whatever
posted by HearHere at 10:33 AM on February 11 [43 favorites]

flagged for offensive omission of The Beach by Alex Garland
posted by phunniemee at 10:36 AM on February 11 [10 favorites]

Wow. Yep.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:41 AM on February 11

Wait an article about Gen X? Not Boomers and Millennials?
posted by Melismata at 10:41 AM on February 11 [12 favorites]

No Tom Robbins?
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:42 AM on February 11 [5 favorites]

I am a very young Gen X, but I was in my 20s and already too old for The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen chbosky when it came out in 1999. It's totally not Gen X YA.

choose Your Own Adventure is spot on, though.
posted by jb at 10:42 AM on February 11 [13 favorites]

Say whatever else you want about Bret Easton Ellis, he has his lane and he’s stayed in it.
posted by Lemkin at 10:42 AM on February 11 [7 favorites]

It has Geek Love, so I declare this list legit.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 10:46 AM on February 11 [13 favorites]

This list is so oddly on-point it's infuriating. It's all either "I read this book when it came out and have thought about it a lot over the years" or "I missed this book back then and feel its moment has passed and I'm safe never picking it up."
posted by mittens at 10:46 AM on February 11 [21 favorites]

I've read 23 of these 75, which I guess is a pretty good record. Definitely agree with Secret History and Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, which were practically devoured by my fellow Gen Xers when they came out.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:47 AM on February 11 [6 favorites]

I've only read 18 of these! (Some I've never heard of, tbh.) And yet I will not be reading the remaining 57.
posted by Kitteh at 10:47 AM on February 11 [5 favorites]

I’m shocked and kind of bummed that they didn’t go with Douglas coupland’s Microserfs. I get why, but I don’t have to like it.
posted by ifatfirstyoudontsucceed at 10:49 AM on February 11 [9 favorites]

I only read twenty of them, and I got my English degree in 1990. Man, I must have been one dismissive, picky jerk when people recommended books.

(Stupid catcher in the Rye, why did dumb wrestling-coach-turned-middle-school-English-teacher Mr. Weber make us read that??)
posted by wenestvedt at 10:51 AM on February 11 [5 favorites]

The url confused me - I had to check and see whether it was an AARP newsletter. As a 50-year-old genxer, I have gotten that card in the mail, much to my chagrin.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 10:53 AM on February 11 [4 favorites]

Lawn Beaver, i was 18 the first time they mailed me.
posted by clowder of bats at 10:55 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing; so many of these are spot on. I love how eclectic this is, beginning with Flowers in the Attic. My only nitpick is that it includes older books that influenced Gen X, but certainly were not of our generation, such as The Stranger and The catcher in the Rye (Silent Generation) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (boomers). By that standard, Gatsby and Hamlet should be on the list too.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:55 AM on February 11 [3 favorites]

This list is a sellout.
posted by BlahLaLa at 10:57 AM on February 11 [22 favorites]

such as The Stranger

(i won an award in high school for my dramatic interpretation of the 'i was always right' passage of the stranger, so its inclusion works for me.)
posted by mittens at 11:03 AM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Doesn't have "Go Ask Alice," but that's the only truly glaring omission I see on casual inspection.

Seems like if you're going to have catcher in the Rye, you should probably also have catch-22 and On The Road. Both of those were as de rigueur as any existing literature, and (I think) provided meaningful antecedents to those maximally cynical and escapist days. In any case, I'm fine with previous generations' novels being included. Those reads were validating, and provided continuity. At least for my own sweet self, they let me say on more than one occasion something along the lines of "See? You KNEW it was all bullshit! So why do you expect me to care??"
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:08 AM on February 11 [12 favorites]

No Neuromancer ? No Watchmen ?
posted by SageLeVoid at 11:10 AM on February 11 [25 favorites]

I don't hate it; my only real beef is the one a few other people have mentioned, which is that a few of these books were really more popular with millennials. I'm a young Gen Xer, really more of an Xennial, and stuff like Perks of Being A Wallflower and Weetzie Bat was really more loved by people slightly younger than me (Weetzie Bat took a while to catch on despite when it came out).

