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As a genuine card-carrying Gen X’er (the card is actually a Wishbone dog tag from Cracker Jacks), I’m very angsty, sarcastic, and bitter. Where was my house, my good job, and all those other neat things my dad had? Gen X was the first generation to do worse than their parents, despite a higher level of education and knowledge of every episode of The Brady Bunch. Unlike our parents, we hated Regan, but hoped his evil empire would bring about better days once the monetary system collapsed and we all became punk-rawk squatters.
However, we did have our brief moment in the sun in the 90s when we were suddenly the targeted market. We hated it, but secretly we loved it. We ruled the music charts with grunge and hip hop, TV catered to our distrust of the government and general misanthropy (The X-Files, TV Nation, Mr. Show), and we even had movies (Reality Bites, Slacker) and comedians (Janeanne Garofolo, the Upright Citizens Brigade). Nowadays, people don’t write their own songs and every TV show is full of models getting into food fights. Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
But what I loved most about our Gen X heyday were the books. We still had some independent bookstores, and they were full of books that were hip and smart and had characters just like me—overeducated, underemployed, cynical, and angry.
So when I heard that Details ran a featurette recently on their top 25 Gen X classics, I looked at it right away, wanting to relive my youth. But the list was a little baffling. OK, very baffling—a book on Barry Goldwater? The Tipping Point? A Dave Eggers book that came out in 2009? While some of their picks seemed appropriate (Ghost World, White Teeth), it turns out that the list was predicated on the author being a Gen Xer rather than the book being one that a Gen Xer would read. I know we’re all shocked that the highly esteemed Details got this wrong!
So, I decided that the Hipster Book Club needed a real list of Generation X classics—books that a real Gen Xer would probably have read—written by an actual Gen Xer. What these books all share are those iconic hallmarks of Gen X: sarcasm, hope in the face of hopelessness, and attention to minutiae.
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Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture, 1991
I’m actually not a fan, but this book has to be included on any Gen X list. It was Coupland’s book (and not a band nor a book from the 1960s) that identified the generation of goof-off disenfranchised slackers born after 1960-something and before 1980-something. The short, disjointed stories in this book littered with pop cultural ephemera were among the first pieces of literature that specifically addressed this generation. I hated this book and instead would, at the time, extol the virtues of Generation Ecch, (1994, Jason Cohen, Michael Krugman, with drawings by Evan Dorkin). Now, I just hate both.
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Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, 1990
Without a doubt, this was the first book Gen Xers used as a signal to others that they were part of the club. A copy of MC, MG was like having a secret decoder ring, or, for you hippies, a copy of In Watermelon Sugar. MC, MG is made up of 17 linked short stories that are adrenaline-filled roller coaster rides of LOL whut. Reading it is like being stuck in a ball pit with a trove of hyperactive Chihuahuas, all named Mark Leyner.
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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1995
Not sure I need to say much more on this topic. Wallace made the end note cool.
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Adrian Tomine, 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini Comics, 1998
People who were early adopters were getting the actual mini comics via mail order, but those late to the party read this collection of Tomine’s tales of angst. In the collection, Tomine progresses from a Love and Rockets fan boy to a sophisticated telegrapher of subtle emotions. He held up a knowing mirror to our anger and despair.
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Donna Tartt, The Secret History, 1993
I hated this book, but everyone else loved it, so it makes the list. Bunch of kids in college, a murder, blah blah blah. Ooh! Spooky! The big appeal of The Secret History is that it’s a big book, but it can be read in an afternoon. Seriously, though, many many people loved this book, so don’t listen to me.
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Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, 1995
An early entry in the overly confessional memoir disguised as cultural criticism. The cover featured the adorable and provocatively posed Wurtzel, looking like a waif who went to too many Lollapoloozas. Incredibly annoying, gossipy, but ultimately irresistible, Prozac Nation was like finding the secret diary of your high school nemesis.
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Richard Linklater, Slacker, 1992
We all saw ourselves and our friends in Slacker. We were the girl making the menstrual art or the guy who filmed everything. And who hadn’t had that conversation about the Smurfs and Hinduism? This book includes the script to the classic indie film and Gen X fave, and lots of funny trivia. Many Gen Xers have a multiple copies of this book, received as holiday gifts from relatives or acquired when sneaky roommates moved out in the middle of the night.
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Nick Horby, High Fidelity, 1994
Notable for its use of top five lists and discussions of mix-tapes, High Fidelity made all girls want to date record store clerks, in spite of their obvious tendencies towards basement dwelling and making lists.
