Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1977
1977 is the year Elvis Presley dies in August at forty-two, and Star Wars opens in May and changes what the cinema expects of itself. It is also, by some measures, one of the finest years for literary fiction in the decade. Toni Morrison publishes the novel that the Swedish Academy will cite sixteen years later when she receives the Nobel Prize. Stephen King publishes his first hardcover bestseller — a haunted hotel in Colorado, a father losing his mind, a child who sees too much — and establishes beyond any doubt that horror fiction can be serious literature. The Tolkien mythology that was written in fragments across sixty years finally appears, edited by his son, and reaches number one on the New York Times bestseller list in October. Philip K. Dick publishes his most personal novel disguised as science fiction. It is a year of arrivals and posthumous gifts, of popular literature proving itself and literary fiction reaching beyond the academy.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
Song of Solomon
The novel opens with an extraordinary image: an insurance man named Robert Smith poised on a rooftop, attempting to fly, while a crowd watches below and one woman sings. In the commotion, another woman — Ruth Dead — goes into premature labour. The child born that day is Macon “Milkman” Dead III, and the novel follows his life in Michigan and his eventual journey south to discover the origins of his family and the legend of his great-grandfather Solomon, who was said to have escaped slavery by flying back to Africa. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was the first novel by a Black woman author ever selected by the Book of the Month Club, and was cited by the Swedish Academy in awarding Morrison the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. It was named the 25th best English-language novel of the twentieth century by the Radcliffe Publishing Course.
Song of Solomon is Morrison at the full reach of her ambition — larger and more formally daring than Sula or The Bluest Eye, and the novel in which she most completely inhabits the African American folk and oral tradition as a literary structure rather than a source of local colour. The flying myth, which runs through the entire novel, is not metaphor but history: Morrison is writing about what it cost to be enslaved, what was lost, and what was transformed into something that survived. The prose is dense and lyrical and precise. If you have read Beloved and want to go deeper into Morrison, come here next.
The Shining
Jack Torrance is a writer and recovering alcoholic who takes a job as off-season caretaker at the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies — a chance to heal his marriage, repair his relationship with his son Danny, and finish his play. His son Danny has the shining: a psychic ability that allows him to read minds and see across time. The Overlook, built on a Native American burial ground and the site of decades of violence and corruption, begins to speak to Jack through the hotel’s history and through the bottle it seems to press on him. King wrote the novel partly as a meditation on his own alcoholism and his fear of what it was doing to his family. It was his third published novel and his first hardcover bestseller, firmly establishing him as the defining figure in popular horror fiction.
The Shining is the King novel that most rewards reading as a study of addiction rather than as a haunting. Jack Torrance’s descent is not primarily supernatural — it is the recognisable logic of a man who has convinced himself that his failures are everyone else’s fault, whose genius justifies his appetites, and who loves his family in a way that does not prevent him from destroying them. The Overlook amplifies what is already there. That psychological precision is what separates the novel from King’s lesser work and from Kubrick’s film, which simplified Torrance into a man who was always going to be monstrous.
The Silmarillion
Tolkien began writing the mythology that became The Silmarillion in 1917, while recovering from trench fever after the Battle of the Somme. He worked on it for the rest of his life — alongside The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and everything else — but never completed it. He died in 1973 with multiple contradictory drafts covering the creation of the world, the ages of the elves, the wars against Morgoth, and the events that preceded the Third Age of Middle-earth. His son Christopher spent four years selecting, reconciling, and editing the material into a coherent text. The Silmarillion reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in October 1977 and has remained in print ever since. It is the source text for everything in Tolkien’s mythology.
The Silmarillion is not a novel — it reads more like the Old Testament or the Prose Edda than like The Lord of the Rings — which is both its difficulty and its power. Tolkien was constructing a mythology for England, and this is the mythology: the music that made the world, the first darkness, the silmarils, the fall of Númenor. If you have read Tolkien and want to understand why his world feels so much older than it is, this is the book that explains it. Christopher Tolkien’s editorial work is itself an extraordinary achievement; he spent the rest of his long life continuing to publish and annotate his father’s unpublished writings.
A Scanner Darkly
Bob Arctor is an undercover narcotics agent in near-future Southern California, tasked with surveilling a group of drug users — including himself. He wears a “scramble suit” that conceals his identity from his police superiors, who do not know the identity of the informant they call Fred. Substance D, the drug they are all using, causes the two hemispheres of the brain to work independently, and Bob Arctor begins to lose track of which identity is real. The novel is closely based on Dick’s own experience in the drug communities of the early 1970s. The author’s note at the end — a list of people he knew who were damaged or killed by drugs, dedicated to them — is one of the most devastating pieces of prose Dick ever wrote.