If I think about it, I could probably identify some omissions here, too -- like, I don't think Please Kill Me or Rip It Up And Start Again made the list, and at least one of them probably should have. Maybe Zine by Pagan Kennedy or c*nt by Inga Muscio, even though the latter book really ticked off a lot of people in the post riot grrrl scene.

But overall, aside from a few I don't recognize that were probably regionally popular elsewhere and a few Boomer books that trickled down (Tom Robbins), this is pretty representative of what my book-inclined peers were reading. The Bluest Eye and The Handmaid's Tale were both assigned reading when I was in high school in the early 1990s (along with The catcher in the Rye, which is less surprising).
posted by verbminx at 11:14 AM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Oh yeah, actually, what SageLeVoid said, completely endorse those.

I knew there was something...
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:17 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Smedly, you beat me to it! Go Ask Alice needs to be on here for sure.

My personal collection would also include I'm with the Band by Pamela Des Barres, as well as cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston.

And agreed, minus points for no Tom Robbins.
posted by Molasses808 at 11:17 AM on February 11 [7 favorites]

No Neuromancer ? No Watchmen ?

nothing from Neal Stephenson. This is a silly list.
posted by philip-random at 11:19 AM on February 11 [7 favorites]

I am a very young Gen X, but I was in my 20s and already too old for The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen chbosky when it came out in 1999. It's totally not Gen X YA.

I would set the date cutoff at The Perks of Being a Wallflower because it is about characters in high school in the early 90s and was published as the last of Gen X, if they’re real, was turning 20. Or possibly the cutoff should be White Teeth. It’s like debating whether This is Hardcore or OK computer represents the end of Britpop.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:21 AM on February 11 [4 favorites]

A book like Dune or catcher in the Rye may be a formative Gen X thing, but not exclusively formative to Gen X, so I'm not sure I totally get what the list is going for. Plenty of books mentioned here that were written by Gen Xers have, I suspect, little if any cross-generational appeal: I would be astonished to learn that Zoomers are reading Fight club and Less than Zero, tbh.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:23 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

I have never felt so seen by a listicle.

Also, for some reason I am absolutely thrilled that Interview with a Vampire is on here.
posted by kitcat at 11:23 AM on February 11 [4 favorites]

Wait an article about Gen X? Not Boomers and Millennials?

I'm with you, Melismata. I'm astonished this exists.
And suspicious.
posted by doctornemo at 11:24 AM on February 11 [2 favorites]

They really whiffed it by not putting Hitchhiker's Guide at #42
posted by slogger at 11:24 AM on February 11 [35 favorites]

formative Gen X books - younger, later Gen X. It moves way too quickly through the 70s and 80s.

-born 1967
posted by doctornemo at 11:26 AM on February 11 [4 favorites]

On the older edge of the GenX cohort -- I've read a good chunk of these (maybe 25%) but really most of the ones I recognize I only know from the movie (only about half of which I've actually seen).
posted by Pedantzilla at 11:28 AM on February 11

With the glaring omissions of both Go Ask Alice and The Stand, I agree with this list. Well done - thanks for posting!
posted by sundrop at 11:28 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

10. And three of those I could have done without. This is a stupid list.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:32 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Probably should have The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton on there, too. Pretty sure we ALL read that. Even though it seemed really weirdly dated reading it in the early 80's... TBH, it probably came across like that when it was published in 1967. Stay golden, Ponyboy!!
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:41 AM on February 11 [16 favorites]

I've read 41 of them but I'm an old Gen X - so old they moved me into the boomers when I was already in my 40s, whatever - so I've had more time.

