With the fast pace of life, we rarely stop to think about what is happening in other people’s lives. The moment you were opening your eyes for the first time, a famous actor could have been practicing his lines for a famous movie. By the time you were turning six years old, a poet was probably finishing his most famous compilation of poems. And when you were blowing the candles of your cake for your sixteenth birthday, maybe Max Brooks was publishing World War Z.
Books are oblivious to time. Their pages may turn yellow, but the words written on them travel from century to century and are brought to life by the voices of children and adults throughout the world. Classic or modern stories can be linked to specific moments of a person’s life. If you love books you will be interested in discovering the novels published on your birthday. Because books are like family to many of us, we invite you to find your literary siblings if you were born between 1984 and 1999.
1984
The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera
This is a philosophical essay, a love story, and an analysis of our modern society told by four people during the social unrest in 1968 in Czechoslovakia
1985
White Noise — Don Delillo
The same year Márquez published Love in the Time of Cholera, Don Dellilo wonderfully expressed the realities of a postmodern society in White Noise. The book is a criticism to the academic life, and to the family. With White Noise Don Dellilo established himself as one of the most important authors of the century.
1986
It — Stephen King
This book was the Best Seller of the year with its 500 pages of horror. It is considered to be King’s most complex work. The author who publishes two books a year tells the story of a creature who adapts its form to kill people. The main character, which transforms itself into a clown, becomes the nightmare of an entire generation of children.
1987
Tokio Blues — Haruki Murakami
It is the fifth book of the Japanese novelist. It is set in the sixties during a student’s unrest. In the middle of the conflict, a story of love and death is told. At the same time, The Bonfire of Vanities made its debut in US.
1988
The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho
Coehlo established himself in the collective imagination with this novel. “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it,” writes Cohelo to inspire his readers. The novel has sold 65 million copies since its first edition.
1989
The Pilars of the Earth —Ken Follet
It is the novel that catapulted Follet’s career. Before The Pilars of the Earth, his work was focused on espionage. With this book, he explores historical events in the twelfth century. He touches upon many subjects, from nutrition in the Medieval period and gothic architecture to philosophy and theology.
He combined them to create an exquisite narrative, making it the best novel of 1989.
1990
Nightfall —Isaac Asimov
In his final days, Asimov went back to check some of his short stories, his effort became Nightfall. The story is about Kalgash, a planet similar to the Earth in size, but with six suns. Every 2,049 years the suns shut down, and the inhabitants of the planet have to prepare to face the darkness.
1991
The Gosspel According to Jesus Christ —José Saramago
This novel is as complex as the rest of his work. Saramago writes about what would have been the untold story of Jesus Christ. In the novel, Jesus blames his father Joseph for the death of Jerusalem’s children. He abandons his home and starts a journey of self-discovery. Eventually, Jesus meets Mary Magdalene and starts a family with her. The novel was highly controversial as it places Jesus as a man and not a divinity.
1992
All The Pretty Horses— Cormarc McCarthy
McCarthy experimented with a new form of narrative to tell a story of love and the adventures of John Grady Cole. It is the first volume of his Border Trilogy.
1993
Trainspotting— Irvine Welsh
His book was famously adapted to film, and since then it has garnered legions of readers and admirers. Published in 1993, at the time it was seen as the most emblematic publication of the decade. It tells the story of a group of Scottish heroin addicts. Their adventures with drugs, their resentment against their homeland, and the journey to adulthood are the main subjects explored by Welsh.
1994
Of Love and Other Demons— Gabriel García Márquez
On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Mari is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. Into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura,and as he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love, and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery.
1995
Blindness— José Saramago
Years after publishing his controversial book, The Gosspel According to Jesus Christ, Saramago decided to explore the human behavior in his new novel. Few people know that Saramago stopped writing for 30 years because he was unsuccessful at the beginning of his career. Blindness proves that all writers can overcome any difficulty. Ten years later, he wrote Seeing, the sequel to Blindness.
1996
Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
It has over one thousand pages which address different topics of the postmodern reality like drugs relationships, advertising, and suicide on a dystopian North America. The book is filled with footnotes and notes about the notes, which makes it a complicated book, however it is worth reading.
1997
American Pastoral— Philip Roth
Seymour Levov is a happy and conventional upper middle class man, whose life is ruined by the social and political turmoil of 1960 during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. The book explores what happens when a man loses the stability that he was accustomed to, and how the best and the worst of humanity rises from conflict. It also questions the concept of the American dream.
1998
The Savage Detectives— Roberto Bolaño
Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest? To track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. According to the author, the novel tries to contrast the feelings of defeat and happiness of a generation, as well as the lines people draw when confronted with diverse challenges.
1999
Disgrace— J.M. Coetzee
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of Communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. But an affair with a student, Lurie sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly …disgraced.
