John D. MacDonald, Iris Murdoch, Irving Stone, Rex Stout, and others.]

Also: 

Two spy novels: Ian Fleming's, The Man with the Golden Gun (final James Bond novel by Fleming) and John le Carré's, The Looking-Glass War (said to be the antithesis of an 007 novel).

And two novels remembered because of the films made from them: Georgy Girl  [Margaret Forster] and Midnight Cowboy [Leo Herlihy].

My List:

• Closely Watched Trains, Bohumil Hrabal¹

• Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino²

• The Magus, John Fowles³

• The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosińksi⁴

• The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark*⁵

• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.⁶

• Stoner, John Williams⁷

[*I haven’t read]

Also:

Four significant nonfiction works:

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley and Malcolm X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Malcolm_X

• I Lost It At the Movies, Pauline Kael [first collection of reviews by The New Yorker's film critic]

• Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, Ralph Nader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed

• The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby [essays], Tom Wolfe [Wolfe's first published collection, an early example of "New Journalism";       set the stage for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Wolfe's classic account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test

1. [about the film]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closely_Watched_Trains

2. Vignettes concerning the creation of the universe. One of my faves [“All at One Point”] begins:

Through the calculations begun by Edwin P. Hubble on the galaxies’ velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe’s matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space.

Naturally, we were all there, — old Qfwfq said, — where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?

I say “packed like sardines,” using a literary image: in reality there wasn’t even space to pack us into. Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others in a single point, which was where we all were. In fact, we didn’t even bother one another, except for personality differences, because when space doesn’t exist, having somebody unpleasant like Mr. Pber^t Pber^d underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing.

3. Readers complained the book ended without enough resolution; Fowles published a revised edition in 1977.

4. The story of a young boy abandoned in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, a very grim, very tough novel, saturated with cruelty, mercilessness, disease, and abject superstition—if we didn’t know better, we’d think we were adrift in the Dark Ages, or in the darkest of fairy tales. But the writing is terrific. Here’s a little taste:

If it was true that there was no God, no Son, no Holy Mother, nor any of the lesser saints, what had happened to all my prayers? Were they perhaps circling in the empty heaven like a flock of birds whose nests had been destroyed by boys? 

5. But I’ve read a bunch of others and heartily recommend: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Girls of Slender Means (1963).

6. Vonnegut ranked this 4^th best of his novels—after Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Jailbird.

7. A sad little novel, another great save by New York Review of Books Press.

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Birth Year Project: A standing invitation

You supply your birth year [in a comment]; I'll respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been used, fret not; I'll do a fresh one.

Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post. 

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