Agree with the terrible omissions of Go Ask Alice and maybe I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, along with Tom Robbins and absolutely William Gibson, for shame. I think Black Elk Speaks and carlos castaneda ought to be in there too; there's a lot of overlap in formative books between late hippie and early punk. I mean, where do you find your books when you're young? In older people's bookshelves. I'd add the Firefox Books and maybe even the Whole Earth catalog, but I spent a lot of time in my teens and 20s around old hippies.
posted by mygothlaundry at 11:46 AM on February 11 [6 favorites]

Weetzie Bat is definitely a 90s phenomenon; came out of nowhere, was super-popular for a couple of years (although Witch Baby might have been the better novel), then it kind of receded into the distance. I’m not sure it’s fully understandable if you didn’t read it in that brief window of time.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:46 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Yes the Outsiders! I loved Weetzie Bat. It seemed groundbreaking to me at the time, although I don't know that I'd go that far anymore.
posted by mygothlaundry at 11:48 AM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I've read 28 and mostly agree with the list. Jesus' Son should be higher, though.

I am also surprised at the lack of The Beach and Tom Robbins and Neal Stephenson.

The list was written by Tod Goldberg, who wrote Living Dead Girl, which felt relatively popular when it came out, and had the same publisher as the chbosky book. Fake Liar cheat as well. He used to be on my mailing list and was complimentary to my writing so obviously has good taste.
posted by dobbs at 11:51 AM on February 11

So as (late, 1957) Boomer, I'm curious what makes this Gen-X? I've read 25 of them, and seen the film version of a few more. It seems like a fair number are modern classics, not generational ephemera.
posted by cheeseDigestsAll at 11:53 AM on February 11

I would've picked cat's cradle for Vonnegut's contribution, personally, and the missing sci-fi/fantasy (remember those shelf signs?) I'm mad about is Ursula Le Guin. But I do see a lot of stuff me and my friends were into on here.
posted by EvaDestruction at 11:58 AM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I'm curious what makes this Gen-X? I've read 25 of them, and seen the film version of a few more. It seems like a fair number are modern classics, not generational ephemera.

I think doctornemo has it; they were formative. Even the ones I didn't read, I remember other people reading them, I can picture the duskjackets from those times. We even carried a lot of them around just to look cool.
posted by kitcat at 12:05 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

Some of these were assigned in school, or I never would have read them; others were "pleasure reading" that no teacher would have assigned. Having them on the same list seems...kind of sloppy?

As cheeseDigestsAll points out above, the popular stuff should be peculiar to the cohort -- but that's the opposite of what usually gets assigned.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:09 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Also with the exception of The Secret History which I had never heard of before I read it last year (the nostalgia is sublime and heartbreaking, strongly recommend) - of the books on the list that I've read, I read them all before turning 23.
posted by kitcat at 12:09 PM on February 11

This is a silly list

It’s the height of bogosity.
posted by Lemkin at 12:11 PM on February 11 [4 favorites]

I like this list so much that I signed up just to comment. My take is that these are just books that Gen-X readers were quite likely to read, and I like that it includes genre books as well as more literary stuff. Seriously, did any Gen-X book nerd not read Flowers in the Attic when they were like 12?

A few others from the list that seem particularly Gen-X to me: Less Than Zero, Geek Love, Secret History, Prozac Nation, and High Fidelity.

For omissions, as noted above, The Beach is glaring. Maybe replace The Bluest Eye with Beloved , Garp with Owen Meany, and The Shining with The Stand.

For your consideration: Watership Down, clan of the cave Bear, The Outsiders, Middlesex, and A Wrinkle in Time.
posted by killingmesmalls at 12:14 PM on February 11 [27 favorites]

Real GenX books won't make any lists. They'll just be forgotten and skipped over.
posted by srboisvert at 12:24 PM on February 11 [7 favorites]

I am very early Gen X and have read 20 or so of these. I would have included things like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Bell Jar, plus Plath's poetry as well, which had huge impacts on my young self. Being so early post boomers(1965) meant growing up under the huge shadow of the boomers as far as culture went.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 12:31 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

Snow crash, Neuromancer, Ender's Game, anything by Raymond chandler, anything by Dashiell Hammett...there's a lot of stuff missing. No Bradbury, no Tolkien, no Moorcock.

Meh. There are probably more books on my list of what's missing than are on this listicle.
posted by chuffy at 12:36 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

"For many in Gen X, [Fun Home] was our first foray into graphic nonfiction but not our last."

what, no Maus?

