Here are 77 books that Journey to the West fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about Texas literature for over 25 years.
I’m the longtime literary curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, which holds the archives of many leading writers from Texas and the Southwest. I have a personal passion for the 1960s and have written/co-written three nonfiction books set in the sixties.
Bud Shrake’s novel of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy Assassination is an excellent example of what I call “eyewitness fiction.” As a prominent journalist at the rabidly anti-JFK Dallas Morning News, Shrake spent time mingling with the far-right millionaires who refashioned Dallas into a “City of Hate.” Yet the politically liberal, dope-smoking Shrake was also a denizen of Dallas’s underworld and was dating the star stripper at Jack Ruby’s nightclub. From these twin worlds, he fashioned this ferocious, comically subversive portrait of Dallas in the months leading up to the assassination.
Shrake’s writing has less in common with his Texas contemporaries than it does with American novelists Ken Kesey, Charles Portis, and Kurt Vonnegut. This novel blasts off so hard it can be a bit hard for some readers to hang on in the beginning. But if you stay with it, and latch on to Shrake’s Dexedrine-fueled…
A TV western star quits his successful series and returns to Dallas to make a documentary film that reveals the truth about his home town. His quest forces him to learn if he is capable of using his six-gun for real as he moves from booze and radical politics in oil men's palaces into the infamous Carousel Club and the underworld of arms and dope smuggling in a city ripe for the murder of a President.
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
This American classic by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, is read by university students worldwide. It’s set in its own time of indulgent decadence where little value is placed on the lives of individuals met by Danny Deck, the sad-sack protagonist, who denigrates his published work to the point of tearing up a copy of the novel he carries with him before drowning his own sorry self in the river of the Rio Grande. Yet, Danny is as much at fault for the sloppy treatment of the company he keeps as his company is for being disingenuous.
What McMurtry calls normal life, or mundane happiness, through the voice of novelist Deck, is seen as obtainable if one wants to pursue the creative arts. His conclusion is that the two simply don’t mix. As he explores this idea in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, Deck sets about self-destructing, which has nothing to do…
Hailed as one of "the best novels ever set in America's fourth largest city" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry's "comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension" (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the "mundane happiness" of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, "El Chevy," bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable…
I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about Texas literature for over 25 years.
I’m the longtime literary curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, which holds the archives of many leading writers from Texas and the Southwest. I have a personal passion for the 1960s and have written/co-written three nonfiction books set in the sixties.
I’m cheating a bit here because this book is set in the Japan and Okinawa, rather than Texas. But Sarah Bird is one of Texas’s most beloved writers, and this exquisite novel about the college-aged, Vietnam War-protesting daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, is one of the finest novels written by anyone from Texas. Bird captures the mood of the Vietnam era with empathy and wonderful humor, but beyond that, The Yokota Officers Club is a deeply affecting story about families, about love, loss, and the hope of redemption. It’s a transcendent novel that feels both intimate and sweeping. Sarah Bird has written several fine books but this one is her masterpiece.
“A GEM, POLISHED AND FACETED IN A WAY THAT PULLED ME INTO THE HEART OF IT WITH THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. . . . Important, touching, meaningful, and uplifting.” –JEANNE RAY Chicago Tribune
After a year away at college, military brat Bernadette Root has come “home” to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to spend the summer with her bizarre yet comforting clan. Ruled by a strict, regimented Air Force Major father, but grounded in their mother’s particular brand of humor, Bernie’s family was destined for military greatness during the glory days of the mid-’50s. But in Base life, where an…
I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about Texas literature for over 25 years.
I’m the longtime literary curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, which holds the archives of many leading writers from Texas and the Southwest. I have a personal passion for the 1960s and have written/co-written three nonfiction books set in the sixties.
Dick J. Reavis was a white teenager from Texas when he joined the Civil Rights movement in 1965. If White Kids Die is his clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of his experiences in Alabama for the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee. It’s a fascinating, grassroots view from a foot soldier of the movement, someone far removed for the glamorous leadership positions.
Following his stint with SNCC, Reavis later joined SDS and became a prominent anti-war protester in Austin. During his time in the Movement, Reavis endured beatings, jailings, denunciations, and poverty. All of that, as it turned out, was good preparation for his eventual career: a life in journalism. He has since become a legendary journalist in Texas, famed for his tough and daring reporting. He once told me: “I knew Spanish, knew how to live poor, knew how to lie to bosses."
In 1965 Dick J. Reavis, a white middle-class Texan, decided to join a voter registration programme, and spent a summer on the wrong side of the tracks in Demopolis, Alabama. This work describes his gradual maturation as he encountered the other side of legally-enforced racism.
I have been fascinated with the sixties and its counterculture ever since I was about eleven or twelve, and I found out that the summer I was born, 1967, was called the Summer of Love. Because of this fascination, I started reading writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson at an early age. Then, I became a lover of the Grateful Dead and went on tour with them as a fan for a couple of years in my late teens. It was the best way remaining in this country, in the 1980s, to be a hippie in some real way. I still love the music and literature of that time.
