Portland writer Ursula Le Guin (The Oregonian)

The "best books of 2017" lists are out, and they offer up a lot of great reading opportunities. But, inevitably, something is missing, something important.

That would be critical distance. True classics by definition stand the test of time, and so we don’t yet know for sure if any of this year’s “best books” actually qualify as great works.

Books from 1967, on the other hand, now have five decades behind them. That long-ago year -- with its Summer of Love, its faraway war reaching the homeland, its growing political and cultural upheavals -- was sui generis. And yet in key ways the present day feels like its echo. That makes the best books from 50 years ago ripe for rediscovery.

Below are the 1967 tomes, some famous and some mostly forgotten, that still offer engrossing reading in 2017:

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Associated Press

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

Fred Powledge, in his New York Times review of “Black Power,” called author Stokely Carmichael “the anti-hero of the civil rights movement.” But Powledge feared the too-brief book would lead readers to view its title as little more than a “scare phrase.” He continued: “That would be tragic, for there are a lot of Americans who are black and a lot who are white and who are looking for a way out of our dilemma, and Black Power sounds to them like a beginning.”

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The Chosen

Chaim Potok's first novel has not faded into the folds of literary history. The book, about a friendship between two Jewish boys in New York, can be found on many school reading lists. In 1967, Kirkus Reviews called it "a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox." More than 30 years after he reviewed it for The New York Times, Hugh Nissenson said "The Chosen" is "harmonious in all its parts ... [it] remains in the mind like the memory of actual experience. It gives the illusion of life."

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The Oregonian

City of Illusions

This short gem from Portland literary icon Ursula K. Le Guin is set in the same universe as her classic, later novel “The Left Hand of Darkness.” The story involves a space alien named Falk who ends up on a dystopic future Earth and, suffering from amnesia, undertakes a quest to find himself.

"In many ways this is tentative and imperfect Le Guin," Kirkus Reviews wrote in 2011, before adding: "But the writing -- particularly the descriptions of Falk's westward trek -- has the generous ardor and judiciousness which mark Le Guin as the rara avis she is: a sci-fi novelist writing for grownups."

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Styron (AP)

The Confessions of Nat Turner

William Styron’s novel, about a true-life 1831 slave revolt, landed on the bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize. The following year, a small publishing house put out a collection of essays, “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” that suggested Styron was racist and instantly made his novel controversial. The book of criticism “demands attention,” The New York Times wrote, “not so much because of the questions it raises about Styron’s novel as for what it reveals about the thinking of intellectuals in the Black Power movement.”

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Counter-Clock World

Philip K. Dick’s novel, heralded as “the most theologically probing of all of Dick’s books,” offers up a world in which time moves backward. People rise from the dead, get younger, uneat meals, and finally zap into nothingness from the womb.

The mind-bending novel started out as a short story, “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday,” published in Amazing Stories magazine.

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The Associated Press

The Death of a President

Jacqueline Kennedy handpicked historian William Manchester to write the definitive account of her husband’s assassination. But Jackie ended up being unhappy with the result and filed suit to stop the book’s publication. Other members of John F. Kennedy’s family piled on. Sen. Robert Kennedy even ambushed Manchester at a hotel. “Bill, I know you’re in there!” he yelled, pounding on the door of the writer’s suite. “Bill! Bill, I know you’re in there!”

“The Death of a President” was a massive bestseller and received good reviews, though some of the people who appeared in its pages grumbled about how they were depicted. Texas Gov. John Connally, wounded by the “magic bullet” on Nov. 22, 1963, grumbled that the book was “filled with editorial comment based on unfounded rumor, distortion and inconsistency.”

Former President Dwight Eisenhower, however, thought future historians would owe Manchester a debt of gratitude for all his hard work. “Something like this should have been done after Lincoln’s death,” he said. “Then we’d have it now.”

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The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 2: 1934-1939

Anais Nin has been hailed as a sexual-freedom pioneer and dismissed as a self-obsessed attention junkie. “With me,” she wrote in the second volume of her diaries, “my unconscious is so vast, so tremendous, like a vast ocean which is constantly manifesting its presence, threatening to drown me but which I can clarify and control as I live it out.”

Nin’s erotic, wide-ranging diaries became a literary scandal and would inspire the movie “Henry and June,” even though her excesses as a writer -- her “self-idealizings and self-justifications,” as The New York Times put it -- could make even her most ardent fans glaze over.

