Several weeks ago I posted the web address of a blogger in the UK who had posed the question of which books and authors are formative for today's young adults. The query has stuck with me and when, last Saturday, I found my house swarming with several dozen 20-somethings, I saw my chance to ask.
"So," I said, "our parents reoriented their lives after reading authors like Kerouac and Vonnegut. What books made an impression on you? Which ones made you reconsider your own lives? What are the books that will define our own generation?
A fairly lengthy silence ensued.
"We all read Harry Potter," somebody volunteered. "Did it have a formative effect on you?" I asked. We decided Harry Potter may not have been life changing, but that it was certainly one of the only books we all had in common. We hashed the conversation in several directions and eventually reached several conclusions (see below) including the significant fact that Kerouac and many other classics are still completely relevant.
With some additional prodding I was able to begin a list of contemporary books important to my generation. When I returned to the store on Monday, I continued my research by interrogating customers.
Here's a peek at my List-In-Progress of the authors and books that have helped shaped my generation:
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club. I read this earlier in the spring and was rather blown away. A bit frightening to me, but this book has wide appeal among my peers. His most recent book is Pygmy.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated. "Simple, clear, complex, and full of the absurdities of life" says Gabrielle, though she says she liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close even better.
Dave Eggers: What is the What. A fictionalized memoir of Valentino Achak Deng, a real-life refugee from the Sudanese civil war. Eggers also wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
And of course:
John Krakauer (Into the Wild)
Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea)
Leif Enger (Peace Like A River)
Paul Farmer (Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues) (hugely impacted me in high school, though I'm not sure about anybody else)
And Some of the Relevant Classics
Aldo Leopold
Jack Kerouac
Herman Hesse
Helen and Scott Nearing's Good Life (again, a book that changed my life, and possibly some other teens during the early aughts).
What would YOU add to the list?
Let us know -- add a comment below.
As promised above, here are some of the ideas that came up during our conversation:
1. Much of our contemporary fiction is written "like a movie" and focuses too much on keeping us turning the pages.
2. The classics are still relevant
3. So many writers, so many books – can anyone beside Harry Potter reach a wide audience anymore to have an effect across an entire generation?
4. The 60s and 70s saw a lot of liberation and change… are we exposed to as many new or radical ideas as we may have been in the past?
I am thinking Life of Pi would be up there as formative for our generation. In my own experience 100 years of Solitude was extremely formative. I will keep thinking...
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, thanks -- I've never read "Life of Pi" OR "One Hundred Years of Solitude" but they're certainly both on my lists. I've heard many folks of my generation refer to 100 Years as on of their very favorite books.
ReplyDeleteI'd better advance it one my reading list...
~April
My favorite novel as a kid was Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. Apart from Kesey and some of Tom Wolfe's books, I didn't really get into Boomer literature. I mostly read detective stories and scifi parodies like The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat.
ReplyDeleteIn the 90s, a couple graphic novels really grabbed me, Moore's Watchmen and V for Vendetta. I followed a couple comics as they came out: Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Garth Ennis' Hellblazer.
I was always more into novels, but instead of moving on to literature, I simply upgraded my genre reading to genre novels that went against form, including John Steakley's Armor and Glen Cook's Annals of the Black Company.