This novel is a strange triptych, with three tangentially connected parts that all have to do with the darker side of the '60s counterculture. I loved it.
One part is about the early days of the Rolling Stones, with the band members themselves as characters. Then there’s avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who made a movie in which Mick Jagger appeared alongside Bobby Beausoleil, who later joined the Manson Family. The third part is about the Manson Family itself, leading up to their inexplicable crimes.
The book engaged and compelled me in spite of (also because of) its disjointed nature—it’s beautifully written and a true work of art.
Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary novel, Sway -- the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence.
Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson "family." With great artistry, Lazar…
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
Popularised as a 1960s counterculture book, its author, Brautigan, playfully breaks all the rules in a modern Dadaistic style of commentary which is a sort of stream of consciousness that verges on playful and purposeful madness. Thoughts of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass come to mind when trying to make any sense of this author’s zany work here. In a word: trout? No trout. This is no commentary about fishing. It’s a mishmash of essay-like commentaries on an ‘on the road’ lifestyle which does occasionally mention fishing.
Richard Brautigan's wonderfully zany, hilarious episodic novel set amongst the rural waterways of America.
Here's a journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways and ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. With pure inventiveness and free-wheeling energy, the counterpoint to all those angry Beatniks, Brautigan tells the story of rural America, and the hunt for a bit of trout fishing. Funny, wild and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration - of a country and a mind.
I have been fascinated with the sixties and its counterculture ever since I was about eleven or twelve, and I found out that the summer I was born, 1967, was called the Summer of Love. Because of this fascination, I started reading writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson at an early age. Then, I became a lover of the Grateful Dead and went on tour with them as a fan for a couple of years in my late teens. It was the best way remaining in this country, in the 1980s, to be a hippie in some real way. I still love the music and literature of that time.
Denis Johnson’s big, National Book Award-winning novel revolves around the Vietnam War itself, with a big cast of characters and many narrative threads.
I really loved following all the threads and seeing the intricate web they formed. The picture it paints of America is still relevant today. It’s an exciting book, and though it requires quite a lot from a reader, it ends up being hugely satisfying.
`Once upon a time there was a war, and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.'
This is the story of Skip Sands, a CIA spy engaged in psychological operations against the Viet Cong, and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of two brothers heading towards self-destruction, and a story…
I’m a poet, tarot muse, and artist whose childhood experiences with vivid night-time dreams and a handful of years on a commune in the cornfields ignited my passion for exploring inner imagery. I read voraciously from science fiction to fairytales to channelings. I discovered tarot in my twenties, using it to read for others, mend my broken heart, and get squared away enough to apply to graduate school for poetry in the heartland at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ever since, tarot is my favorite mirror for self-reflection. Author of two poetry collections, I wrote a workbook to help others apply the tarot in joyful, healing ways through writing and art.
Writer, photographer, and journalist William Cook Haigwood selected his own photos to create Journeying the Sixties: A Counterculture Tarot. The book helped me understand the context for my early childhood when my parents had an apartment in the Haight. Haigwood practically offers a graduate-level course in the Sixties by examining the major players, the opposing forces, and the gifts and wages of the unbridled idealism and enthusiasm characteristic for the times (love, religion, art, music, politics, law enforcement, war, drugs, feminism, poetry, revolution, and more). The Eight of Cups chapter looks at People’s Park in Berkeley; Mick Jagger represents the King of Pentacles; the Death card discussion explores Martin Luther King, Jr., Kennedy, and Vietnam. Haigwood’s interpretations make tarot’s archetypal energies relevant to the lessons of an entire generation.
Journalist and writer William Cook Haigwood offers a unique look at the Counterculture of the 1960s in this collection of historical essays and vintage photographs that uses the symbolism of the Tarot to describe and conceptualize the era’s critical cycles of experience. Journeying the Sixties: A Counterculture Tarot features photographs selected from thousands made by the author during more than 15 years of reporting and participation in what has come to be called “the 20th century’s longest decade.” Selected images from the period have been formatted as Tarot cards. Essays supporting the cards use the Fool’s Journey to extend a…
I was a Brooklyn kid who grew up on Long Island. I started hitting the bars and clubs in NYC when I was still a teenager. I found my way to CBGB in 1975, moved to Bleecker St in 1976, and in a right place/right time moment I found myself working the Mudd Club door in early 1979. That moment was a life changer. The Mudd Club book tells the story.
The best book written about 1960’s Pop-Culture madness and mayhem. As founding member of The Fugs and a unique literary voice, Ed Sanders tells this tale brilliantly. The warning signs, the goosebumps, and knowing when it’s time to stop are all there in The Family.
I’m just a guy, a normal guy who enjoys thinking and writing about things that can nudge humanity along towards peace. If everybody thought just a little bit about it, we’d have it.
I love this story! It’s a wonderful romp through the lives of the characters, characters who are like everyday people that we could know.
It’s at once bizarre yet relatable, imaginative yet real, and just all-around fantastic. This is a story that I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first time and one that I would read again.
This is one of McMurtry's most memorable novels - the basis for the film of the same name. Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.
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