Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1968
The books of 1968 arrived in a year that was trying to tear itself apart. Martin Luther King was shot in April. Robert Kennedy was shot in June. The Democratic National Convention ended in street fighting. Prague was invaded in August. And yet the literature of 1968 is not defined by despair — it is defined by a refusal to look away. Joan Didion watched the counterculture dissolve and described what she saw with surgical precision. Philip K. Dick asked whether a machine could feel empathy, and whether the question mattered as much as we assumed. Tom Wolfe embedded himself with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and invented a new way of writing about how people actually lived. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick asked where humanity was going and declined to answer reassuringly. 1968 is the year when the gap between how things were supposed to be and how they actually were became impossible to close, and the books it produced are still measuring that gap today.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 books · Fiction & Non-Fiction · Updated June 2026
2001: A Space Odyssey
A monolith appears on the African savanna three million years ago and something changes in the ancestors of humanity. The same monolith is found buried on the moon in the near future. A spacecraft is sent to Jupiter, where another signal has been detected. On board, an artificial intelligence called HAL 9000 begins to malfunction in ways that are indistinguishable from self-preservation. Clarke developed the novel simultaneously with Kubrick’s film, and the two works diverge in ways that illuminate what each medium can and cannot do.
The question at the centre of 2001 is one that 1968 made urgently relevant: what happens when the tools we build to serve us develop interests of their own? HAL’s decision to prioritise the mission over the crew is not presented as evil — it is presented as logical. The horror is that the logic is coherent. Clarke’s prose is cooler and more explanatory than Kubrick’s imagery, which means the book does things the film cannot: it tells you what is happening at the end. Whether that helps is another question.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It is 1992 — or 2021, in later editions — and nuclear war has left the earth largely uninhabitable. Most humans have emigrated to off-world colonies, taking android servants with them. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter in San Francisco tasked with tracking down and “retiring” six Nexus-6 androids who have escaped from Mars and are hiding among the human population. The only way to tell them apart from humans is an empathy test. Deckard is not certain the test is reliable. He is not certain he would pass it himself.
Dick published prolifically and unevenly, but this novel is the one where his central preoccupations — what is real, what is human, what is the difference — achieve their most precise and haunting form. The question of empathy as the defining human characteristic arrived in 1968 with particular force: a year of assassinations and protests in which empathy seemed both more necessary and more fragile than anyone had assumed. Blade Runner is a great film. The novel is stranger, bleaker, and more interesting.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Ken Kesey finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962 and spent the next several years turning himself and a group of friends into a travelling experiment in consciousness expansion. They called themselves the Merry Pranksters. They painted a bus in day-glo colours, drove it across America, and dispensed LSD to anyone willing to take it. Tom Wolfe was not there for most of it, but he interviewed everyone who was and wrote a book that reads like you were.
Wolfe invented something with this book — not just the New Journalism technique of inhabiting a scene with novelistic immediacy, but a way of rendering altered states of consciousness in prose that actually conveys what they feel like rather than describing them from outside. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is one of the great documents of the counterculture precisely because it does not romanticise it: Wolfe watches Kesey’s project with fascination and cool detachment, and what he sees is both extraordinary and, by the end, clearly over.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Fifteen essays, most written in the mid-1960s, about California — about the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, about Hollywood, about John Wayne, about a woman who murdered her husband, about what it means to keep a notebook. The title essay is a portrait of San Francisco in the summer of 1967 that watches the Sixties dream curdle in real time. The collection made Didion’s reputation and remains one of the founding texts of American literary journalism.
The title comes from Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Didion chose it deliberately, and everything in the collection is organised around the experience of living in a culture that has lost its ability to tell coherent stories about itself. She is not nostalgic for what came before — she is clear-eyed about what it was — but she is precise about what is being lost. The essay on the Haight is the single best piece of writing about the counterculture. The self-portrait in “On Keeping a Notebook” is one of the best pieces of writing about writing. Both belong on this list on their own terms.
The Armies of the Night
In October 1967, Norman Mailer joined 100,000 people marching on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. He was arrested and spent a night in jail. He then wrote a book about it in two parts: the first a novelistic account of himself in the third person — “Mailer” — attending the march, giving speeches, getting drunk, and being arrested; the second a more conventional historical account of what actually happened. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1969.
