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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:
...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