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Oates (AP)

A Garden of Earthly Delights

Though The New York Times found much of “Earthly Delights” to be “as good as anything the season has turned up so far,” the paper worried that Joyce Carol Oates’ approach to fiction would be dismissed as old-fashioned.

“It is told in strict chronological order,” the Times’ reviewer wrote of the novel, “the environment is solid and recognizable ... Miss Oates is unfashionable also in that there are no curlicues in her technique. She subordinates her language and the structure of the novel to her story. Her prose does not call attention to itself.”

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I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

"I Have No Mouth," about underground-dwelling survivors of the apocalypse, won the Hugo Award for author Harlan Ellison. The story collection in which it appears remains a favorite of Ellison's fans. Wrote K.C. Locke for HarlanEllison.com:

“For anyone with a soul softer than granite, it is actually painful to read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” from cover to cover, without a break. These stories will entertain you, engross you, even enrich you. But they are fables of their times, fables of ourselves, and so, sadly, become timeless. Because we are still those people -- as Pogo used to say, ‘We has met the enemy, and he is us.’”

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Kundera (AP)

The Joke

"What if History plays jokes?" wonders Ludvik, the narrator of Milan Kundera's first novel. Wrote Publisher Weekly upon its 1990s re-release:

“This politically charged question, coupled with Ludvik's fate as an unintentional dissident, struck a chord in Czech readers; the novel's 1967 publication was a key literary event of the Prague Spring. Looking back on the tense, McCarthy-like atmosphere of the late 1940s, it chronicles the disastrous results of Ludvik's prankish postcard to a girlfriend criticizing the Czech communist regime. ... [The book showcases] Kundera's power as a novelist, unmistakable even in this early work.”

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Killing Time

Kirkus Reviews captures the appeal of Thomas Berger's novel in the opening paragraph of its review:

“As brutal as a barracuda, ‘Killing Time,’ superficially at any rate, is a good example of what Tom Wolfe has called the pornography of violence. The opening chapters with their dual thrust of rabid shock and kinky sex synthesize aspects of ‘In Cold Blood,’ ‘The Collector’ and ‘The Detective’: (a) opening with a multiple murder; (b) the central character's psycho psyche; and (c) the operative techniques of the homicide force from battery to assault.”

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Logan's Run

Before it was cult cinematic kitsch, “Logan’s Run” was a short novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. When the book hit the market, the catch-phrase of the moment was, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” With “Logan’s Run,” the authors took that notion to the extreme: In the future, everyone over the age of 21 gets offed to prevent outdated thinking and the war-making impulse that seizes old men’s minds.

“‘Logan’s Run’ is a marginal production that probably won’t survive its comic-strip flaws,” The New York Times opined. “Still, it has its points -- and in this dark age of realistic fiction, that’s enough to help any secret allegorist hold out for brighter days.”

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Lord of Light

A group of space travelers with special powers colonize a distant, Earth-like planet, where they pretend to be Hindu gods, in Roger Zelazny’s strange, complicated Hugo Award-winning novel.

"The obscurity and ambiguity are sometimes irksome," The Guardian's Sam Jordison wrote in 2010, "but generally add to 'Lord of Light's' considerable appeal. Reading it is a strange and exhilarating experience."

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The Magic Toyshop

Melanie, the 15-year-old heroine of Angela Carter’s novel, is transfixed by her maturing body, her “newfound land,” and this obsession takes her on flights of fancy. Until, that is, she and her siblings are suddenly orphaned, dropping Melanie into the clutches of her uncle and his extended family, which brings the worst of her sexual fantasies to life.

“This is Angela Carter’s second novel,” John Wakeman wrote for The New York Times. “... She is still in her twenties and greatly talented and will no doubt write better books. But I would not have this one much different.”

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Alma Classics

The Master and Margarita

"Satan live and in person, a man-sized black cat, a magician and his helpmeet, Pontius Pilate… Classic text of dissident magic realism, banned for years under Stalin: now you'll struggle to find a Russian who hasn't read it," Britain's The Telegraph wrote last year about Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel. "Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper."

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McLuhan (AP)

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

Marshall McLuhan, the first philosopher of the “Electric Age,” came up with the dictum “the medium is the message,” and a few years later he and co-author Quentin Fiore decided to sell some more books by giving the catchy phrase a jocular spin. “Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor,” they wrote in “The Medium is the Massage.” “Now all the world’s a sage.”

