You Are What You Read: Baby Boomer Books

I'll also add:
"Bonfire of the Vanities" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil".

Eoe--

You're absolutely right about Black Literature being more than Malcolm X.

Gore Vidal should be on that list someplace.

I fit smack right dab in the baby boom generation

Never heard of:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The Whole Earth Catalog
A Confederate General from Big Sur
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
The Group
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Anywhere But Here


Have heard of or read about:
Catcher in the Rye
The Greening of America
The Medium is the Massage
Bright Lights, Big City
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Understanding Media
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
The Martian Chronicles
Candy
Fanny Hill
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Joy Luck Club
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


Not read but saw the movie:
Green Eggs and Ham
Lord of the rRngs
Slaughterhouse-Five
Catch-22
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Portnoy's Complaint
Valley of the Dolls
The Godfather
Breakfast at Tiffany's


Read:

Soul on Ice
Our Bodies, Ourselves (incomplete)
On the Road
Fear of Flying
The Feminine Mistique
To Kill a Mockingbird
Love Story
Lolita
The Joy of Sex
Fahrenheit 451

Read and was influenced:

The Stranger
Stranger in a Strange land
Lord of the Flies
The Little Red Book


Other references:

Woodstock Nation - Abbie Hoffman
Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen
Tools for Conviviality- Ivan Illich
Life Against Death - Norman O. Brown
On the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka
One-Dimensional Man - Herbert Marcuse
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn

I read the link. Not sure I agree with the premise. But I'm not exactly sure what the premise is.

I read many of the books on the list. I read many others, as well.

Was I influenced by any of the books on the list? Novels--I don't think so. But I'm not sure what "influenced" means in this context.

As for some of the nonfiction, I suspect that how I thought about and viewed things may have been affected. But that would apply to any book that provided information I didn't have before.

Do I view the books on the list as baby boomer books? Only insofar as most of them were written and released during the baby boomer generation. But people who came before and after that generation also read at least some of them.

I'm clearly missing something here. What? The pernt. Please won't someone enlighten me. (Note: I may be in an especially curmudgeonly state of mind today and am resisting what may be obvious.)

Count on Roberta to say what I was thinking so much more precisely.

I think Jones and I share the memories of a time when the books we were discovering illuminated entire new corners of the universe. Oh, Brave New World.

Perhaps "influence" is only inflated nostalgia.

I 'get' the article. Or part of it.

This in particular hit me as one of 'my' truths,

We had knapsacks and there were paperbacks in them. You couldn't really carry a hardback around in a pocketbook.

The ability to easily carry around books to read changed things. Changing the format of the media changes how you're able to access it.

...and the pressing favourites ... there were some circles were adults did talk about what they'd been reading, but it generally seemed almost something that adults were embarrassed about. They also didn't seem to loan each other the books they did have - it would mess up the shelves. If there were visible books in living rooms in many of the homes I visited, they were decor.

We talked about our books for hours and shared them and discussed them. When book clubs started to be popular I felt a bit like I was back in high school because that's what we did outside of class. A lot of my group dropped out of high school English - but we talked about our books non-stop after school.

Now, something I can relate to. Illumination which (IMO) applies to many books.

Nostalgia. You're missing the time when many of us read these books? When many people were reading them at the same time so we could talk about them?

Forgive me for being dense (and ornery).

Roberta--

You aren't being dense--you're being precise and forcing me to find the words to say exactly what I mean.

There was a time in the '50s and 60's when television sets had 13 channel settings--and fewer channels. Radio was local and the Internet was still twinkling in the eyes of the geeks.

Paperbacks were a common intellectual currency.

Yes, I was young then, but the world was a more focused place.

Add Summerhill--A.S. Neill.

Nodding to eBeth.

I have a real nostalgia for those big book conversations.

The last really good conversation I had about any book was a couple of years ago when I had a garage sale. A woman a few years older than myself bought my ancient tattered copy of Johnny Got His Gun and we fell into a conversation about when we had first read the book and what it had meant to us. It led to this long circular conversation that included how I thought the James Earl Jones character in Field of Dreams was supposed to really be Dalton Trumbo and why she didn't think so and so on and so on and so on.

Fabulous.

so true

as for the list, there's one book that i read at regular intervals

the martian chronicles

Being on the spot of the baby boomers' culture:

No self-help books.
No make-a-lot-of-money books.
Lots of hippish books.

The list has several very commercial books (i.e. Love Story) to make the less adventurous baby boomer reader confortable with it.

"The World According to Garp."

Generation of Vipers - Phillip Wylie

Catch-22's pretty good.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is all right. A rare occasion when the movie's better than the book.
Lolita - brilliant book on tape. Read by Jeremy Irons. A great drive through Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. Don't know how it would be on the page.
I thought the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was great when I was a teenage stoner in northern California.




But I'm not a boomer. There are a few books I know a lot of people my age have read. TV, on the other hand -- there are obsessions with Three's Company and Scooby Doo that I don't think anyone under 35 would entirely get, and I suspect there are associations with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which I've heard people rave about but couldn't even read) that I just don't get.

Wandeljw beat me to it.