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Best Books of the Decade: 1960's

Top 10 Best Books of the Decade: 1960's : Slaughterhouse-Five, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Where the Wild Things Are, Dune, Cat's Cradle, The Woman in the Dunes, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, The Phantom Tollbooth, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stranger in a Strange Land

Slaughterhouse-Five
AuthorKurt Vonnegut
ISBN0385333846
There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.

This is usually based on the following quote.
"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I...
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
AuthorRoald Dahl
ISBN0142403881
Tonight I just finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate factory with my son. This is the first chapter book I've read all the way through with him. And it was a ton of fun.

First off, I'll admit that I love the movie. I grew up with it. (I'm talking about the Gene Wilder version, of course.)I'll...
Where the Wild Things Are
AuthorMaurice Sendak
ISBN0099408392
One night Max puts on his wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind and another, so his mother calls him 'Wild Thing' and sends him to bed without his supper.

That night a forest begins to grow in Max's room and an ocean rushes by with a boat to take Max to the place where the wild things are.

Max...
Dune
AuthorFrank Herbert
A deluxe hardcover edition of Frank Herbert's epic masterpiece--a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.

This deluxe hardcover edition of Dune includes:
- An iconic new cover
- Stained edges and fully illustrated endpapers
-...
Cat's Cradle
AuthorKurt Vonnegut
ISBN0140285601
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For...
The Woman in the Dunes
AuthorKōbō Abe
ISBN0679733787
The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit....
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
AuthorJorge Luis Borges
ISBN0811200124
Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface, Andre Maurois writes: "Borges is a great writer who has composed only...
The Phantom Tollbooth
AuthorNorton Juster
ISBN0394820371
Librarian's Note: For an alternate cover edition of the same ISBN, click here.

Hailed as “a classic. . . . humorous, full of warmth and real invention” (The New Yorker), this beloved story -first published more than fifty years ago- introduces readers to Milo and his adventures in the Lands...
2001: A Space Odyssey
AuthorArthur C. Clarke
ISBN0451457994
On the Moon, an enigma is uncovered.

So great are the implications of this discovery that for the first time men are sent out deep into our solar system.

But long before their destination is reached, things begin to go horribly, inexplicably wrong...

One of the greatest-selling...
Stranger in a Strange Land
AuthorRobert A. Heinlein
ISBN0441788386
Apparently a classic of the sci-fi cannon, I'd never heard of this book until it came up on a book club here. It took me a long time to read only because of lack of time, and a rather annoying trait the author has that I'll go into later.

This is one of those books that tells us more about the period it...
Something Wicked This Way Comes
AuthorRay Bradbury
ISBN0380729407
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show...
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
AuthorJohn le Carré
In this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carre brings to light the shadowy dealings of international...
The Left Hand of Darkness
AuthorUrsula K. Le Guin
A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can choose—and change—their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must...
Silent Spring
AuthorRachel Carson
ISBN0618249060
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land,...
Harriet the Spy
AuthorLouise Fitzhugh
ISBN0440416795
Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. She's staked out a spy route, and she writes down everything about everyone she sees - including her classmates and her best friends - in her notebook.
I bet the lady with the cross-eye looks in the mirror and feels just terrible.

Pinky Whitehead will never change....
The Andromeda Strain
AuthorMichael Crichton
ISBN0060541814
The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the...
A Wizard of Earthsea
AuthorUrsula K. Le Guin
ISBN0553383043
”The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”


The Folio Society edition is superbly illustrated by David Lupton.

The boy is born on the island of Gont in the archipelago of Earthsea. This is a world infused with magic. Not everyone can control this magic, but those...
Valley of the Dolls
AuthorJacqueline Susann
ISBN0802135196
Dolls: red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight-for Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three women become best friends when they are young and struggling in New York City and then climb to the top of...
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
AuthorMaya Angelou
ISBN0553279378
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many...
The French Lieutenant's Woman
AuthorJohn Fowles
ISBN0099478331
The scene is the village of Lyme Regis on Dorset's Lyme Bay..."the largest bite from the underside of England's out-stretched southwestern leg." The major characters in the love-intrigue triangle are Charles Smithson, 32, a gentleman of independent means & vaguely scientific bent; his fiancée,...
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
AuthorMalcolm X
Alternate cover for ISBN 9780345350688

Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister....
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
AuthorMichel Foucault
Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 – from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to...
Papillon
AuthorHenri Charrière
ISBN0061120669
Henri Charrière, called "Papillon," for the butterfly tattoo on his chest, was convicted in Paris in 1931 of a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: escape. After planning and executing a series of treacherous...
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
AuthorPaulo Freire
ISBN0826412769
First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United...
A Moveable Feast
AuthorErnest Hemingway
ISBN0099285045
Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the twenties are deeply personal, warmly affectionate, and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald...
The Last Unicorn
AuthorPeter S. Beagle
ISBN0451450523
alternate cover editions can be found here, here and here

She was magical, beautiful beyond belief—and completely alone...

