Do you enjoy books written in the 1960s or takes place during that decade? Then check out this book list...
1) "The Pigman" by Paul Zindel
The Pigman is Mr. Angelo Pignati, dupe, patron, playmate, responsibility of high school sophomores John Conlan and Lorraine Jensen, who take turns telling what happened. . ""but you really can't say we murdered him."" Hooked like that, you really can't stop reading either, although this echoes the current preoccupation with floundering kids and niggling parents and the abyss between, underlined: ""I don't want to be a phony. . . . I want to be me."" Lorraine and John are sympatico, not sweethearts; home and school are hollow; not so old Mr. Pignati pretending that his wife isn't dead, showing off the collection of pigs he gave her, going to the zoo every day to visit the baboon. And telling jokes and playing games like a kid, with TV and refreshments and no sweat: a refuge. Then he is hospitalized with a heart attack (after chasing John up the stairs on roller skates) and Lorraine and John have the house to themselves. The first evening they sense each other differently. Before Mr. Pignati is scheduled to come home they throw a bottle party and the house is in chaos, the pigs shattered, when he walks in. Not smiling; crying, a policeman says after. Contrite, Lorraine and John insist he meet them at the zoo the next day but the baboon has died and the Pigman has a fatal stroke. ""There was no one else to blame anymore. . . . Our life would be what we made it--nothing more, nothing less."" Insistently rebellious as this is (John smokes, drinks, plays practical jokes deliberately), it's not churlish like some of its sort. And though the kids miss coalescing as individuals, there are moments when you know just what they're talking about.
2) "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Us and its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about. Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorker are being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely. The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
3) "Over Sea, Under Stone" by Susan Cooper
...that's the cryptic route followed in this story which starts as a typical Juvenile mystery/adventure but then turns out to be a morality tale with a struggle between forces of good and evil. Simon, Jane and Barney Drew go with their parents on a vacation to an old house in Cornwall Which their Great-Uncle rented for the occasion. Great-Uncle Merry is a scholar specializing in Arthurian history and legend, a mysterious person who seems larger than life. The children decide to go on a quest and immediately locate a hidden chamber and an aged manuscript. The manuscript turns out to be a description of the hiding of Arthur's grail and of the key to its understanding which were supposed to usher in the Coming of the new Pendragon ("And that day shall see a new Logres, with evil cast out; when the old world shall appear no more than a dream."). Only the children are able to carry on the Search. Great-Uncle Merry seems to know all the answers, but he can only watch, advise a little, and protect them from the forces of evil represented by a personage mas-querading as the vicar and a fashionable young couple yachting in the area. The story, which starts slowly, becomes more compelling as the supernatural starts to take over, although the mystic powers never reach the terrifying proportions they should have, and the ending, necessarily ambiguous, seems uncomfortably contrived. The theme of good and evil in violent opposition is always a forceful one, but beyond this book's capacity.
4) "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing has been established in England, rather than here, as one of the most interesting writers since the '40's and this remarkable book, unquestionably her major work to date, reflects a savage intelligence which does not exclude passion. Technically the novel is intriguing, subdivided in alternating, cyclical sections, and the prefatory Free Women introduce Anna Wulf and her friend Molly, emancipated and enlightened, living "emotionally hand to mouth". Most of the novel however is devoted to the notebooks kept by Anna: The Black Notebook which covers a period during the war in South Africa and a first nostalgic love; The Red Notebook spans the 1950's, her entry into the Party, her disaffection and a five year affair; The Yellow Notebook is a novel written within this novel in which she projects and paraphrases her own experience; and The Blue Notebook, the most contemporary, is filled with her analysis, a short-lived marriage, her daughter, and finally a very devastating affair which leads up to the final reprise in the notebook of the title. Perhaps a claim of one of the characters may be used to define the book, that the real revolution of our time is not Chinese- not Russian- but that of "women against men", women, like Anna, who achieve freedom only to submit to chaos, and certainly the notebooks are a device to mirror her anxiety, discomfort and fragmentation as she drifts through experiences with careful men, non-committed men, castrated men. With all its passionate probing and deliberate truthtelling, it is sexually, biologically clinical to a point which may offend some readers. Others will find it a painful, revelatory, fascinating book, and while Doris Lessing is not as glittering a writer as Simone de Beauvoir, some of her concerns may occasion the comparison and suggest a market.