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The Naked Ape

Desmond Morris, the curator of mammals for the Zoological Society of London, decided it was time for a change of pace, so he decided to study humans rather than animals in the wild, believing “we must take a long, hard look at ourselves as biological specimens and gain some understanding of our limitations.”

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Clarke (AP)

The Nine Billion Names of God

The title story in Arthur C. Clarke's collection is one of his most famous. "In what starts out as a social examination of man's view of our existence through scientific competence," Amazing Stories says of the tale, "the story quickly becomes a weighty question regarding the cause and responsibility of a doomsday."

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Marquez (AP)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

In his classic, magical-realist novel, in which he tells the multigenerational story of the Buendia family, Gabriel Garcia Marquez creates an “enchanted place,” The New York Times wrote, “flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch.”

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Hunt (AP)

One of Our Agents is Missing

Before former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt started running dirty ops for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and thus became entangled in the Watergate scandal, he spent his free time churning out pulp novels. This memorable one tells the story of an American agent who disappears in Tokyo. Was the spy killed by the enemy? Did he defect? Is he ensconced in a love nest? Hunt, writing as David St. John, captures the burgeoning conspiracy-theory mindset that had infected the Cold War’s most determined warriors.

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Associated Press

The Outsiders

S.E. Hinton wrote “The Outsiders,” about a group of “greaser” outcasts, when she was still a teenager. It became an instant classic.

“By almost any standard,” The New York Times wrote in 1967, “Miss Hinton’s performance is impressive. At an age when most youngsters are still writing 300-word compositions, she has produced a book alive with the fresh dialogue of her contemporaries, and has wound around it a story that captures, in vivid patches at least, a rather unnerving slice of teenage America.”

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Picnic at Hanging Rock

"Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' has gripped the Australian public's imagination for five decades," The Australian newspaper wrote this year. "We can't seem to let this novel go." The story of three girls and a teacher disappearing in the Outback, filled with "gothic horror, intrigue and sexual ambiguity," has been adapted for TV and the movies.

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McPhee (AP)

The Pine Barrens

New Jersey is known for highways and strip malls and rundown factories. But it’s also home to a thousand-square-miles wilderness known as the Pine Barrens. Journalist John McPhee decided to get beyond the rumor and lore that have long dominated talk of the area.

"The few people who dwell in the region, the 'Pineys,' are little known and often misunderstood," writes the publisher Macmillian. "Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people -- and their distinctive folklore -- who call it home."

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Rosemary's Baby

Ira Levin's horror novel, wrote Kirkus Reviews, is "a beautiful conception and you'll enjoy every maleficent minute of it."

Using Satan's spawn to tap into our darkest fears about ourselves and the culture, the novel proved a sensation. Wrote the New York Daily News about the literary phenomenon: "Few people could put Levin's book down."

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Salter (AP)

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter offers us expatriates in France trying to make sense of their lives and find meaning in their day-to-day activities. Inevitably, the characters turn to intense sex in an effort to block out their angst and ennui.

Wrote The New York Times: "Salter celebrates the rites of erotic innovation and understands their literary uses. He creates a small, flaming world of sensualism .... We enter it. We feel it. It has the force of a hundred repressed fantasies. And it carries purpose: Salter details lust in search of its passage into love. Sometimes it makes it. Here it can't. Slowly eroticism fails. The reality of total human need intrudes into the golden bedrooms of the lovers' weekends."

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Goldman (AP)

The Thing of It Is

William Goldman's novel about an anxiety-ridden Broadway composer's collapsing marriage and self-esteem ultimately turns on identity -- the composer is half-Jewish and unwilling to admit it to anyone. "A short novel," wrote Kirkus Reviews. "What there is of it is articulate, abrasive, funny, intimate, notional and unresolved."

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Topaz

Leon Uris offers a fictionalized account of the spy-vs.-spy battle leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Alfred Hitchcock would make a movie verison. "As a writer," The Guardian wrote upon the author's death in 2003, "Uris was a considerable spokesman for American Jews. Critics winced at his status as 'master storyteller,' but readers found in his books a world of vivid causes, largely new to popular US culture."

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Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan was a cult writer, and this was his ultimate cult book.

"I think in 'Trout Fishing in America,'" said former poet laureate Billy Collins, "one of the under songs in the book is a kind of lament for the passing of a 19th century or even earlier pastoral America and its replacement by an industrial America."

NPR described Brautigan as “a little bit Beat generation, a little bit hippie generation ... a sort of bridge writer.”

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A "master list" of the best books of 2017.

-- Douglas Perry

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