Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

Fuck you mookie. Amazing that just sharing about one's life can be derided so easily.

uh mookie i'm not particularly sure why table's post inspired such an incredibly hostile response from you

seriously. also "indigenous triplet poets"... take this shit back to 1996 please

Just to be clear, too, I never said that my preferences and predilections of yore made me superior to Harry Potter fans. In fact, I pretty explicitly said that HP just wasn't my thing, then attempted to explain myself as a youth.

Mookie, if you took that as some sort of hipster act of dunking or mockery, I'm sorry that sincerity is lost in you

table your post was pretty clear to me, i don't know where the hell mookie got the reading they got of that post

Is indigenous triplet poets = one-legged Lithuanian dance troupes? If so yeah that can fuck off

This is ilx. I thought we were allowed to be hipsters here.

Holy shit some of you are so young (and/or I am so old). Anyway, I totally read those Xanth books, I'd be afraid to so much as look at their covers these days.

(s)muggles have got it coming

I vaguely remember reading the first three or four Xanth books, but I liked a different Anthony book, On A Pale Horse, a lot better.

same as imago, born in 87 and lost interest after the fourth one. i recognized at the time that they weren't very good books, but they were entertaining until they weren't. i'd read just about anything during my staying-at-dad's no-friend summers

i'd read just about anything during my staying-at-dad's no-friend summers

haha yeah ... the time filling function that these large books filled -- that was me and the Lord of the Rings books. It was the original binge-watching ...

y'all had it so much easier than me, i grew up on the fucking bobbsey twins books

It was the original binge-watching

It felt healthier somehow when I read The Lord of the Rings and even The Silmarillion for the first time, whereas with The Wheel of Time I remember thinking (probably around vol. 7): 'why the fuck am I inflicting this upon myself? And why do I want it to go on forever?' I think I quit after Winter's Heart, probably because I was 17 when the next volume dropped and by that time I had put away childish things (right).

I had a babysitter as a child who'd had sons, so there were a shit-ton of old Hardy Boys and Tom Swift paperbacks still sitting around. I devoured those things.

y'all had it so much easier than me, i grew up on the fucking bobbsey twins books

Heh, I read so much Trixie Belden between ages seven and ten.

At one point I found a Bobbsey Twins book lying around my grandparents' cabin and I swear to God, the plot was that their uncle had gone off sailing with a teenage boy he wasn't related to (referred to as his "boy friend") and now they'd disappeared? So the entire Bobbsey family got on a boat and went off looking for them on deserted islands??? Do you remember this one?

a lot of my reading material came from the public library in the small town where i grew up and I read so much Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie

I read a ton of Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novels, probably lucky that never crossed over into Tom Clancy.

Where my James Clavell and Graham Greene kids at?
Also Robert R McCammon (completely unknown these days i think!) and a shitton of L Ron Hubbard's sci-fi.

I only remember reading Raise the Titanic!, but I might have read another Cussler book at some point.

Somebody who rented my grandmother's house at the Jersey Shore left behind a copy of Brian Garfield's Wild Times, which was pretty much the greatest book I'd ever read at age 12. (It's a Western - a fictionalized version of the life of a guy named Doc Carver, who was a competitor of Buffalo Bill, running his own Wild West show in the 1800s.)

Oh yeah, my dad suggested I read Shōgun when I was 12, and so I did.

all the talk about bobbsey twins is giving me flashbacks to my time cataloging an early 20th c YA collection, the sheer amount of them was astonishing. what didn't those rascals get up to

Where my James Clavell and Graham Greene kids at?

I did really like Our Man in Havana when I was a kid.

Best Christopher pike novel is the weird surreal pro life one where the ghost of an aborted baby sends everyone to slasher purgatory as revenge

love aborted babies!

I read Shogun as a kid and also read some multi-part L. Ron Hubbard sci-fi series that still has me wondering wtf it was all about.

Reading your post I felt an irrepressible need to put this on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpTUhN__FRk

such dulcet tones

all I remember about the books is that they were somewhat humorous and had a fair amount of graphic sex

I haven't read any of his, uh, works, but I plan on playing a Battlefield Earth (the movie) drinking game before I die.

