1975

US F I C T I O N

1. Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow 1,275 copies on LT

2. The Moneychangers, Arthur Hailey 184 copies

3. Curtain, Agatha Christie 725 copies

4. Looking for Mister Goodbar, Judith Rossner 206 copies

5. The Choirboys, Joseph Wambaugh 160 copies

6. The Eagle Has Landed, Jack Higgins 336 copies

7. The Greek Treasure: A Biographical Novel of Henry and Sophia Schliemann, Irving Stone 100 copies

8. The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton 787 copies

9. Shogun, James Clavell 1,895 copies

10. Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow 710 copies

N O N F I C T I O N

1. Angels: God's Secret Agents, Billy Graham 320 copies

2. Winning Through Intimidation, Robert Ringer 80 copies

3. TM: Discovering Energy and Overcoming Stress, Harold H. Bloomfield 28 copies

4. The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski 565 copies

5. Sylvia Porter's Money Book, Sylvia Porter 20 copies

6. Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a Week, Laurence E. Morehouse and Leonard Gross 20 copies

7. The Bermuda Triangle, Charles Berlitz with J. Manson Valentine 137 copies

8. The Save-Your-Life Diet, David Reuben 117 copies

9. Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven 160 copies

10. Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, Theodore H. White 108 copies

I was in college when Shogun was made into a mini-series. In those days the only televisions allowed were in the dorm lobby. For some reason the girls weren't into it, so I had to go over to the jock's dorm to see it. All those guys were completely riveted.

I got nothing here.

I enjoyed Shogun, and I was a girl! As I recall, it had some hunky actor (can't remember who) in the lead role. I liked the book, too.
I also remember really enjoying The Ascent of Man, both the book and the TV series.

That hunky actor was Richard Chamberlain, formerly known as Dr. Kildare.

That's it! Mama always wanted me to marry a doctor...

He's gay.

Guess that's why I didn't marry him.

Ragtime is on my list of all time favorite books.

I never read the bookShogun but the mini-series was terrific.

I saw the Broadway version of Ragtime, so I decided not to rad it.

My wife did read Curtain and Shogun Clavell.

My mother gave me the Ascent of Man, so some of it was read.

I did read Charles Berlitz' The Bermuda Triangle. I sometimes like stuff on the cusp of fiction and non-fiction and certainly unprovable.

Winning Through Intimidation -- now there's an interesting title. Seems like many people have taken that theme to heart.

I think The Great Train Robbery was Crichton's first book. Also made into a movie which was not bad. Sean Connery.

I remember our teacher instructed us to watch the Shogun series on TV. He was very impressed but I remember nothing about it.

Good to see Bellow there. A serious writer who was also popular.

10: Michael Crichton had been writing since the late sixties. The Andromeda Strain from 1969 was his first 'big' book.

I haven't read any of these

Ragtime is my favorite by Doctorow; I have read it several times.

I read The Great Train Robbery, Shogun, and Ascent of Man. All were good beach reading, but I no longer own any of them.

It's a rare event when literary prize-winners show up on year-end bestseller lists, but in 1975 there were 2 of them: Doctorow's fabulous Ragtime was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle(NBCC) Award for best novel, and Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift, a fictional rendering of his often tumultuous friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz, a book that remains my favorite of all Bellow's novels.

Besides those two landmark works, I also read Judith Rossner's grimly sensational Looking for Mister Goodbar, Joe Wambaugh's The Choirboys, The Great Train Robbery, and Shogun. In non-fiction, I read what turned out to be the 2nd volume of British actor David Niven's memoirs Bring on the Empty Horses, which is still an utterly delightful book, as I just reread it in 2000.

I've read a few of these. Ragtime is one that I haven't read but would like to someday.

I've read:

Curtain, The Eagle Has Landed, Shogun, and The Bermuda Triangle

After reading Judith Rossner's "sensational" Looking For Mister Goodbar I did not read another contemporary novel until my wife introduced me to Aloysius Pendergast some three years ago.

Contemporary novels are still the rarest of my reads. I just don't like them. They have the feel of being written by and for people trained on television, short attention spans, lots of action, little depth, either of characters or of story telling. I'd rather read a good Natty Bumppo novel than a Harry Potter. People raised in a world of words seem to have a greater affinity for language than those raised in a sea of images.

I don't mean to imply there are not any excellent writers working today, it's just that with so much proven work out there to be read, why should I waste my time looking for that rare diamond in the dreck?

geneg

Years ago, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway used to make the best-seller lists. Presumably these are ok in 'your book'. Is there for you a cut-off year when popular novels ceased being worthwhile reads?

