1976 Club: Post your reviews here! #1976Club

The 1976 Club is here! It’s time for the bi-annual event where Karen and I ask readers across the internet to join together to build up a picture of a particular year in books. This week, we’re asking you to read and review a book – or more – published in 1976. Any book published in 1976 counts – in whatever format, language, place.

Just put a link to your review in the comments here – on your blog, GoodReads, Instagram, wherever. If you don’t have any platform to leave a review, you can write your review in the comments.

I also wanted to start the week by sharing this apt quote from Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017), translated by Sasha Dugdale – an eclectic and poetic work of non-fiction that starts from the idea of looking at old family photographs and ranges far and wide. How perfect for the club projects is this? It really captures something of what I hoped we could achieve when I first came up with the club idea.

There is a strange stylistic kinship between texts of the same moment, written in the same cross-section of time, but it has nothing to do with authorial intention and can only be seen in hindsight. With a distance of twenty or thirty years it’s hard not to notice the single intonation, the common denominator welding together newspaper, shop sign, poem read from the stage at the all-women college, the conversation on the way home. It is as if every age produces it owns particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner. Even those who behave as if they stood outside the idea of the ‘typical’ suddenly make a linguistic gesture that’s common to their contemporaries, without even noticing it, as if they were unaware of the pull of gravity on them.

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