I read all the SE Hinton books, but I was definitely born a decade later than the generation for which they were intended. Loved bad boys and being bad lol.

did you see the Outsiders movie and did you think any of them were cuet?

Ralph Macchio could get it

cool -- i was fonder of rob lowe and emilio so we are not in hypothetical bad boy competition

The Mission Earth Dekalogy!

I read the Thrawn trilogy and some other Star Wars novels before I saw any of the movies, they were disappointing in comparison.

At one point I found a Bobbsey Twins book lying around my grandparents' cabin and I swear to God, the plot was that their uncle had gone off sailing with a teenage boy he wasn't related to (referred to as his "boy friend") and now they'd disappeared? So the entire Bobbsey family got on a boat and went off looking for them on deserted islands??? Do you remember this one?

― Lily Dale

no, i have mercifully repressed all memories of anything that actually happened in the books. i had kind of assumed that nothing, in fact, happened in them.

i can't remember if i read any clavell or not. i think i mostly just watched the tv miniseries, which again, i have no idea why any of that would be of the slightest bit of interest to me. i think i tried reading some michener. maybe a little "clan of the cave bear".

my favored tween doorstoppers were steven king books. even then, though, i think i drew the line at "the dark tower", although that might have been because there were only two of them at the time.

The only age when it’s appropriate to read the end of IT

Kind of wish IT was the read another book touchstone for dorky libs tbh

That or the pike book about the aborted baby ghost slasher limbo town

I saw a revisionist take that that book wasn't actually anti-choice but I call bullshit.

The transition between RL Stine and Christopher Pike is an important moment in a young person's life.

I remember a Pike story about a haunted song on a cassette, a teenage deathwish, it was really spooky and scary and I had nightmares about it for a while.

It was this one lol https://yarevisited.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/point-horror-thirteen-collect-call-i-christopher-pike/

a lot of my reading material came from the public library in the small town where i grew up and I read so much Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie

― sarahell, Saturday, 25 July 2020 19:03 (yesterday) link

This was me exactly. I read so many of the blue hardcover Hardy Boys and the small, pocket-sized Agatha Christie with the scary hardcovers in the early 80s.

yes!!!!

As a 70s Australian kid my tastes were pretty Empire heavy: Doctor Who novelisations and the works of Capt. W. E. Johns:
https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/server5900/7o6312a/products/3854/images/48678/P1350709__48399.1505115014.1280.1280.JPG

oh in retrospect i definitely did read huge chunks of agatha christie. and i think a lot of the james bond novels too, even though the only one i really remember is the one about baccarat, and also the one where fleming talks about trans people in japan doing the inguinal tuck (which is a good way of getting a hernia and is not generally a good idea)

read some doctor who novelizations as well - i remember "invasion of the dinosaurs" from the printings that had an utterly idiotic speech by harlan ellison from the '70s as a preface - but my only exposure to the biggles books is monty python's mention of "biggles combs his hair"

honestly "biggles combs his hair" seems hardly less exciting than "biggles flies to work". i'm imagining him trying, and failing, to get to sleep during an in-flight movie on the way to a sales conference.

Roald Dahl, Tintin (and to a lesser extent Asterix, although I suppose that would be the hip choice now), Douglas Adams, Asimov, 2000AD are among the main stuffs I remember reading. Younger sibling born in '76 was mostly into novels with dragons and that on the (reflective) covers.

I watched that one HP film because Cuaron and it was notgood.

Erik Davis has made a good point about how Gen Xers grew up surrounded by culture created by heads.

I was obsessed with the Tintin books as a kid too.

xp

This is very true. I think my parents looked at it as kind of normal that I would look at stuff like Freak Brothers comics or related 80s indie comic stuff when I was a kid, even though it was all wildly inappropriate. I suppose the fact that their formative years were in the 60s and 70s gave them a weird perspective on what was in retrospect pretty anomalous cultural artifacts.