10 books from 1968 still worth reading today
In this 50th anniversary year, people are revisiting major events of 1968, such as the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Tet offensive in Vietnam. They’re re-examining, or simply re-grooving on, memorable recordings of 1968, including The Beatles’ “White Album.”
Now let’s reconsider books published in 1968. Here are 10 I recommend as pleasurable and worth reading today, with a few afterthoughts about other books following the list.
“A Wizard of Earthsea,” Ursula K. Le Guin. In this fantasy novel, the first in a series, Le Guin portrays the growth of the young mage Ged, who would become a great wizard of his world but suffer along the way, often through his envy and impatience. The gist of her story is contained in this powerful advice to Ged from a senior mage: “Every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!” While published as a children’s book, “A Wizard of Earthsea” has a wide adult following. Recommended for Harry Potter fans.
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” Philip K. Dick. Remember when Dick’s sci-fi novels were a cool cult thing because he seemed so far out? His paranoia and tales of immersive shared realities seem scarily on the nose today. In “Do Androids Dream,” the source material for the film “Blade Runner,” a bounty hunter tracks down rogue androids to terminate them, in the hope of being able to buy a scarce real animal for his depressed wife.
“The Double Helix,” James D. Watson. Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Watson describes how he and fellow scientist Francis Crick came to identify the structure of the DNA as a double helix, making possible the enormous strides in medicine and genetics that have followed. Watson’s account is controversial for several reasons. It’s more personal than such narratives tended to be, with comments and remarks about fellow scientists. Also, supporters of the late Rosalind Franklin, whose research was important in understanding the structure of DNA, have accused Watson of diminishing her. I’d recommended readers turn to “The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix” (2012), edited by Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski, with many photos and documents that provide context.
“Dragonflight,” Anne McCaffrey. Like Le Guin, McCaffrey launched an immensely popular speculative fiction series in 1968. To fight periodic invasions of their planet by toxic spores, the people of Pern have engineered dragons that bond telepathically with human riders. The story begins with the search for a woman to bond with a new dragon queen and become its rider, giving McCaffrey room to explore the conflicts and tensions in this feudal world. “Dragonflight” and two succeeding novels can be found in the one-volume collection “The Dragonriders of Pern.”
“House Made of Dawn,” N. Scott Momaday. This poetic novel blazed the trail for mainstream readers of fiction about American Indian life by indigenous writers. Abel, Momaday’s protagonist, is neither fully at home on the Jemez Pueblo reservation in New Mexico nor in Los Angeles.
“Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer,” edited by Dick Schaap. Packers guard Jerry Kramer, recently elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, kept notes through the 1967 season, from the opening of training camp through the legendary Ice Bowl victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL championship game. Schaap edited Kramer’s notes into this enjoyable narrative. It can seem almost genteel today, given 24-hour coverage of pro sports athletes and their foibles. But it offers a personal window into coach Vince Lombardi and one of pro football’s greatest teams.
“Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Joan Didion. Didion’s first book of magazine articles and personal essays captures the zeitgeist of the time, with such subjects as Joan Baez, John Wayne and, most notably, life on hippie ground central, Haight St. in San Francisco. Her book continues to be compelling reading because of the cool, remarkable voice she displays in such essays as “On Keeping a Notebook” and “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind.”
“Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” James Baldwin. Baldwin is frequently invoked today as a cultural critic and essayist. But his fiction matters, too. “Tell Me How Long” captures the texture of the life of an African-American actor who has sexual relationships with both women and men, white and black.
“To Be a Slave,” Julius Lester. In this small nonfiction book for children, illustrated by Tom Feelings, Lester uses excerpts from the narratives of former slaves to describe their lives, from capture and the passage to America through working on plantations, resistance to slave owners and emancipation. The truths it reveals are harsh. But Lester’s book has an enduring dignity because the former slaves are telling the story.
“True Grit,” by Charles Portis. As terrific as the 1969 and 2010 movie adaptations were, Portis’ novel brings the superior pleasure of immersion in the distinctive narrative voice of Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old Biblequoting girl who recruits the meanest possible U.S. marshal, Rooster Cogburn, to help her hunt down her father’s killer. This brilliant Western was the Waukesha Reads book in 2017.
Afterthoughts: Proving the staying power of science fiction and fantasy literature, I could have filled up this list with such works from 1968. In addition to Le Guin, Dick and McCaffrey’s novels, that year gave us Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Keith Roberts’ alternate historical “Pavane,” multiple novels from John Brunner and Larry Niven, and Stanislaw Lem’s “His Master’s Voice.”
For readers interested in the milieu of 1968, consider Norman Mailer’s nonfiction novel “Armies of the Night,” about the late 1967 march on the Pentagon, and Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice,” a controversial memoir and essay collection from the imprisoned Cleaver. Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, is a showcase for Wolfe’s dazzling style. David McCullough’s first book, “The Johnstown Flood,” launched him as a great popular writer of American history.
Literary readers can turn to a pair of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novels first published in 1968, “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle”; Alice Munro’s story collection “Dance of the Happy Shades”; Yukio Mishima’s “Spring Snow”; William H. Gass’ story collection “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”; and Julio Cortázar’s experimental “62: A Model Kit.”
Popular fiction choices include Arthur Hailey’s “Airport,” John Updike’s “Couples,” John Irving’s debut “Setting Free the Bears” and Georgette Heyer’s historical romance “Cousin Kate.”