Pretty much around 1975 with this particular book.

As for Steinbeck I find his language provides the framework upon which he builds his stories. Steinbeck relies on different storytelling styles to tell different stories. Cup of Gold does not have the same sound as East of Eden which doesn't sound like Grapes of Wrath and so on.

Hemingway is a mystery to me. He is the epitome of what can be done with little talent and lots of desire. Unfortunately, while I doff my hat to him for his achievement, I don't care for him at all.

I've read (and own) Humboldt's Gift. I own White's Breach of Faith but haven't read it yet.

While I have never read The Eagle Has Landed, and outstanding movie with Michael Caine was made from it.

I still own my copy of Ragtimewhen it first came out in paperback and I still plan to read it some day.
I've seen the musical and I love the story,I was
fifteen when it first came out and I've just never read it. Now I feel I know it so well. I did read The Great Train Robberywhich is on the list and I remember loving it. There was something special about the way the story was told. I think the author included slight historical details that made the reading much more fun.

I've read, and I still have, David Niven's 2 memoirs. I love them!

The Niven memoirs were hugely popular, I think more popular then his movie career.

Surely not MORE popular? Are you young? ;}

I read Looking for Mr. Goodbar and don't remember much about it. I read Humboldt's Gift and the thing I remember most is that it was a lot of work to get through; I was interested, but it was dense.

Breach of Faith was OK, or it seemed so at the time, but to me, everything he wrote after Making of the President 1960 seemed a bit anticlimactic.

I've been noticing that the David Niven books are disappearing from libraries, and I don't even see them at booksales any more. Maybe that's just a local phenomenon, but I remember that they were very popular for a very long time. One of my friends in college used to read passages out loud, laughing all the way through.

I read Looking for Mr. Goodbar when it was popular. It put me off modern fiction for the next thirty years. As I recall it was populated by a bunch of people (or person) who heartily deserved everything that happened to them.

The Eagle has Landed was translated into Afrikaans and we read it at school a valiant but failed attempt by our Afrikaans master to get us to take the language seriously and I read my parent's copy of Shogun - which I didn't like although I did like King Rat. Curtain is one of Christie's weakest efforts but I own it, together with Ragtime, which disappointed me after all the hype.

Curtain ranks 13th of Agatha Christie's works catalogued in LT. Her author page shows over 1,200 works, which seems a bit high to me.

#27: Looking at the number of short stories and various omnibuses, it's not too far off. A good combining will help, but the multilingual mess--who wants to figure out which four books are in each of the Dutch omnibuses, and whether they can be combined with something from a different language--makes it a messy job.

Although I do a fair amount of combining, I am not one to tackle Agatha Christie. She was a favorite of my wife, but we gave away almost all of our Christie books several years ago in attempt to downsize a fairly large book collection.

Ragtime
Finished reading: 5 April 2012



Traditionally, historical fiction places fictional characters and fictional events against a background of historical fact, or historical figures against a historical background embellished with fictional detail. Suspense is achieved by expectation and the enjoyment of what the reader already knows about history and the new elements introduced in the novel. E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is quite different, in the sense that historical and fictional characters and events intermingle in a way which blurs the division between history and fiction.

Few readers will be fully aware of American history between 1906 and 1914, the historical period in which the novel is set, although this may be different for future readers, once this period is more closely studied and more history books appear about the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. Still, many historical characters in the novel are familiar, such as Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. They also help to anchor the story in time. Other, less well-known historical characters can be identified by the way they are described, such as Emma Goldman, and Evelyn Nesbit. The fictional characters, mostly having no name, merely indicated by Father / Tateh, Mother / Mameh, Mother's Younger Brother / Little Girl, makes them iconic or everyman characters.

With limited knowledge of the period, the reader is at the mercy of the author. Some events are likely and believable, such as Emma Goldman's lecture and the ensuing riot. However, other events are highly unlikely, and typical of postmodern fiction, such as the pornographic scene in which Mother's Younger Brother follows and peeps from a closet at Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit's lesbian romp (p.54). The history of the third family, the African-Americans, is confusing because they have names, which pulls them into the realm of the "historical figures" while obviously their actions are fictitious.

While the non-academic reader has some urge, initially, to look up characters, -- now, in the age of Internet and Wikipedia so much easier than in 1975, when the novel was first published, the myriad of characters and events is so dense that one is coerced into giving up that urge and go with the flow of the novel, wondering about the likelihood of events. Reading in that mode, the novel's sweeping scale makes for a very enjoyable read.



Other books I have read by E.L. Doctorow:
The waterworks
Sweet land stories