5) "Okay For Now" by Gary D. Schmidt
It’s 1968. The Vietnam War and Apollo 11 are in the background, and between a war in a distant land and a spacecraft heading to the moon, Doug Swieteck starts a new life in tiny Marysville, N.Y. He hates “stupid Marysville,” so far from home and his beloved Yankee Stadium, and he may have moved away, but his cruel father and abusive brothers are still with him. Readers of the Newbery Honor–winning The Wednesday Wars (2007) will remember Doug, now less edgy and gradually more open to the possibilities of life in a small town. Each chapter opens with a print of a John James Audubon painting, and Mr. Powell, the town librarian, teaches Doug to paint and see the world as an artist. He meets pretty Lillian Spicer, just the feisty friend Doug needs, and a whole cast of small-town characters opens Doug to what he might be in the world. This is Schmidt’s best novel yet—darker than The Wednesday Wars and written with more restraint, but with the same expert attention to voice, character and big ideas. By the end of this tale, replete with allusions to Our Town, Doug realizes he’s pretty happy in Marysville, where holding hands with the green-eyed girl—and a first kiss—rival whatever might be happening on the moon. (Historical fiction. 10-14)
6) "Stoner" by John Williams
John Williams is a professor of English at the University of Denver and this novel which is about a professor of English at the University of Missouri has no doubt some, if not considerable, basis in his own experience even though it subdues it more than, say, R. V. Cassill or Carlos Baker. Actually Mr. Williams' novel is altogether subdued and in keeping with the character he has created with care, conscience and consistency, perhaps at the expense of the readers he might hope to attract. William Stoner is a shy, awkward, reserved young man to begin with when he comes off the farm and his primary experiences are unlikely to make him more assured and expansive. He marries the prohibitively prim Edith who, in the one period when she is not sexually inviolable, manages to have a child, Grace. But she will attempt to keep Grace at some distance from her father. Stoner, midway in his career, has a real crisis of principle with the new chairman of the English Department who will pillory him from then on. He has only one rewarding personal experience, an affair with a graduate student, forcibly curtailed because of campus gossip. And he retreats further to teach, with an almost anonymous, dogged dedication until his death--cancer....His story is told in monochomatic shades of grey and it is to Mr. Williams' credit that he achieves for Stoner the sympathy he deserves. More, perhaps not.
7) "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates
It's hard to think that there's too much wrong with April and Frank Wheeler over and above what has been tagged the disenchantment syndrome of the average young married couple in the suburbs. An attractive pair (April is beautiful), with two children, a home in Connecticut, and friends nearby a little less limited than the rest of their neighbors,- still -- a lot has rubbed off since they first played house together in a Village apartment. But while Frank has been able to accept a dullish job with a big business in New York, April's Bovaryish boredom, her reproaches, her flare-ups and nights spent on the sofa, would indicate that she is more than just a chafed spirit. For April's discontent is a real emotional destitution, and this, to Yates' great credit, is only imperceptibly apparent. There is her irresponsible, unrealistic plan to get away from the ""hopeless emptiness of everything"" by going to Europe where they can find ""a world of intellect and sensibility"". Frank goes along with it, although he is offered a ""challenging"" new job- until April is pregnant again and threatens to abort herself. There is talk- of getting help, of starting again- as they were, but the moment of truth, April's hopeless alienation, comes only after the irreparable fact...... Yates, a new novelist (an O'Henry award earlier and an appearance in the Scribner annual) has an unerring eye and ear and ar so that his first novel, while maybe not important, is certainly aware and alive.
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