The unicorn had lived since before memory in a forest where death could touch nothing. Maidens who caught a glimpse of her glory were blessed by enchantment...
The Chosen
AuthorChaim Potok
ISBN0449213447
Danny Saunders en Reuven Malter groeien in de jaren veertig van de vorige eeuw op in een gemeenschap van chassidische joden in New York. Danny is orthodox opgevoed en voorbestemd zijn vader op te volgen als rabbijn. Het milieu waarin zijn vriend Reuven opgroeit, is veel moderner. Steeds meer wordt Danny...
A Canticle for Leibowitz
AuthorWalter M. Miller Jr.
ISBN0060892994
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature—a chilling and still provocative...
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
AuthorRobert A. Heinlein
ISBN0340837942
It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth. It is a tale of a culture whose family structures are based on the presence of two men for every woman, leading to novel forms of marriage and family. It is the story of the disparate people, a computer...
Portnoy's Complaint
AuthorPhilip Roth
ISBN0099399016
The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy, who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Hilariously funny, boldly intimate, startlingly candid, Portnoy’s Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon...
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
AuthorJohn Steinbeck
ISBN0142000701
A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California’s Monterey Peninsula

To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover...
On Death and Dying
AuthorElisabeth Kübler-Ross
ISBN0684839385
One of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century, On Death and Dying grew out of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous interdisciplinary seminar on death, life, and transition. In this remarkable book, Dr. Kübler-Ross first explored the now-famous five stages of death:...
Fox in Socks
AuthorDr. Seuss
ISBN0007158475
In this hilarious book, the irrepressible Fox in Socks teaches a baffled Mr. Knox some of the slickest, quickest tongue-twisters in town.

With his unique combination of hilarious stories, zany pictures and riotous rhymes, Dr. Seuss has been delighting young children and helping them learn...
Dragonflight
AuthorAnne McCaffrey
ISBN0345484266
HOW CAN ONE GIRL SAVE AN ENTIRE WORLD?

To the nobles who live in Benden Weyr, Lessa is nothing but a ragged kitchen girl. For most of her life she has survived by serving those who betrayed her father and took over his lands. Now the time has come for Lessa to shed her disguise—and take back her stolen...
The Feminine Mystique
AuthorBetty Friedan
ISBN0393346781
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined...
Collected Poems, 1909-1962
AuthorT.S. Eliot
ISBN0151189781
There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that T.S. Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.

Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of...
Mother Night
AuthorKurt Vonnegut
ISBN0385334141
Librarian note: Alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with...
The Crying of Lot 49
AuthorThomas Pynchon
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humor, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd...
Ubik
AuthorPhilip K. Dick
ISBN8498000831
Glen Runciter está muerto. ¿O lo están todos los demás? Lo que es seguro es que alguien ha muerto en una explosión organizada por los competidores de Runciter. De hecho, sus empleados asisten a un funeral. Pero durante el duelo comienzan a recibir mensajes descorcentantes, e incluso morbosos,...
The Sneetches and Other Stories
AuthorDr. Seuss
ISBN0007158505
Illus. in full color. "Four funny easy-to-read stories all with subtly planted moral lessons."--Publishers Weekly.  

THE SNEETCHES
"Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches / Had bellies with stars. / The Plain-Belly Sneetches / Had none upon thars." This collection of four of Dr. Seuss's...
Pale Fire
AuthorVladimir Nabokov
ISBN0141185260
The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous?...
The Book of Three
AuthorLloyd Alexander
ISBN0805080481
Taran wanted to be a hero, and looking after a pig wasn't exactly heroic, even though Hen Wen was an oracular pig. But the day that Hen Wen vanished, Taran was led into an enchanting and perilous world. With his band of followers, he confronted the Horned King and his terrible Cauldron-Born. These were...
Ramona the Pest
AuthorBeverly Cleary
ISBN0192750976
This is the second title in the hugely popular series about Ramona Quimby. Ramona doesn't think she's a pest - she knows that she isn't a pest on purpose. So how in the world does Ramona get in trouble? Why does Davy run away whenever Ramona comes near him? And how does she manage to disrupt the whole kindergarten...
The Clown
AuthorHeinrich Böll
Acclaimed entertainer Hans Schnier collapses when his beloved Marie leaves him because he won’t marry her within the Catholic Church. The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies...
Up the Down Staircase
AuthorBel Kaufman
ISBN0060973617
Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase is one of the best-loved novels of our time. It has been translated into sixteen languages, made into a prize-winning motion picture, and staged as a play at high schools all over the United States; its very title has become part of the American idiom.

Never...
Herzog
AuthorSaul Bellow
ISBN0142437298
This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend - Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters...
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