Slaughterhouse Five
1969 · 215 pages
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, between a Dresden meat locker during the firebombing and a zoo on another planet. Vonnegut was in that cellar, and writes "So it goes" after every death.
★ 8.4
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1969
Showing 10 books from 1969
Conversation in The Cathedral
1969 · 601 pages
At what moment did Peru screw itself up? A newspaperman and his father's chauffeur drink through an afternoon in a Lima bar called the Cathedral, and their talk rebuilds a country under dictatorship.
★ 6.9
The Left Hand of Darkness
1969 · 304 pages
Le Guin removed gender from a civilization and followed every consequence. Her envoy lands on an ice planet where nobody has a fixed sex and survives by crossing a glacier with one ally.
★ 6.8
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
1969 · 304 pages
Angelou grows up in Stamps, Arkansas, under Jim Crow and behind her grandmother's store counter. Raped at eight by her mother's boyfriend, she stops speaking for five years and reads her way back.
★ 6.2
Portnoy's Complaint
1969 · 289 pages
Alexander Portnoy lies on his analyst's couch and confesses everything: a Jewish son's rage at his mother and an appetite he cannot govern. Four hundred thousand copies sold in the first year.
★ 6.1
Akenfield
Portrait of an English Village
1969 · 353 pages
Forty-nine Suffolk villagers talk about horse teams, hunger and the Great War. Blythe caught a rural England that machinery was erasing as he wrote, and English country life has had no better witness.
★ 6.0
Ubik
1969 · 227 pages
Dick's most vertiginous novel. After a bomb on the Moon, Joe Chip's world rots and slides back toward 1939, and nobody can say who died. An aerosol called Ubik holds it off.
★ 5.8
A Void
1969 · 304 pages
Perec lost both parents to the war, then wrote a novel in French without the letter e: Anton Vowl vanishes, friends hunt him, and no one can name what is missing.
★ 5.3
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
1969 · 26 pages
One apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, and holes punched through the pages for small fingers to follow. Carle's caterpillar has eaten its way through fifty million copies and sixty languages.
★ 4.6
Business Adventures
1969 · 464 pages
Twelve New Yorker reports on how companies behave: Ford burning millions on the Edsel, a grocer trying to corner his own stock. Bill Gates calls it the best business book he has read.
★ 4.3