The last seven books I read were all published in 1965. I decided on this literary time travel after noticing that I unintentionally read two books in a row from 1965. I thought: Why not continue? Would I get a deep sense of the mid-1960s zeitgeist? I don’t think so, but I did find two of the best books I’ve read in several years: Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown and The Magus by John Fowles. I thought I’d write about these seven books now rather than waiting until my usual end-of-year book recap, in part because I’ll probably have other books to write about by then, and in part because I have to contribute even more to the current flood of essays commenting on artificial intelligence.
First, a list of the books.
- The Jugger by Richard Stark. Fiction; Audiobook
- Stoner by John Williams. Fiction.
- The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem. Fiction
- The Magus by John Fowles. Fiction; Audiobook
- Killing the Second Dog by Marek Hłasko. Fiction
- Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown. Non-fiction; Audiobook
- The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman. Non-fiction.
Two of the seven are non-fiction, one of which describes the most unfamiliar world of all the books. Three I “read” as audiobooks, which as I wrote earlier I’ve become fond of and which make running farther than 10 km possible. (The local library has a very good collection, via Hoopla.)
AI and cell phones
What’s it like to read these books in 2023? Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad is a set of fun, fantastic stories, imaginative science fiction unconstrained by reality or physical plausibility. In it, two inventors build remarkable machines. One machine destroys all objects in the universe whose names begin with “n.” Another transfers minds from one body to another, and is grabbed by a mischievous despot who wants to stiff the inventor of his payment. Hijinks ensue. One machine, shockingly, writes poetry. The rival inventor prompts it to create “a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra, mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”
“Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!.
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
[and several more verses]
The poets of the land are furious and frightened by their inhuman competition. They protest, but the magazine editors are delighted and the readers are happy.
It’s the science fiction of 1965, but it’s the reality of 2023. (I couldn’t have written that sentence in 2022!) ChatGPT can churn out verse, including mathematical proofs in verse form. I gave GPT3.5 Lem’s prompt (“a love poem … in the cybernetic spirit) and it did return a nicely rhyming poem, but I don’t think it’s very good so I won’t paste it here. (Both Lem and his translator are amazing.) The Cyberiad is witty and fun, but as bizarre as it is, many of its creations fit well in our modern technologically-informed imaginations. I’m told there will be new classes on science fiction and artificial intelligence in our English department next year; I strongly recommend The Cyberiad, or at least a few of its bite-sized stories, for the syllabus.
There is no artificial intelligence in The Jugger, the sixth in a series of pulp crime novels by Richard Stark that feature heists, double crosses, violence, and lots of planning of heists and double crosses. (The violence is usually spontaneous.) The Jugger is unfortunately the worst book of the series, but its publication year started me on this quest. Not only are there no clever machines, there are no cell phones, and the events of all these books could only take place in a world without such devices. Half the challenges the criminals face would be trivial if they could communicate quickly from arbitrary locations, and half would be impossible as their victims or the police could communicate just as well.
The strangest stories
Crime also features prominently in Manchild in the Promised Land, the author’s account of growing up in Harlem in the late 1940s and 1950s. I had never heard of the book until looking at lists of what was published in 1965, though it’s apparently well known, with some editions subtitled “a modern classic of the Black experience.”
It’s a harrowing book, the first half depicting the author’s intense and sustained forays into crime and violence, as well as time spent at multiple juvenile detention centers (starting at age 10?). Though certainly not rich, the author isn’t desperately poor, and his immersion into criminality is driven largely by peer pressure. In the second half, the author escapes from “street life.” Jazz and education play a role; there’s a nice passage about learning geometry. Much of the second half describes the devastation wrought by heroin addiction on individuals and on the community as a whole. The writing is crisp, matter-of-fact, and rivetting. The recounted speeches of the Black Muslims and the Black Coptics, neither of whom the author is convinced by, are esecially entertaining. (The audiobook narrator, Cary Hite, is brilliant.)