Bogus.
posted by egypturnash at 12:36 PM on February 11 [12 favorites]

also why does searching for "Pinkwater" bring up absolutely zero
posted by egypturnash at 12:38 PM on February 11 [12 favorites]

The Monster at the End of This Book is not at the end of this list, soooooo
posted by ginger.beef at 12:40 PM on February 11 [10 favorites]

killingmesmalls: ...did any Gen-X book nerd not read Flowers in the Attic when they were like 12?

TBH, in fourth or fifth grade we all took turns reading these, thanks to the bookmobile that used to come to our grade school. God bless librarians & our teacher for not stopping us!

(Also: welcome to MetaFilter, killingmesmalls. Your favorite book sucks!)
posted by wenestvedt at 12:53 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

Didn't see 'em: Robert cormier (let's say The chocolate War), Maurice Sendak (In the Night Kitchen, fight me), Howard Zinn (clearly People's History...)...

There's probably room for more nonfiction and graphic novels in there, but this is a really good list.

By my count, I've read ~60 of those books (if you count choose Your Own Adventure as one book), and I don't really read YA or SFF these days, so I don't see that number getting a whole lot bigger.
posted by box at 12:53 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I'm on the X/Millennial cusp, so take this with all the grains of salt... but I really appreciated Bird by Bird being on there. That was a very formative book for me, and one that I teach now.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 12:58 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

I've read 50-ish of them, but more importantly there are some that I've read 50-ish times. (Yes, I exaggerate.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:00 PM on February 11

To add to the graphic novel choices, I submit Dc comics Starman. I think that Jack Knight was the first Gen-X superhero.

Knight was about my age and acted like it. He debuted in 1994 as a goateed 24-year-old who had no interest in his father's scientific super-hero legacy, preferring to run an antique kitsch store. He's forced into the superhero game, ditching the costume for a leather jacket and vintage bowling shirts.

The series ran for 80 issues with the same writer and only two artists; it definitively concluded in August 2001 with Knight passing along the mantle and focusing on his family responsibilities. I recommend it.

Also consider the slacker opus Hate, the unsettling ennui of Eightball and the pop culture anarchy of Milk & cheese.
posted by JDc8 at 1:01 PM on February 11 [6 favorites]

No cormac Mccarthy? No Lovecraft? I'd add Peter Watts of course, but maybe a bit tricky for *everyone*.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:03 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

43. I too appreciated how eclectic the list is, although I think it shortchanged science fiction and graphic novels. (Seems to me like a calvin and Hobbes collection really needed to be there, although I'm not sure which one in particular.)

I know Generation X needed to be on there but I'm wondering how many found Microserfs more influential/long-lasting. I know I did.
posted by dlugoczaj at 1:08 PM on February 11 [4 favorites]

Seems to be a lack of counterculture in this list... would have expected Pynchon, Ballard, Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Baudrillard, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze & Guattari, some of those Re/Search publications (Angry Women, Modern Primitives, Incredibly Strange Films and the Industrial culture Handbook were key generational counterculture documents, as were the WSB and JGB volumes)... It seems everyone I knew as a teenager in the early-mid 80's was into that kind of thing (in a small town in eastern canada even), though maybe outside punk-adjascent circles it wasn't as prevalent as I believed. And no 'Neuromancer'? Hard to believe.

I've read about four or five things on this list (as a born-late-60's GenXr) but barely remember them apart from Geek Love and House of Leaves which are still on my shelves.
posted by remembrancer at 1:09 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze & Guattari

No no, this is a list of books we actually read, not the stuff we'd bring up in conversation while furrowing our brows and nodding knowingly.
posted by mittens at 1:11 PM on February 11 [9 favorites]

I've read more of these than I care to admit.

While I remember little of copland's Generation X any more, one of the things I do remember is one of his main characters discussing that everyone he knew had had what-if daydreams about "when the bomb finally falls, what would I do". It's the first time I really felt seen about that. And then there's also Hitchhiker - that seems almost like a given.

I was a bit surprised to see One Hundred Years of Solitude on here; I thought it was older somehow. Although there was a wonderful moment from when I finally was reading it - just about ten years ago. I had it on a subway, and someone entered the car and sat down next to me. He glanced at me, then did a take at the book title. "You're reading that?" I nodded. "Have you ever read it before?"

