Song of Solomon
1977 · 337 pages
Hunting gold in the South, a rich man's bored son finds his family's history instead, hidden in a song children sing. Morrison turns it into myth: an African ancestor who flew home.
★ 8.4
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1977
Showing 15 books from 1977
On Photography
1977 · 224 pages
Taking a picture is a form of acquisition, close to aggression, Sontag argues, and a world drowning in images loses the power to feel them. You will not photograph casually again.
★ 7.1
A Time of Gifts
1977 · 321 pages
At eighteen in 1933 Fermor set off on foot from Holland for Constantinople, sleeping in barns one night and in castles the next, and caught central Europe in its last clear light.
★ 7.1
The Living Mountain
1977 · 176 pages
Summits barely register. Shepherd spent a lifetime in the Scottish Cairngorms and writes about going into the mountain rather than up it, attending to water and frost until the seeing becomes the point.
★ 6.9
The Hour of the Star
1977 · 81 pages
Macabéa is a half-starved typist from Brazil's Northeast, and the writer narrating her keeps stopping to ask what right he has to her poverty. Lispector makes that discomfort the whole book.
★ 6.8
Coming into the Country
1977 · 438 pages
Three Alaskas: a river trip above the Arctic Circle, the hunt for a new capital site, and the trappers of Eagle on the Yukon. Reporters have been studying McPhee's patience ever since.
★ 6.5
Woman at Point Zero
1977 · 128 pages
In an Egyptian prison a woman awaiting execution tells a psychiatrist her life: genital mutilation, forced marriage, prostitution, and the man she killed. El Saadawi drew it from a real condemned prisoner.
★ 6.0
Dispatches
1977 · 260 pages
Herr covered Vietnam for Esquire at twenty-seven and wrote the siege of Khe Sanh and the ruins of Hue at the pitch of a bad trip. Apocalypse Now took its narration from him.
★ 6.0
In Patagonia
1977 · 204 pages
Chatwin traveled Patagonia chasing a scrap of giant sloth skin from his grandmother's cabinet, and collected Welsh settlers, anarchists and Butch Cassidy. He remade travel writing into something as strange as fiction.
★ 5.6
A Rumor of War
1977 · 356 pages
Caputo landed at Da Nang in 1965 with the first American ground troops, eager for it. His tour ended with murder charges over two Vietnamese civilians his men shot, and he excuses nothing.
★ 5.6
A Lover's Discourse
Fragments
1977 · 234 pages
Waiting in a café for someone who does not come, rereading a letter, saying I love you and hearing it fail: Barthes breaks obsession into figures, each spoken in the lover's voice.
★ 5.2
A Scanner Darkly
1977 · 289 pages
An undercover narcotics agent is assigned to watch a suspect who is himself, and the drug splitting his brain hemispheres keeps him from noticing. Dick closes by naming the friends he lost.
★ 5.2
Learning to Labour
1977 · 336 pages
Working-class boys are not pushed into working-class jobs, Willis found: they choose them. Twelve lads at a Midlands comprehensive laugh their way through school and hand themselves to the factory floor.
★ 5.2
Fatale
1977 · 98 pages
Aimee Joubert kills for hire. She arrives in a smug French seaside town, learns everyone's secrets over dinner, and sets the notables to destroying each other. Manchette writes crime as class war.
★ 4.9
Bridge to Terabithia
1977 · 144 pages
Jess can outrun everyone in fifth grade until Leslie moves in next door. They swing over a creek into Terabithia, the kingdom they rule together, and Paterson refuses to protect them from grief.
★ 4.8