Books: THE BEST OF THE SEVENTIES

FICTION Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: technology and slapstick raised to the nth power.

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow: a saline picaresque of American literary life.

Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov: the master's valedictory novel, with his customary flourishes and optical allusions.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: a South American village transformed by magic and time.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow: the past imperfect, done with syncopation and high style.

Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer: the most recent novel by America's 1978 Nobel laureate for Literature.

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever: elegies by a master of the short form.

The World According to Garp by John Irving: an explosive tragicomedy about feminism and fatherly love.

NONFICTION Dispatches by Michael Herr: highly evocative reporting about the Viet Nam War and its aftermath.

Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills: a prescient analysis of the pre Watergate President.

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell: the rise of modernism from the trenches of World War I.

The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a harrowing documentary of Stalinist terror and oppression.

The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas: essays that raise science writing to an art.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe: the lives and lively times of the first U.S. astronauts.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston: musings about growing up Chinese and female in America.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M, Pirsig: a cross-country search for enlightenment.