A Scanner Darkly is the Philip K. Dick novel that most clearly crosses from genre fiction into literature. The paranoid identity themes he explored throughout his career here have a source: he knew these people, he was one of these people, and the novel is a document of genuine loss rather than a thought experiment. The science fiction framing — the scramble suit, the surveillance state — is not decoration but the argument: a society that surveils its population cannot distinguish the surveiller from the surveilled, the addict from the investigator. The author’s note turns the novel into an elegy. Start here if you have not read Dick.
The Thorn Birds
The Cleary family — Irish Catholic, poor, transplanted from New Zealand to a vast sheep station in the Australian Outback — spans three generations from 1915 to 1969. At the novel’s centre is Meggie Cleary and her impossible love for Father Ralph de Bricassart, an ambitious priest who rises through the Catholic Church’s hierarchy while never entirely freeing himself from his attachment to her. McCullough was a neurophysiologist at Yale when she wrote it. The Thorn Birds spent forty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over thirty-three million copies worldwide — the best-selling Australian novel in history. The 1983 television miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward became one of the most-watched programmes in American broadcasting history.
The Thorn Birds is sometimes dismissed as popular fiction, which undersells what McCullough actually achieved. The novel spans fifty-four years and two continents, keeps control of a large cast of characters across multiple generations, and earns its emotional investment through patience rather than manipulation. The central relationship between Meggie and Ralph is the oldest possible structure — the love that cannot be, the vow that separates — and McCullough gives it a specificity of place and faith and consequence that most writers of popular fiction never attempt. It is the right book for what it is, and what it is is considerable.
Falconer
Ezekiel Farragut, a university professor and drug addict, is serving a prison sentence for the murder of his brother. The novel takes place almost entirely inside Falconer Prison — its routines, its hierarchies, its violence, its occasional grace — and follows Farragut’s relationships with other inmates, his correspondent wife, and his dealer. Cheever had spent decades writing about suburban Connecticut in The New Yorker; Falconer is his reckoning with everything his carefully constructed public persona had concealed: addiction, bisexuality, the long suppressed fury of his family life. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, won that year by Song of Solomon.
Falconer is the novel Cheever needed to write and could barely allow himself to write — it is the most direct and autobiographical thing he produced, dressed as fiction about prison rather than about himself. What makes it extraordinary is the quality of attention he brings to confinement: the way small freedoms become enormous, the way affection and violence exist side by side in close quarters, the way a man’s sense of himself survives or doesn’t. Cheever’s journals, published posthumously, confirmed that much of what is implicit in Falconer was his own experience. Reading the novel knowing that makes it something else entirely.
The Dragons of Eden
Carl Sagan combines anthropology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, and computer science to trace the evolution of human intelligence from the first nervous systems to the human brain. He uses the cosmic calendar — compressing the history of the universe into a single year — to place human intelligence in its biological and cosmological context: we appear in the last minutes of December 31. He examines the triune brain model, the relationship between the left and right hemispheres, the nature of dreams, the capacity for language in other animals, and the question of what artificial intelligence might eventually mean. The book spent thirty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1978.
The Dragons of Eden is a snapshot of what science communication looked like at its best before the internet made everything both more accessible and more disposable. Sagan writes about complexity with the clarity of someone who has genuinely thought through what the general reader needs to know and in what order. Some of the neuroscience has been superseded in the fifty years since — the triune brain model is now considered too simplified — but the quality of the thinking, and Sagan’s ability to make scale and time genuinely felt rather than just stated, has not been replaced. If you want to understand what made Sagan significant as a public intellectual, start here.
Where to start
If you want the finest novel
→ Read Song of Solomon. Morrison at the full reach of her ambition — the novel cited by the Nobel committee, named one of the twenty-five best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and the book in which the African American folk tradition becomes a complete literary architecture.
If you want the novel that most established what horror fiction could do
→ Read The Shining. King’s most psychologically precise novel — a study of addiction and paternal failure that uses the supernatural as a precise diagnostic tool. More complex and more human than Kubrick’s film.
If you want Philip K. Dick’s most personal work
→ Read A Scanner Darkly. Science fiction as elegy — a semi-autobiographical account of a community destroyed by drugs, with an author’s note that turns the whole novel into a memorial. His most literary achievement.
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“Milkman Dead was born on the day his father died.” — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
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