A few of you who follow
the blog have expressed interest in a summary of the Bestseller List of 1964. I
completed reading the 10 top bestsellers about a week ago, so here are my
thoughts.
The List:
When I started My Big
Fat Reading Project in 2002 I was on my way out of a cult where we were
discouraged from reading the news and watching TV. (Please don’t ask me
questions about this. I am writing my story and one day it will be public.) In
any case, I was starved for pop culture and had little to no idea of what had been
going on in the world for the past 10 years. I had always been someone who learned from books but at
the time I wasn’t looking very far into the world except for my own country. I
figured that the American fiction bestsellers would be a way to catch up. That
is why I began to read these lists.
Since I also planned to
write a story about how I ended up where I did, I decided to go back to my
beginnings. Then I went back even further to the year when my parents met:
1940. It wasn’t a bad plan because World War II was a turning point in modern
life. One way or another, we are all children of that conflict. Along the way I
added other books to my reading lists. I read 22 books from 1940. For 1963 I
read about 50. Like an atomic explosion my lists have mushroomed and I have
branched out to reading books from other countries as well as history.
The idea though has not
changed. I don’t know if it is still valid at this point in the 21st
century but I have found it possible to get a sense of the 20th century from
reading books.
The big topic in the 1964
list is the Cold War. It underlies or influences the stories in seven of the
books: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Armageddon, The Man, You Only Live
Twice, The Martyred, Convention, and even This Rough Magic. This topic came up
in just three novels from the 1962 list, two in 1963.
The next most common
topic, though it overlaps with some of those mentioned in the above paragraph,
are three books focused on American politics: Armageddon, The Man and
Convention.
In earlier years books
about the two World Wars often dominated the lists. In 1964 only Armageddon,
about the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, and The Martyred,
about the Korean War, made the list. I consider the Korean War a direct outcome
of WWII. Now instead of looking back at war, we are looking ahead to a possible
final war.
Also in earlier years,
religion and particularly Christian stories sold well. 1964 saw only two: The
Rector of Justin and The Martyred.
Spycraft is probably an
up and coming bestselling subject in the ensuing decades. The few spy books in
earlier lists were some of Graham Greene’s novels. This list has two: The Spy
Who Came in From the Cold and You Only Live Twice.
The opening events of
the sexual revolution can be found in the lists going back several years but
1964 wasn’t that sexy. Of course it is hard to have fiction without sex but as far
as changing mores go all we got was Candy and Herzog.
Another popular subject
in the 1950s and early 1960s was class conflict. I see that falling away and in
fact only The Rector of Justin took it on in 1964.
Personal growth began
being an American concern in the postwar years. It showed up in this list in
Herzog and The Rector of Justin. Racism had a slow year with The Man standing
alone in spotlighting it. Romance, another former big seller, has taken a back
seat, found only in Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic where it combines with the
one mystery book. Historical fiction is nowhere to be found on the list.
I have found it true in
both in the 1940s and 1950s that a shift takes place about mid-decade and the
phenomenon has occurred again demonstrating how the Cold War was so thoroughly
on the minds of Americans that it sold books!