"No, this is my first time."

He gasped slightly. "You're just reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time now?" he asked. I nodded. He blinked at me, looked at the title, then broke into a grin. "I envy you."
posted by Empresscallipygos at 1:15 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Love all the classics folks are remembering in this thread (Re/Search! The chocolate War! The Outsiders!)

I've read 38 ... maybe a couple more I couldn't remember for sure. Some of these are very good books!
posted by latkes at 1:24 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I feel like MetaFilter's suggested additions to this list speak much more to me than the list itself.
posted by ifatfirstyoudontsucceed at 1:27 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

It would seem that the Adrian Mole books are missing, unless that's too British, though Hornby and Bridget Jones make the cut. Maybe A confederacy of Dunces? Probably half the selections from If Books could Kill too, for the harm they've done. And Zizek? Piketty? Knausgård?
posted by St. Oops at 1:28 PM on February 11

A little surprised that Armistead Maupin's Tales of the city isn't on there.

Not surprised that Rubyfruit Jungle and Macho Sluts are not.
posted by box at 1:35 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

I don’t know whether to feel pleased or bereft by two other mentions of Re/Search. I truly thought I was the only person in the world to know about it.
posted by Lemkin at 1:35 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

No Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
posted by olopua at 1:37 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Was Bastard out of carolina on there, and I missed it?
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:37 PM on February 11 [4 favorites]

Saw the coupland entry, but I'm surprised it wasn't Microserfs, given how a number of us grew up in the dot-com/Microsoft-millionaire era.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:38 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

No Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

No, we're Gen X and that's waaaaaaay too sincere for us.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:42 PM on February 11 [8 favorites]

What about Trainspotting?
posted by Kabanos at 1:43 PM on February 11 [6 favorites]

I don’t know whether to feel pleased or bereft by two other mentions of Re/Search. I truly thought I was the only person in the world to know about it.

I sold a metric ton of them at my store, along with a whole range of literature — a lot of SF, but also stuff by the Beats, Situationists, Absurdists, and all manner of queer and outsider authors. To my shame, too many of the outsiders — Jim Goad, Adam Parfrey, and the like, turned out later to be Nazis or as good as. The desire for a different world was not always for a better world.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:43 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

No Illuminatus Trilogy, or really anything by Robert Anton Wilson. Problematic? Yes. Influential? Definitely.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 1:51 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

Trainspotting?

Dae ye ken that if ye'r nae scots?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:53 PM on February 11

Whar Shampoo Planet?
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 1:54 PM on February 11

Book of the Subgenius, too. That should be on there and a big yes to Rubyfruit Jungle (although even I did eventually have to give up on Rita Mae Brown's cat mysteries because, just, whoof) Bastard Out of carolina and Tales of the city. We all read Tales of the city.
posted by mygothlaundry at 2:00 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

Re/Search - I still think about the "Modern Primitives" edition, I 'blame' it for the tattoo culture the kids are into today. I totally regret not having a copy to show my kids. (Tattooing used to be illegal in NYc and I remember this great/cool photo book documenting someone getting a hundred small "Xs" in the shape of a larger "X." You wouldn't know it. (to coin a phrase...heh heh))

I have at least 50 of these books on my shelves, still, and just reading the titles - even of the crappier ones - brings me joy. Flowers in the Attic? What the hell was that? It was like those astral-projection-hypnosis tapes Mark's brother had. We all pretended we knew what was going on but to this day it still means nothing.

(No Flowers for Algernon? Yeah, fine. You think about it, kids these days, all this internet shit, they don't know what they missed.)
posted by From Bklyn at 2:02 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Does it count if I’ve seen the movie tho
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:03 PM on February 11

This list and comments are making me think of the movies that shaped gen X that were *based* on books, but the films did the heavier lifting in terms of impact to this gen in particular, in my opinion.

For example:
Watership Down. The book was a fascinating parable but the movie was–OH MY GOD WHAT DID THAT RABBIT JUST DO. Points for being the first animated film I saw that showed blood.

