What To Read

Picture this: summer, 1977. New York City was pulsing with terror as serial killer David Berkowitz (AKA Son of Sam) stalked the streets. Star Wars had just landed in theaters, the new Studio 54 was thumping, and the Great Blackout plunged the city into 25 hours of darkness. The nation was still riding the patriotic high of the bicentennial celebration, while a newly inaugurated Jimmy Carter wrestled with growing impatience with fuel shortages and gas lines. The city balanced precariously between urban decay and the promise of renewal. Against this backdrop, writers and publishers were quietly at work bringing some monumental books into the world. 

Looking back at the books that were taking off during this remarkable summer shows what a great vintage 1977 was for American literature. As you put together your summer reading list, take a trip back to Summer of Sam with this choice selection of five books that defined that era and have stood the test of time. 

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Released in June of 1977, this coming-of-age saga followed protagonist Milkman Dead, who embarks on a journey of self-discovery tracing his ancestral roots. This was Morrison’s breakthrough into mainstream literature, earning her the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

“Morrison dazzles…With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of Black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create Black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today.” —The Nation

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Quartet in Autumn, released at the end of the summer of 1977 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was hailed as a huge comeback by Barbara Pym, who went in and out of favor during her lifetime and who Philip Larkin called "the most underrated writer of the century.” Required reading for anyone in the throes of midlife malaise, this story follows four office workers approaching retirement as they confront loneliness and the twilight of life.

"Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity."  —Financial Times

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Didion’s third novel, which Hilton Als in The New Yorker called “an act of journalistic reconstruction disguised as fiction,” follows an American woman who becomes entangled in local political violence in Central America after her daughter joins a radical group—while remaining willfully oblivious to the revolutionary turmoil around her. While the book channels the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood, Didion bucks the overtly “second wave” feminism of the time. “It was clear from Didion’s writing that not only was she allergic to ideology, which she avoided like a virus in most of her work, but her ways of thinking and of expressing herself were unlike anyone else’s,” wrote Als. 

"Didion's most ambitious project in fiction, and her most successful...glows with a golden aura of well-wrought classical tragedy.”  – Los Angeles Times

The Shining by Stephen King

We know this story, whether having read the book, watched the movie or absorbed the story by cultural osmosis. Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic writer, moves his family into the remote Overlook Hotel for the winter. Their son Danny, who has psychic abilities ("the shining"), soon senses the hotel's malevolent forces, sending Jack into madness. This was King’s third novel and his first hardcover bestseller, which solidified his status as a horror icon. 

“Few books cut as close to the bone as The Shining,” wrote author Grady Hendrix in a post about the experience of re-reading the book. "King is writing 'up' here, reaching for a more literary bar than a lot of genre fiction, fleshing out his characters and giving them all time to shine, pun intended. If King’s 'shining' is a way of perceiving feelings, of knowing what someone’s thinking without being told in words, then the book itself is a kind of telepathic shining, from King to each reader.” – Grady Hendrix, Reactor Magazine

The Thorn Birds by Colleen Mccullough

Perhaps the most talked-about book of summer 1977 was the blockbuster novel The Thorn Birds, a sweeping, multigenerational family saga — and love story between a woman and Catholic priest — set primarily on a sheep station in the Australian Outback. This Australian Gone With the Wind, which dominated beach bags and bestsellers lists and went on to be a hit TV miniseries, still holds up as an immersive beach page-turner.

As the New York Times wrote back in ‘77, “She reads easily. Her characters are credible, if interchangeable. She writes as if to improve on life. And if we read fiction to fill the boring spaces left by reality, then The Thorn Birds fits our need. It runs like a dream factory.”  – Webster Schott, The New York Times