After reading a recent column of mine on the egalitarian obsessions of the contemporary left (more precisely, on liberal demands for laws against "appearance discrimination"), a friend asked if I'd read "Harrison Bergeron," a short story by Kurt Vonnegut that addressed such themes.
It turned out that I had, but so far back, in high school, that I'd forgotten. But that jogging of the memory also got me thinking about all the other things my friends and I read back then, some of which probably shaped our views of life more than we realized.
There actually was a canon of sorts when I was a teenager, albeit not necessarily the one you'd find in "Great Books" curricula. Rather, there seemed to be two separate reading lists for those of us who liked to read (not a terribly large group then, and probably an even smaller one now).
If you went to high school in the early to mid-1970s, or at least my high school in Illinois, there was the list that you were assigned in classes: Beowulf, Homer, some Shakespeare and Steinbeck (usually Of Mice and Men, perhaps Travels with Charley), The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, Black Like Me, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, and some of the dystopia stuff (1984, Animal Farm, or Brave New World), maybe Catcher in the Rye.
We enjoyed many of those, but some of that enjoyment was inevitably lost because they were "required" and we'd have to write papers and take exams on it all.
So there was a different list that we read for pleasure that was a whole lot cooler, or, more accurately, consisted of books that you had to read (or at least carry around with you and pretend to read) if you wanted to be seen as cool. At the forefront of these was anything that seemed counterculture or rebellious and therefore in synch with the broader youth ethos of the time. This meant lots of Vonnegut, Carlos Castaneda's hallucinogenic "shamanism" tales, Trout Fishing in America, A Clockwork Orange, Catch-22, On the Road, Naked Lunch, and the various works of Hermann Hesse. Perhaps also Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ken Kesey.
We'd all read, of course, The Lord of the Rings (but not The Hobbit, which was dismissed as a children's fairy tale) and at least several of us moved thereafter to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books (although I was never able to get past the first 30 or so pages of Titus Groan). When it came to fantasy (broadly defined), there was also that ultimate exercise in anthropomorphosis, Watership Down, about the trek of Bigwig, Hazel and the other rabbits from their threatened warren to a new home.
Then there was the scary stuff--Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, along with The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. And the Sherlock Holmes stories, followed by a summer spent with Hercule Poirot (although none of Miss Marple, for some reason).
Like any healthy American teenage boys at the tail end of the Golden Age of science fiction, all of us had read The Foundation Trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and Childhood's End. And also Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and the disturbingly weird stories of Harlan Ellison ("A Boy and His Dog" and "I Have no Mouth and Must Scream").
Perhaps more interesting was what we didn't read--although we weren't necessarily politically oblivious, I don't remember anyone carrying around dog-eared copies of On Liberty, The Communist Manifesto, or Atlas Shrugged (at least not yet). About the only thing I read (at least that I can now recall) that could have fallen into the political/sociological category was Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, which I found so boring I never got close to finishing.
We generally didn't go in much for the more mainstream, literary-prize fiction of the time, either, so read little if any of Updike, Mailer, Cheever, Styron, Bellow, or Philip Roth or Walker Percy (in some of those cases--Bellow and Percy especially--these were oversights thankfully later corrected).
There were some exceptions--John Irving's Setting Free the Bears seemed to be popular for some reason, and I remember liking Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and James Michener's The Drifters. I'd also put Joseph Heller's-long anticipated follow-up to Catch-22, Something Happened, on one of my Christmas lists, only to be disappointed that nothing much happened in it. We had one especially pretentious friend who carried around a copy of Finnegan's Wake and claimed to understand it, but we didn't believe him.
There were lots of other books, some good, some bad and some downright inexplicable (Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Really?), but in all the worthwhile probably outweighed the worthless, it only narrowly. Indeed, I suspect that we had it a lot better back then than kids do these days when it comes to reading; without all the video games, tweets, and texting to distract us.
Or is that simply the way old men always come to see such things?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 01/19/2015