Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1974
1974 is the year Richard Nixon becomes the only American president to resign from office, two months after Woodward and Bernstein publish the book that documented the investigation that made it inevitable. In Britain, John le Carré publishes the spy novel that defines the genre — not James Bond glamour but George Smiley: rumpled, methodical, heartbroken, brilliant. Stephen King, a high school teacher writing at night, sees his first novel published in April; his wife had rescued the pages from the bin. Jaws makes the sea terrifying in February and the film makes it worse in 1975. The Dispossessed wins the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Award. It is a year of debuts, of documents, and of the particular anxiety of a world that had watched its institutions fail in slow motion and was not sure what came next.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
George Smiley, retired from the Circus — British intelligence's inner sanctum — is brought back by a former colleague with a single piece of information: the previous chief believed there was a Soviet mole at the top of the organisation. One of five men. The novel's engine is the slow, meticulous reconstruction of what actually happened — through memory, personnel files, and the reluctant testimony of people who know more than they want to say. There is no glamour, no action set pieces, no Bond. The 1979 BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness is the most faithful television version; the 2011 film with Gary Oldman is the most watchable compression.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is le Carré's masterpiece, and the spy novel against which all others are judged. What makes it extraordinary is not the plot — though the plot is excellent — but the texture: the atmosphere of institutional exhaustion, of men who gave their working lives to a system that may itself be compromised, of loyalty that is indistinguishable from complicity. Smiley is the opposite of the spy-as-hero: he is a man who sees clearly, acts slowly, and pays every cost personally. The novel was loosely inspired by the Cambridge Spy Ring, but it is not really about any specific betrayal — it is about what it costs to believe in something when the thing you believe in turns out to be rotten.
All the President's Men
Published on June 15, 1974 — two months before Nixon's resignation on August 9 — this is the account of how two Washington Post reporters followed a burglary at the Watergate complex in June 1972 and unravelled a conspiracy that reached to the White House. Woodward and Bernstein write it as a detective story: the grinding legwork of finding sources, the paranoia of the investigation, the role of the anonymous source known as Deep Throat (later revealed to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt). The book won the Pulitzer Prize for the Post in 1973 for the reporting it documents. It was adapted into a film in 1976 starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.
All the President's Men is the founding document of a certain idea of journalism — patient, source-based, procedural, at odds with power. That idea looks different fifty years later, and the book's account of two young reporters navigating a system that was both concealing and slowly exposing itself has the quality of a thriller precisely because the stakes were real: the investigation eventually brought down a presidency. It is also a precise portrait of how institutional power resists scrutiny, how sources balance loyalty against conscience, and how a story that seemed impossible gradually became undeniable. Time called it the most influential piece of journalism in history.
Carrie
Carrie White is seventeen, socially invisible, raised by a fanatically religious mother who has never told her that menstruation is normal. When Carrie gets her first period in the school shower room, her classmates throw tampons at her. In the same period, she begins to understand that she can move objects with her mind. The novel builds toward the night of the school prom, where a bucket of pig's blood and a telekinetic teenager produce one of the most remembered scenes in horror fiction. King wrote Carrie partly as a writing exercise — trying to inhabit a female perspective — and almost abandoned it. His wife retrieved the first pages from the bin. The paperback rights sold for $400,000.
Carrie is not King's most technically accomplished novel, and he knows it — he has described it as raw. What makes it matter is that it established King's central subject: the monstrousness that emerges from cruelty, and the question of who is really the monster. Carrie White is not a villain; she is a person pushed past endurance by a society that excludes her. The horror is the revenge, but the real horror is what made revenge feel justified. Fifty years on, it remains one of the few horror novels where the reader's sympathy for the protagonist never fully disappears even as the body count rises.
The Dispossessed
Shevek is a brilliant physicist living on Anarres — an arid moon colonised two centuries earlier by anarchist settlers who rejected the capitalist society of the mother planet, Urras. He is the first Anarres citizen in living memory to travel to Urras, and the novel alternates between his journey outward and the story of what drove him there. Le Guin subtitled it "An Ambiguous Utopia" — the anarchist society on Anarres is not an ideal; it has its own conformities, its own suppressions, its own ways of crushing the individual who thinks differently. The novel won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Locus Award for best novel in 1975.