What makes the book so remarkable, and one of the best I’ve read in years, is that it’s simultaneously very relevant to our world, yet more foreign than most science fiction. My kids are 14 and 17, and not only have I never had to contemplate them spending large chunks of time in juvenile prisons or being strung out on heroin, but the possibility itself seems more alien than poetry-writing robots. The elaborate social codes that necessitate violence between gangs or between individuals are more puzzling than large language models. Fiction, and especially science fiction is constrained to what is plausible given the reader’s experience. Non-fiction is not.
The other amazing book of the seven is The Magus by John Fowles. The audiobook is over 20 hours long, and the print book (which I read parts of) is 650 pages; if I hadn’t committed myself to experiencing 1965 I may not have taken the plunge, not having heard of the book before and having read only one other book by Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, long ago). The Magus starts out as a mildly interesting story of the rather self-centered narrator and a girlfriend, but about a fifth of the way in, as the narrator takes a teaching position at a boarding school on a Greek island, it becomes strange and complex. Layers of events, interpretations, and tangled explanations keep piling up, with little clue as to what the underlying truth is. At times I wondered if the book would turn into historical fiction, or psychedelic rambling, or something entirely different. It’s the sort of book that one doesn’t want to end, in part because it’s mesmerizing and in part because one guesses (correctly) that the ending won’t be as satisfying as one hopes. Still, it’s very much worth it. I’m glad I read nothing about the book before starting it; I encourage others to not learn anything about the plot. Reading afterwards contemporary reviews of the book it seems many readers are put off by the narrator. This too is part of its appeal: is the narrator a good (or at all likeable) person? (He himself is unsure.)
And the rest
I will just briefly note the other books in the list. Stoner by John Williams, depicts the life of an English professor in Missouri as an unrelenting series of failures, both personal and professional. It’s beautifully written, fast moving, and unrelentingly bleak. It tackles the question of how to act in the face of failure, and what the causes of failure are, both themes that aren’t explored in literature as much as they should be.
The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman is, as you’ve guessed, a history of the fall of Constantinople and the years leading up to it. The first few chapters are dull, with too many names and too little context. The middle is very good: the siege of the city and its aftermath.
The last 1965 book I read was Killing the Second Dog by Marek Hłasko (1965). From the Introduction, “In the period following Stalin’s death in 1953, Marek Hłasko was unquestionably the most acclaimed and popular contemporary writer in Poland. Relentlessly, he depicted the bleakness of life there…” Then, he left Poland and spent time in various countries including Israel, where this odd, short novel about two con men takes place. It’s a bit like Damon Runyon, and even refers to Runyon, but it’s not amusing or punchy enough. I found it uninteresting, despite my fondness for stories about con artists.
The future!
Will I move on to 1966? I have, in fact, read one book from 1966 since finishing the above set of books, the seventh in Stark’s crime novel series (called, appropriately, The Seventh). Though it’s far better than #6, I’ll move on from the mid-1960s.
The self-imposed constraint of books from a specific year was an enlightening one, though, and I may try another year at some point. We’ll see what it tells us about the present!
Today’s illustration…
A mitre aloe plant, based on a photo I took at Stanford’s cactus garden.
— Raghuveer Parthasarathy, June 21, 2023
The Eighteenth Elephant 
In beginning my residency, my advisor sent me back fifty years to “get my feet on the ground,” by reading hundreds of old journal articles. At the time, it was a confusing hodgepodge of facts, terminology, techniques, and conjecture. After forty-five years of studying, teaching and practicing, I went back 100 years to regain a feel for what people in my specialty were thinking, discussing, and doing. I was amazed at how resourceful, intelligent, and insightful my predecessors were. They were giants, who had clearly framed the problems, possibilities, and unknowns. Their challenges were a lack of precision tools, accurate historical data, and technology, not a lack of understanding or diligence. I admire their integrity, persistence, and dedication to their profession and their patients. I feel the same way about authors of fiction and non-fiction, who were thinking and writing in the 1940s and 50s. Paradoxically, the biggest problems of the twenty-first century are a lack of preparation, honest communication, and reflection.
I agree! Also, the old papers are often very well written, a pleasure to read.