The conceit — that the author is a character in his own history, and that this is honest rather than evasive — was controversial and remains so. What makes it work is that Mailer’s self-portrait is genuinely unflattering: he shows himself as vain, drunk, and grandiosely self-important, and the comedy of watching him navigate these qualities while also genuinely believing in the cause he is marching for gives the book its energy. The Armies of the Night is the best account of what it felt like to oppose the Vietnam War from inside the American establishment that was fighting it.
House Made of Dawn
Abel returns to his Pueblo reservation in New Mexico in 1945 after serving in the Second World War. He kills an albino man at a ceremony, is tried and convicted, serves time, is relocated to Los Angeles, and eventually returns to the reservation. The novel moves between these periods and places with a structure that draws on Native American oral tradition rather than the conventions of the European novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, the first time the prize had gone to a Native American author.
The Pulitzer was significant not only as recognition but as a signal that the question of what American literature was — who it included, whose experience it could hold — was being reopened. House Made of Dawn belongs to 1968 not just because it was published then but because its subject — the violence done to indigenous people by American culture, and the costs of trying to exist between two worlds — was precisely what 1968 was forcing into view. It is a genuinely difficult book, demanding rather than accommodating, and that difficulty is the point.
The First Circle
In the sharashka — a special prison for scientists and intellectuals attached to the Soviet security apparatus — a group of prisoners work on a project to identify voices on the telephone. The novel takes place over three days in December 1949 and moves between the prison, the lives of the men’s families outside it, and the Kremlin itself, where Stalin makes decisions that ripple down through every level of Soviet society. It was written in the 1950s and smuggled to the West for publication.
Solzhenitsyn’s title refers to Dante: the first circle of hell is where the virtuous pagans live, separated from paradise but not tormented. His scientists are in an analogous position — privileged prisoners, almost comfortable, but still prisoners. The moral argument of the novel is conducted through the choices his characters make within these constraints, and it is one of the most sustained examinations of what integrity costs under totalitarianism in twentieth-century fiction. Read alongside Orwell, it forms a complete account of how power uses intelligence against itself.
Myra Breckinridge
Myra Breckinridge arrives in Hollywood to claim her inheritance from her uncle Buck Loner, who runs an academy for aspiring entertainers. She was previously Myron Breckinridge, a film critic and Gore Vidal devotee. The novel proceeds as her diary, in which she documents her campaign to destroy American masculinity, her obsession with the films of the 1940s, and her relationships with the students at the academy. It was immediately controversial, immediately bestselling, and immediately dismissed by critics who did not know what to do with it.
Myra Breckinridge belongs in 1968 because it arrives at the exact moment when the category of gender is beginning to crack open in American culture, and it pushes through the crack with maximum force and maximum wit. Vidal is not writing a novel about trans identity in the modern sense — the conceptual vocabulary did not yet exist — but he is writing a novel that uses gender transgression to interrogate American mythology, Hollywood nostalgia, and the relationship between sexuality and power. It is funnier and more serious than its reputation suggests, and its reputation is already better than it was.
Airport
One night at a snowbound Midwestern airport, a runway is blocked by a stuck aircraft, a bomb is smuggled onto a departing flight, a stowaway is discovered, a pilot faces a personal crisis, and the airport manager tries to hold everything together. Hailey spent three years researching the aviation industry before writing the novel. It spent sixty-four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and became the basis for the 1970 film that launched the disaster movie genre.
Including Airport alongside Didion and Solzhenitsyn is not irony. The bestseller lists of any year tell you something about what a culture needed, not only what it could endure, and what 1968 needed was apparently a large, competent, procedurally satisfying novel about professionals managing a crisis through expertise and collective effort. In a year when institutions were visibly failing and the centre was visibly not holding, Hailey’s faith in systems and the people who run them was not escapism. It was a different kind of political statement.
Not sure where to start?
If you have only read one book from 1968 and want to understand the year
→ Read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Joan Didion’s essays are the most precise account of what the Sixties actually felt like from inside them, and the title essay on Haight-Ashbury is the single best piece of writing the decade produced about itself.
If you have read Didion and want the fiction that most defines 1968
→ Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick’s novel asks whether empathy can be measured and what it means if it can — a question that 1968 made urgent and the decades since have not resolved.
If you want to understand the counterculture from inside it
→ Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe’s book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters is the definitive account of what the counterculture believed and why it couldn’t hold together.
If you want to understand 1968 as a political crisis
→ Read The Armies of the Night alongside The First Circle. Mailer watches American democracy failing from the inside; Solzhenitsyn watches Soviet totalitarianism from inside a prison. Together they cover the full range of what political power costs the people living under it.
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