All That and a Bag of Chips: The Best Books of the 90s
Paperback $18.00
The Nineties: A Book
The Nineties: A Book
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.00
We had a blast revisiting the books and movies and music of the 1990s and the early days of the internet with Chuck Klosterman in his new book, The Nineties, where Chuck riffs on Generation X (the book that sort of started a lot of everything) and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Mark Leyner — and he also got us thinking about the books we and some others loved that published in the nineties, when we were Charmed by Billy, the Mambo Kings Played Songs of Love, Janet Malcolm had everyone talking about the mind of a murderer (and the reporter who covered the story in our pre-podcast world), and Madonna published Sex, securely wrapped in its mylar baggie. So whether your personal soundtrack was Nevermind or Exile in Guyville or Midnight Marauders or Jagged Little Pill or All Eyes on Me or Ready to Die, here, in no particular order, are 99 books from the nineties we think you should check out now.
We had a blast revisiting the books and movies and music of the 1990s and the early days of the internet with Chuck Klosterman in his new book, The Nineties, where Chuck riffs on Generation X (the book that sort of started a lot of everything) and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Mark Leyner — and he also got us thinking about the books we and some others loved that published in the nineties, when we were Charmed by Billy, the Mambo Kings Played Songs of Love, Janet Malcolm had everyone talking about the mind of a murderer (and the reporter who covered the story in our pre-podcast world), and Madonna published Sex, securely wrapped in its mylar baggie. So whether your personal soundtrack was Nevermind or Exile in Guyville or Midnight Marauders or Jagged Little Pill or All Eyes on Me or Ready to Die, here, in no particular order, are 99 books from the nineties we think you should check out now.
Paulo Coelho’s magical, mystical story, The Alchemist, changed the way we saw ourselves.
The Secret History had us running back to college with Donna Tartt and trying to choose our friends more carefully. This twisty literary thriller is just one of the decade-defining books on our list, along with Infinite Jest by the late, great David Foster Wallace. American Psycho was dropped by its original publisher and picked up by another and here we are with a now iconic portrait of greed and the American Dream from Bret Easton Ellis.
The Giver by Lois Lowry and Holes by Louis Sachar made us the readers we are now.
Maus II by Art Spiegelman and Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis challenged us to really think about memory, time, and the Holocaust’s legacy.
Not a single one of us could (or wanted to) shake the collective voice of the Lisbon sisters from Jeffrey Eugenides’s luminous debut, The Virgin Suicides.
Stephen Chbosky totally helped us navigate the weirdness that is high school in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Tom Perrotta made us laugh our heads off with his story of a high school Election run off the rails. (Tracy Flick returns 6/7/22!)
We stayed safe at home as we went Into the Wild with Jon Krakauer and Chris McCandless.
Diana Gabaldon changed the way we thought about time travel in Outlander (and wow, spicy starts here.)
Mitch Albom made us think about finding joy and how to live in Tuesdays with Morrie.
We read Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut Interpreter of Maladies over and over until our paperbacks fell apart in our hands because no one captures the moment before flips into after like Lahiri.
We were Dreaming in Cuban with Cristina Garcia.
We were transported — and transformed — by the bittersweet love story in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. We quickly followed that magical delight with Chocolat, a delicious novel that also filled our bellies and our hearts.
We went underground, into the wildly inventive world of Haruki Murakami’s novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicles (ostensibly to look for a lost cat) and found so much more.
We thought the events of the novel Blindness by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago were surreal and fully invented.
We found the place where the everyday and the magical collide in The Famished Road by Ben Okri. So did Marlon James; this is one of the influences for his Dark Star Trilogy. (Volume 2, Moon Witch, Spider King, publishes 2/15/22.)
We’re still unsettled by the truth-telling of The Parable of the Sower, which feels like Octavia Butler wrote it yesterday. This edition includes an introduction by N.K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth Series and The City We Became).
Tyrannosaurus! Velociraptor! Stegosaurus! Triceratops! Our jaws dropped when dinosaurs roared out of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (before landing on the big screen).
Plenty of us traveled to Westeros, Winterfell, the Wall and beyond for the first time in 1996, when A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin was published.
Accio, Accio Hogwarts! Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone changed the wizarding world as we knew it in 1998. We slipped from Narnia to The Golden Compass thanks to Philip Pullman and wished for armored bears.
We went from analog lives to living online and our love of comics grew as our worlds did. We’re still major fans of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and so is Neil Gaiman, who with Terry Pratchett, created the wildly funny world (that may or may not be ending) of Good Omens.
We redefined how we saw heroes and monsters with Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Beowulf, and The Green Mile, Stephen King’s homage to Dickens and a golden age of serialized fiction.
John Berendt changed the way we read true crime in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (and made us seriously contemplate moving to Savannah). Frances Mayes was living our dream in Under the Tuscan Sun.
