Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

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.

kate he was the pilot do u see

Same with my parents and movies... I was lucky enough to grow up near a video store with a huge cult and foreign film section, and so naturally, I'd rent very weird films and my parents would be like 'oh sure, that played when I was in college' and in the meantime I was ten and watching Zabriskie Point.

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

― Stanley Halfbrick (Noel Emits)

i mean, i grew up with g.i. joe. the trippiest shit i knew as a kid was, like, c.s. lewis, who was not particularly a head that i know of. madeleine l'engle may possibly have been a head, i don't know, but childhood entertainment has always had a healthy dose of the surreal.

I read all the Narnia books and never picked up that they were supposed to be Christian allegories until adulthood. To me they were just stories about kids in an imaginary world. And my mom dragged my brother and me to (Catholic) church every Sunday. I guess I just wasn't a particularly close reader...

Sid and Marty Krofft to thread.

I imagine that was a common experience with CS Lewis, although my parents were pretty vociferously lapsed at the time. Not even sure if I was baptised come to think of it.

That reminds me when I read The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail I thought they seemed to have taken the whole thing from the Foundation series.

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

Heh, I met the dude a few times back in the late 90s -- he struck me as the kind of guy that tends just to focus on things that support his ideas -- more of an advocate than an analyst (Culturally we need both, so not a dig on the dude)

as in, I don't think his point is a good generalization for the entire generation though I'm sure it's true for a number of ppl

I think it's practically a truism tbh. Whether you personally picked up on overt freak culture stuff as young child (more likely as teens) or not. How can you not say that stuff wasn't around or influencing culture in the 70s unless you lived in some renunciate commune. Those youth cultures were simply (a major part of) the ones that immediately preceded our own.

He might have been a bit more (or less) to what he said, it seems an interesting bit of context to think about anyway.

* There might have been

I read all the Narnia books and never picked up that they were supposed to be Christian allegories until adulthood. To me they were just stories about kids in an imaginary world. And my mom dragged my brother and me to (Catholic) church every Sunday. I guess I just wasn't a particularly close reader...

― but also fuck you (unperson)

no, i think lewis was just bad at writing children's books. "hey, kids! allegory! subtext!"

if you'd told me aslan was supposed to be jesus when i was reading those books i would have told you that was stupid and that jesus wasn't a lion.

and that's what makes c.s. lewis tolerable for me, i try to read his stuff now and there's all this bloody awful subtext to everything and it's shit.

"That reminds me when I read The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail I thought they seemed to have taken the whole thing from the Foundation series.

― Stanley Halfbrick (Noel Emits)"

i read a lot of asimov too, he really wasn't a very good writer, "foundation" in particular is so much "whig history IN SPACE" bullshit

the main thing that gets me about holy blood, holy grail is that the guy who wrote it co-wrote the original yeti serials for doctor who (the second one was also a knockoff, this one of the film "zulu"), and then tanked his career with the show by doing an awful piece of anti-hippie tripe called "the dominators"

We are gonna be the meanest and the crankiest.

Not saying the millennials don't have potential though.

https://i.imgur.com/24lxeho.jpg

Yes Asimov was a pretty bad writer I eventually had to admit. I haven't gone back to any of that stuff but some of the short story ideas stick with me.

Didn't know about the Dr. Who connection with HBHG (THB&THG in the UK). Dr. Who always felt literally close to home because I was at school with the children of one of the main 70s through early 80s writer / producers and later an actual Doctor (perhaps not one of the more feted ones) was also a parent.

Kevin Fallon @kpfallon
I asked Dylan Gage, the 14-yr-old actor who plays Gabe on #PEN15, what he felt is the biggest difference between kids in 2000 and kids today.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EioUA8CWkAAlQH6?format=png&name=900x900

That feeling on late Sunday afternoons when there is nothing good on TV and you have nothing to do, lost forever.

30 years ago a child would kick a ball on the street.

at the risk of being "ok millennial" there is a huge-ass citation needed on "casual derogatory phrases"

Gage, btw, is spectacular on that show; really a great acting job.