The Ongoing
. . . going on
August Macke (Germany, 1887-1914), Blue Girl Reading (1912)
[Put cursor over footnote for pop-up.]
The last few posts were rather content-heavy, so today’s will be a quickie.
If you’ve been on this ride awhile, you know all about the Birth Year Project. If you’re new, the fine points are spelled out below [along with another ongoing project, Shelter From the Storm].
The time around our births remains a blind spot for most of us, I’ve long thought. What were the grown-ups reading? What was all the hype centered on? We’ve come to expect a chasm between the most-sold titles and ones most-revered by serious readers over the long haul. In 2018, the tireless Emily Temple at LitHub posted a year-by-year breakdown of the prior century’s bestsellers, plus examples from each year of great novels/story collections you don’t see listed.1
What you find, the farther back you go in time:
Scads of books and writers you’ve never heard of—
Books by writers whose names seem familiar but whose work you don’t know—
Books you’ve never heard of by writers you have read—
And a few titles that sold well at the time and became classics.
The first few Birth Year Project pages are scattered among the regular posts. Later, I figured out how to give them a bespoke shelf [see button on menu bar]. The more-recent ones tend to be more expansive.
The first bunch: 1950, 1978, 1965, 1992, 1963, 1984 . . .
The Birth Year Project shelf: 1961, 1966, 1946, 1952, 1971, 1969, 1964
Here’s an example:
Official description below—along with another called Shelter From the Storm.
Birth Year Project:
You supply your birth year, I 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 done, I'll do an update. So far, we’ve done 13 years altogether, between 1946 and 1978.
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.
Shelter from the Storm:
The concept: Each of us has a small cache of books we know and esteem that even other readers like ourselves likely don't know—our discoveries, books we feel a special need to keep out of the clutches of oblivion. I invite you to recommend one.
The details:
One per subscriber [for now].
Tell us why, in one sentence.
When there's enough for a list, I'll post.
You can have your name attached, or not—up to you.
And finally . . .
The keen-eyed will have noticed a new button on the menu bar—Short Story Hall of Fame. What to know about this:
These are simply my favorite stories. Every time I put up a post I’ll add at least one new story title to the HoF. Since I’m older than most of you (all??), this list will focus on stories at least twenty years old, since you may be less likely to know them already, and since they’re good models if you’re a fellow story writer.
You might recognize this painting from an earlier post. I plucked the image off the internet, but later decided I wanted to know where it came from, did a Google image search, and it popped right up. Not only that, it turned out the original was for sale on Etsy [$63.].
It’s now on display here in David’s Lists 2.0’s inner sanctum.
Emily Temple: https://lithub.com/here-are-the-biggest-fiction-bestsellers-of-the-last-100-years/ It’s illuminating to spend a few minutes poking about in these lists.
I'd like to participate in the Birth Year Project! Here's mine: 1980.
Hello David, Please add my birth year of 1959 to your project! Thanks, Monika