We couldn’t stop talking about Cormac McCarthy’s blend of Hemingway and the mythology of the American West in All the Pretty Horses, even before it conquered the bestseller list and won the National Book Award for fiction.
We marveled at the prose in A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson; we raged at the world’s injustices and wept for lost loved ones because of the deep truths these slim novels contain.
We found epic tales in short stories and longer novels, carrying around our well-loved, dog-eared, annotated copies of Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, Jazz by Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. And we talked and talked and talked about those books with anyone willing to listen. (And some that weren’t.)
We laughed and cried, sometimes in the same sentence along with Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, Julia Alvarez’s Garcia sisters in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Mary Karr’s family in her utterly original memoir, The Liar’s Club.
We weren’t limited to Wurtzel. We heard our voices in Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy.
Like us, Nick Offerman may have learned a thing or two about The Great Outdoors from the very funny A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.
Some of us read American Pastoral by Philip Roth and Underworld by Don Delillo as guides to understanding our dads and brothers, husbands and partners. Some of us read them to understand ourselves. Some us read them to understand America. (Some of us failed entirely.)
Everyone read The Firm by John Grisham. (And plenty of lawyers started writing and dreamed of leaving the partner track behind.)
Oh, family can be hard: We tore through A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley’s powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set on a farm in Iowa. We couldn’t put down The Kitchen God’s Wife, Amy Tan’s follow up to her game-changing The Joy Luck Club. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Jonathan Franzen’s Strong Motion made us grateful for our real-world families.
Somehow, we survived those plague years, Angels in America shook us to the core even as it celebrated survival. We cheered when Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, but we still haven’t seen the movie.
What did we do with our wild and precious lives? We swooned as we read and reread the New and Selected Poems, Volume 1 of Mary Oliver.
And then we hooted and hollered and whooped when The Vagina Monologues by the artist and playwright now known as V, shocked everyone else.
We carefully made more mix tapes (a million, at least) after Nick Hornby set a fresh, funny tone for books about being a dude in High Fidelity.
We screamed with joy as Waiting to Exhale showed us ourselves and our friendships; we kept laughing (and groaning) with Bridget Jones as we read her Diary.
Before we had The Book of Form and Emptiness and A Tale for the Time Being, we had Ruth Ozeki’s sharp, smart debut, My Year of Meats featuring Jane Takagi-Little, and we held it close.
We learned about loss when Elizabeth Strout made her debut with Amy and Isabelle.
Leslie Marmon Silko and Charles Johnson brought our ancestors to life in Almanac of the Dead and Middle Passage. (John Darnielle isn’t the only reader who wishes Leslie Marmon Silko would start writing novels again).
Gish Jen redefined what it means to be a Typical American.
We knew we were holding something special as we read Colson Whitehead’s spectacular debut, The Intuitionist.
We got lost in the best way walking home to Cold Mountain with Charles Frazier and we discovered George Saunders in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Some of us pored over and picked thru Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Some of us didn’t. Some of us lingered over Kazuo Ishiguro’s sentences in The Unconsoled or obsessed over the intersection of Great Books and artificial intelligence by Richard Powers in his retelling of Pygmalion in Galatea 2.2.
We traveled back in time with Margaret Atwood and Alias Grace. We fell in (and out) of love with the poets of A.S. Byatt’s Possession. We couldn’t stop thinking about the professor of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the lies he told himself and the consequences he couldn’t face.
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem changed the way we thought about detective stories, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje changed the way we thought about war stories and Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters changed the way we thought about historical fiction.
Our hearts ached with every passing page of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx and Waiting by Ha Jin and The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III.
Like Jon Krakauer’s books, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger had us plunging into adventure stories. (It also inspired a generation of young writers to race into the world, searching for great stories.)
There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz made us want to change the world.
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond made us understand how much world history we’d been taught was racist bunk (even before it won the Pulitzer and sold more than 2 million copies). King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild made us think (again) about how history works and how hard people can fight.
We learned what we needed to know from short stories: Alice Munro taught us The Love of a Good Woman, A.M. Homes The Safety of Objects, and Lorrie Moore Birds of America. Amy Bloom taught us that love is not a pie in Come to Me: Stories.
We eavesdropped with Javier Marías in A Heart so White.
We couldn’t stop thinking about the characters or the cadence of the prose in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh and Drown by Junot Diaz.
We saw Los Angeles — really saw the city — thanks to Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley, The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty and L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy.
We howled with laughter as we read Get Shorty and stopped using adverbs because Elmore Leonard told us too. (He was right. Just ask Stephen King.)
The Vietnam War loomed in our imaginations: A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (Read this with a 21st Century Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.) We couldn’t stop thinking about memory and storytelling and redemption because we read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
We marveled as reader after reader after reader bought The Bridges of Madison County, the 208-page Where the Crawdads Sing of its time.
Everyone was rooting for Seabiscuit.
That’s 99 books for the 90s.* What would you add to the list?
(*100. Because we just couldn’t resist one more.)