100 Books Like My Beautiful Hippie

For all the highly enjoyable shenanigans around using time travel to prevent JFK’s assassination, I came away loving this book for reasons I don’t normally associate with King–I genuinely loved his characters. Jake Epping is a sympathetic lead, and I became far more invested in his love for Sadie than in the assassination-thwarting.

I’d hesitate to say this is King’s finest book, but of those I’ve read, it’s definitely my favourite. I found the climax so emotionally satisfying; it genuinely moved me.

A wonderful coming-of-age novel set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Vietnam War.

Two young men are lucky enough to find kindred spirits in one another and then suddenly, they are wrenched apart – one off to college in Wisconsin, and the other drafted off to fight in the Vietnam War.

The two men take up a correspondence, leaning on each other and sharing their thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams through the only avenue available to them: the written word. Their letters are a lifeline for both.

This novel is a journey through the heart and mind of two young disillusioned men who learn all about friendship and love through letters, finding themselves again through each other.

This non-fiction work is the definitive grunge memoir, told in stark – sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking – detail.

Lanegan is candid and honest about his own struggles as well as those of his music colleagues and friends like Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, and others, always keeping their humanity at the forefront.

A must-read for anyone interested in the grunge scene of the Seattle ‘90s. 

A tale of close sisters who find themselves at odds as their belief systems are challenged during the height of the Vietnam War; their lives deviating from one another as their priorities change.

A poignant novel about how even the strongest of familial relationships can be torn asunder in times of turmoil and upheaval, but how the purest love can bring them back together again.

This is a classic account of the rebellious souls of the counterculture who attempted to disentangle themselves from a society they found stifling and parasitic.

Coyote’s memoir is sometimes bleak, sometimes funny, almost always endearing even through the worst of unintended consequences.

A brutally and beautifully written picture of a time that sought to remake America for the better.

From my eleventh-grade term paper about life after death, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of reincarnation.

This extremely insightful book only fueled that interest. It explores the idea that our souls pre-plan the challenges in each lifetime with purpose.

This book made me look at the struggles I’ve experienced much differently. Now the question I always ask myself is, “What was I supposed to learn from that?”

Finder curated a retrospective collection of 60s books, theatre, music, television, poetry, architecture, and politics. It opens with passages from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, James Baldwin on civil rights, and Hannah Arendt on Eichmann.

Then John Updike muses on the big bang theory, E. J. Kahn, Jr. captures Harvard professors’ view of student protest. Next Kenneth Tynan reviews Bye Bye Birdie, Lillian Ross listens to Sergeant Pepper, then teams with Jane Kramer to parse Marshal McLuhan. Robert Rice muses on the humour of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and A. J. Liebling looks at Cassius Clay before he became Muhammad Ali… and much more.

It’s a cornucopia of well-written, intellectually stimulating prose and poetry written in and about a perplexing decade. It illuminates what I remember—even when I don’t agree—and makes me aware of much that I missed, misunderstood, or misinterpreted at… show more.

Perhaps you’re already aware of all of these books. Well, allow me to introduce Nebraska-born author Wright Morris—a perpetually ignored force of nature. Morris mainly wrote award-winning fiction, but this collection of essays was a refreshing and straightforward way of looking at, to take one offbeat example, hippies: “Hippies share some knowledge of where they have been, but no demonstrable insight into where they are going…What they share is a condition, not a direction.” Morris even temporarily torpedoes his own genre to make his point. “Who needs fiction? What could be stranger than the news on the hour?” In 1968 America, the ‘truth’ was indeed stranger than fiction.

Walt Kelly’s tales of Pogo Possum and Albert the Alligator in the Okefenokee Swamp began in 1948. Like many daily cartoon strips it featured anthropomorphic characters. The humour was sweet, gentle, and “ridickelwockle,” letting Pogo fly under the radar of censorship until they noticed that Kelly was lampooning politicians. “Family” newspapers banned the strip, but Kelly had captured his readers’ hearts.

Walt Kelley expressed the essence of the anti-Vietnam War protest when he had Pogo say, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

It's another sci-fi book! Luckily, it has a fun, psychedelic-flower-child color palette, so it should be fine.

Probably the biggest stretch on this list, this is mostly horror by implication. There are a lot of real-life event references, several characters are hippies (including the main character), and there's even a thread of romance. On the flip side, there's also some other stuff from the era of the "Summer of Love", like clandestine organizations and war protests that poignantly reminded me of the oxymoron, "fighting for peace".