The Dispossessed is Le Guin's most politically serious novel and the one that has aged best. It refuses the comfort of either option: the capitalist Urras is opulent and unjust, but the anarchist Anarres is grey, coercive in its own way, and limited. What Le Guin is doing is taking political philosophy seriously enough to show what it looks like when actually lived — the gaps between ideology and practice, the way any society develops mechanisms to suppress the people who threaten its self-image. It is the science fiction novel about politics that most rewards re-reading in different political climates.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A man and his son ride motorcycles across the American Northwest with two friends. During the journey, the narrator — who calls himself Phaedrus in the sections where he is reconstructing his own past — delivers a sustained philosophical investigation into the concept of Quality: what makes things good, why Western rationalism has divided knowledge into separate categories that cannot speak to each other, and whether there is a way of living that reunites what has been separated. Pirsig was rejected by 121 publishers before William Morrow accepted the book. It sold 50,000 copies in its first three months and over five million since.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of those books that repays patience in ways that are hard to predict. It is not easy reading — the philosophical digressions are dense — but what Pirsig is asking is genuinely important: how do we understand Quality in a culture that has separated the scientific from the aesthetic, the rational from the craft? The motorcycle maintenance is not incidental; it is the argument in miniature. Caring for a machine with attention and skill is the same activity as caring for ideas. That proposition is either obvious or revelatory depending on when you encounter it, but it rarely leaves the reader unchanged.
Jaws
A great white shark begins killing swimmers off the fictional Long Island resort town of Amity. Police chief Martin Brody wants to close the beaches; the town's mayor and business community want the season to continue. A marine biologist named Matt Hooper arrives with scientific knowledge and equipment. A professional shark hunter named Quint arrives with something older and more elemental. The hardcover edition stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for forty-four weeks. Doubleday and Bantam mounted an unusually aggressive marketing campaign; the film rights were sold before publication. Steven Spielberg's 1975 adaptation made Benchley's story into one of the defining films of the century.
Jaws is worth reading separately from the film because the novel and the film are doing different things. Benchley's novel is more pessimistic, more interested in the corruption and complicity of the town's institutions, and more uncomfortable about its characters — Hooper and Ellen Brody have an affair that Spielberg wisely cut. The shark is a force of nature, but the real subject is a community's willingness to deny danger for economic reasons. Benchley spent years afterward as a shark conservation advocate, saying he could not have written the novel knowing what he later learned about great whites. The book launched the modern summer blockbuster ecosystem, which is a cultural fact worth understanding at its source.
The Killer Angels
The Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863: the three days of fighting that determined the outcome of the American Civil War, narrated from the perspectives of the commanders on both sides — Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and others. Shaara spent ten years researching the battle, reading letters and memoirs, and reconstructing the decisions made under conditions of fear, exhaustion, and incomplete information. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975. It was the basis for the 1993 film Gettysburg and Ken Burns's 1990 Civil War documentary.
The Killer Angels works because Shaara takes the commanders seriously as human beings rather than figures in a tableau. The disagreement between Lee and Longstreet — whether to fight the battle at all, and how — is the novel's core, and it is a genuine argument about strategy, honour, and what loyalty to a cause actually costs. Chamberlain's defence of Little Round Top on the second day is one of the most sustained pieces of military prose in American fiction. If you want to understand why the Civil War still haunts American culture, this is as good an entry point as any — better than most history books because it makes you feel the weight of each decision.
Where to start
If you want the finest novel
→ Read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It is the spy novel against which all others are measured, and it works as a study of loyalty, betrayal, and institutional failure as much as a thriller. Read it slowly — the rewards are in the texture, not just the plot.
If you want nonfiction that reads like a thriller
→ Read All the President's Men. It is the account of the most consequential act of journalism in twentieth-century American history, and it is genuinely gripping. Two months before Nixon resigned, it was in the hands of anyone who wanted to understand what had happened.
If you want the most thought-provoking novel about how societies actually work
→ Read The Dispossessed. Le Guin takes both capitalism and anarchism seriously enough to show what each looks like when lived, and refuses to offer a clean answer. It is the science fiction novel that most rewards re-reading.
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“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
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