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William T. Vollmann. Whores for Gloria, 1994
The Rainbow Stories, 13 Stories 13 Epitaphs, and Whores were all gorgeous variations on the same book—drug addicts and whores in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, viewed with a sympathetic eye that caught everything. These were the books that made us all want to immerse ourselves in alien cultures and write about our experiences.
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Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son, 1992
Smart people kept three copies of this book—one to keep, one to lend, and one to lend when someone “lost” the book they borrowed. This collection of short stories is narrated by unnamed marginalized men who drift from low-end job to low-end job in search of redemption. Short and intense, Jesus’ Son was Gen X’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
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Barry Yourgrau, The Sadness of Sex, 1995
These days, Yourgrau is best known for writing serialized fiction for cell phone readers, but in the mid-90s all the cool kids were reading this humorous and melancholic collection. We read a lot of short story collections back then. We also tied onions to our belts, which was the style at the time.
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Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, 1993
Welsh made drugs seem like fun, but then not so fun. Also, the Scottish was hard to read! Carrying this book at a hipster cafe gave people a sophisticate Euro air—you know, unbathed and smelling like Gitanes.
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Jeff Noon, Vurt, 1996
Vurt is speculative fiction from Great Britain whose bizarre and prescient plot gave readers instant cool points just for reading it. Descriptions of the plot sound more confusing than it actually is. Basically, everyone in Manchester is hooked on a drug, called vurt, and the addicts cause the vurt world to manifest in the “real” world.
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Chuck Palanhiuk, Fight Club, 1996
Upset the olds so much that they convinced the media to run stories that jaded Gen Xers were actually forming fight clubs.
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Stewart O’Nan, The Speed Queen, 1997
A woman on death row writes a long letter about her life to her favorite author, Stephen King. O’Nan marries the populist and post-modern in this beautiful exploration of corrupted innocence.
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Schwa World Operations Manual, 1997
Most Gen Xers knew Schwa—they concocted the ubiquitous black and white graphical alien head that showed up on stickers and t-shirts the world over. Particular faves of the ravers, the Schwa people poked fun at folks’ fear of the alien. It was a metaphor printed on a t-shirt! The operations manual was their first foray into real publishing, and everyone ran out and got a copy. Yes, it’s a goofy novelty book.
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Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, 2001
Davis had other books prior to this one, but McSweeney’s published this one, catapulting it to instant classic status. Fifty-six wildly imaginative stories in 200 pages. By the time Sam Johnson came out, we were all so used to reading online that any story longer than 4 pages seemed too long.
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Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, 1990
A strange story of a giantess and her son in seventeenth century London. The slim trade paperback was in everyone’s backpack. Many prefer Orange Is Not the Only Fruit, but Cherry was on everyone’s bookshelves. Sexing the Cherry appealed to our love of the strange.
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Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension, 1994
Yeah, popular science books were mighty popular in the ‘90s, but the Gen X fave was clearly Hyperspace, which explained string theory in a fun and understandable way. Nary is a “time is like a river,” analogy found in the whole book. Kaku is not just a science writer, he’s an actual theoretical physicist who built a particle accelerator in his parent’s garage.
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Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000
Eggers’s memoir and first book featured real-life references to zines (Might), The Real World (for which he auditioned) and his sister’s phone number (removed from the paperback edition of the book). People who didn’t read this had to come up with very creative excuses as to why they didn’t.
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Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, 1995
In 1993, Harper’s ran a heartbreaking, funny, and cynical piece by Lucy Grealy, who, at the age of nine, lost half of her jaw to cancer. From this article came the critically acclaimed Autobiography of a Face. Poet Grealy tells all—childhood taunting, her desire to be special, sleeping around, oxycotin addiction—with non-sentimental humor. The ones of us who didn’t read this book pretended we did.
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Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood, 1993
There were certain stereotypes that came of age with Gen X: Comic book geeks, goths, computer hackers among them. Drawing Blood features all of those, along with hot gay sex, and a potentially haunted house. This was a particular fave among the ladies.
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Peter Bagge, Hate, (1990—1998)
Everyone had to read Hate, even if they didn’t read comics. Buddy Bradley’s life was just like ours. His roommates were douches, his girlfriend was going to cheat on him, and his kid brother sang songs from The Lion King while wearing a dress. The comic book store was packed every time a new issue came out. Luckily, fans now can read them all at once, collected in Buddy Does Seattle, The Complete Buddy Bradley Stories from Hate 1–15, and Buddy Does Jersey, Hate 16–30.
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(January, 2010) |