The Last Unicorn. I was a unicorn-obsessed kid and this movie was totally my jam. A re-watch recently made me realize how bonkers it really is. I just found a copy of the book in a used bookshop and plan to read it soon.

Less than Zero. Waaay different than the book (and far more palatable to mainstream tastes) but nailed the 'tragic 80s rich kids' trope perfectly.

The Secret of NIMH. My mind was blown when I found out the book was based on true events.

The Neverending Story. ARTAX!
posted by Molasses808 at 2:28 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

This list was written in mid-2023; the description for the #1 book, Handmaid's Tale, is a gut punch here in our darkest-timeline 2025:

"Imagine a world in which all the civil rights advances boomers and Gen X fought for have disappeared, plunging the United States into a burgeoning fascist morass."

I fucking wish I needed to imagine it.
posted by microscone at 2:32 PM on February 11 [6 favorites]

Our Universe
The Way Things Work
posted by box at 2:34 PM on February 11

The Last Unicorn was adapted by Peter Beagle and is really, extraordinarily like the book - the movie is simpler, of course, but most of the dialogue is straight from the book and the main incidents are all there. It's a beautiful, amazing book and movie. Also very funny.

If you like The Last Unicorn you should also read Beagle's The Folk of the Air - it was published after the TLU movie came out and bombed, because...it's not about unicorns. It's this great story about a guy who goes back to his old university town ten years later (de facto Berkeley) and falls in with a group of early Society for creative Anachronism types, and then there's real magic. It's also beautiful and happy and sad, and it's a wonderful portrait of a better time for california. And it's foundational for urban fantasy, though almost always uncredited. AND although it is not perfect in this respect, it is one of very, very, very few books by straight white male fantasy authors of this period where there's a meaningful number of important characters of color AND there is also a "basically people were too racist to deal with the evil magic because it was first used to harm a Black man" major plot point. It is not the book I'd expect someone to write in 2025, but it's absolutely outstanding for 1986.
posted by Frowner at 2:36 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Also, what about The Princess Bride? (Another really good movie adaptation)
posted by Frowner at 2:36 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Okay Xer.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:39 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

31. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

tl;dr

I LOL'd.
posted by lock robster at 2:50 PM on February 11 [4 favorites]

The Anarchist cookbook (possibly in the form of mimeographs, xeroxes, or a sequence of text files downloaded from your local BBS)

everyone knew someone who heard someone tried to make a pipe bomb from that book and (fucked themselves up/narrowly avoided fucking themselves up)
posted by egypturnash at 3:01 PM on February 11 [5 favorites]

I've read at least 40 of these. My Gen X English major status stands. I agree that all the school-required books, like A Separate Peace, or catcher in the Rye, were formative in their way, but not sure they belong on a list of Gen X books since generations before and after us were reading them too.

Did any straight people read Rechy? Bastard out of carolina seems like a better fit for this list, with more crossover.
posted by gingerbeer at 3:01 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Okay Xer.

it's pronounced 'cher'
posted by mittens at 3:02 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

Very much agreed on many of the candidates for what's missing, and adding to the list:

- the Amok Books catalogs ("guidebook to the extremes of information in print")
- the Loompanics catalogs (publisher of "horrifying and bizarre" nonfiction in the Anarchist cookbook mode)

Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
Italo calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
James carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Robert cormier, The chocolate War
John crowley, Little, Big
Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black clock
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Alan Moore, Watchmen (got issue 5 from the rotating 7-11 wire stands and it was symmetrical OMG)
Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and other stories
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Joyce carol Oates, Bellefleur (Oates does gothic, and it was as gothic as Oates gothic gets)
Adam Parfrey, Apocalypse culture (got your Re/Search right here)
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Will Self, The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Art Spiegelman, Maus
John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers
Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
posted by vitia at 3:04 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

The site says it's for Gen-X men (aarparrow, get it? I didn't), and it pleases me to think Octavia Butler achieves such penetration into that demographic, though I have my doubts — full disclosure, I don't actually like Butler's work, but I recognize the greatness of her talent and her work.
posted by jamjam at 3:05 PM on February 11

I was today years old when I learned that not only is “bogosity” recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest cite is from the 1890s in The New York Times.
posted by Lemkin at 3:10 PM on February 11

GEB, K&R, RFc 2616…
posted by clew at 3:10 PM on February 11 [1 favorite]

That something was from a different generation or formative for more than one group does not preclude it being formative for the specific group in question. The standard generations (silent, boomers, X, millenials, etc.) are primarily (white, middle class) US cultural constructs, in particular, so part of what defines Gen X will be aspects of broader white US culture.

