Bookbub had a column this week about “Books Turning 50 This Year That Deserve a Reread.”

 

For those of us who were alive in 1970 that was a daunting reminder of how time flies.  Kimberley Laws of Bookbub encouraged readers that one way to celebrate these much-loved books is to reread them.

 

One of the biggest books of 1970 was Erich Segal’s “Love Story,” a romantic story of two college students from different classes and different worlds who fall in love, build a life for themselves and then face tragedy.  

 

Another big book published the year before was Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather.”  If you have only seen the movie, you need to read the book.  

Toni Morrison’s classic “The Bluest Eye,” also turns 50 this year; the Nobel Prize winner’s first novel about an African American girl who want to be accepted.  This novel “tackles difficult subjects like racism, alcoholism, abuse and society’s definition of beauty.”

 

Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” has been selected by Time magazine as one of the “Top 100 English Novels.”  A novel about life in Hollywood where the wife of a top movie director experiences real life.

 

And who would believe that the classic book for girls is turning 50.  “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume is still read by middle schoolers everywhere as Margaret deals with a move to the suburbs, how to make new friends, and deals with growing up.

 

“Jonathan Livingstone Seagull” by Richard Bach is definitely a sixties-seventies book in this story of a bird to whom flying is everything.  

“Deliverance” by James Dickey also turns 50 in this tale of four middle-aged friends on a canoe trip through the remote South.  What was a relaxing vacation turns into a fight for survival.  

 

Other books gracing the Publishers Weekly bestseller’s list in 1970 are: “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Fowles, “The Crystal Cave” by Mary Stewart, “Great Lion of God” by Taylor Caldwell, “QB VII” by Leon Uris, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight’ by Jimmy Breslin, “The Secret Woman” by Victoria Holt, and ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ by Irwin Shaw.