I’m a bit dubious about how the inclusions from post 2000 could be “formative”, though.
posted by eviemath at 3:13 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Well, this is a perfect day for a banana fish.

and no banana yoshimoto.

is the trial on there?
posted by clavdivs at 3:14 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

But of course the true Gen X comic, in an era of emerging public engagement with AIDS and racism, was the claremont X-Men.
posted by vitia at 3:16 PM on February 11 [3 favorites]

It feels like you could break down the list into a couple different blocks. You'd have, on one side, the school books: 1984, catcher in the Rye, The color Purple, The Things They carried, essentially the high school/university English Lit canon. Then you've got, let's say the Scholastic Books, book fair/bookmobile stuff: Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, Encyclopedia Brown kinds of stuff. The third group would be the zeitgeisty things, the books that popped up outside of school and had enough of a cachet to be the things that defined the culture to some extent, in general the stuff that wasn't taught in schools, and books that people came to as adults or young adults, which is going to end up being stuff like 100 Years of Solitude, Douglas copeland, Stephen King, Anne Rice.

As for the list itself, I was pleasantly surprised to see The Only Good Indians (which is a fantastic book, but feels like work created by Gen X, rather than work that defines it), but kind of shocked about the lack of No Logo and (in preview), and A People's History of the United States (one of the key texts for solid disillusionment with the world as it was presented to us in school). And yeah, Tom Robbins had a solid moment there.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:20 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

No Logo reminds me of the existence of Thomas Frank's The conquest of cool.
posted by box at 3:31 PM on February 11

The Beauty Myth (RIP Naomi)
posted by latkes at 3:41 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

As a late GenXer who went to the prototypical GenXer liberal arts college, I was so glad to see A Secret History on there. I can think of nothing from that era that I identified so strongly with at the time and yet is still so evocative of what it was like to sit around those tables so fucking positive we were this close to getting at the truth.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:49 PM on February 11

Heh. As I mentioned the first time “A Secret History” was discussed on here some years ago, I remain somewhere between bemused and concerned about it being formative for anyone. The description of the book in the article was pretty good though.
posted by eviemath at 4:12 PM on February 11

I’ve only read 7 of these, but if I count the ones where I’ve only seen the movie of I think I can get up to 12. Of those I would say only Are You There God, it’s Me, Margaret, and Hitchhikers Guide would I in any way count as formative. certainly not A Separate Peace, which I was assigned in high school and the only thing I can remember about it was that I hated it.

As with others, I’ve read Generation X and Microserfs (as well a a bunch of other coupland) and Microserfs definitely resonated with me more.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 4:27 PM on February 11

I mean, where do you find your books when you're young? In older people's bookshelves.

Yes, and so I submit to you the most egregious omission (to me personally), and would be in my top 10:

"The Joy of Sex" by Alex comfort ("comfort", really? yeps...)

Per wikipedia: At the top of The New York Times Best Seller list for 11 weeks and for more than 70 weeks in the top five (1972–1974).

Like Flowers in the Attic, this was a book that hundreds of thousands (maybe millions!) of young Gen X-ers encountered wayyy earlier than they should have.

Likely discovered while rummaging around parent's bedrooms, or if you lived in more "free-thinking" households (like mine), it was just sitting on the living room bookshelf or coffee table for anyone to peruse.

Think about it. What other time in 20th or 21st century history would a mass produced book modeled after a cookbook and featuring hand-drawn illustrations of long-haired hippie types having graphic sex be a thing?

Being tossed headfirst into the deep end of the adult pool without warning was a hallmark of gen-x, so this is my humble submission.
posted by jeremias at 4:41 PM on February 11

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