by Lena Andersson

“From the day she found language and ideas and realized where her mission lay, she renounced expensive living, ate cheaply, was always careful about contraception, only traveled rationally, had never been in debt to the bank or to any private person, and did not get herself into situations that forced her away from what she wanted to spend her time doing: reading, thinking, writing, and debating.”

Until, of course, now.

This short novel is about the woman described above, and how she abruptly falls in love. It is a literally excruciating look at self-deception. Ester’s love is unrequited and undeserved. Over and over, we wince as we read some variation on: “She thought: I should walk away. But I don’t want to. I want to stand here with him. It’s the only place in the world I want to be.” As Lionel Shriver says on a back-cover blurb: “Alas, most women have lived this story.”

by Thomas Sowell

He comes across as a really belligerent person. On one page, he’ s in a shouting match with a VP in his organization, and on the next, he is referring to a copy editor’s “idiotic questions.”

I also thought it was weird he never once mentioned the name of his first wife; married 9 years and mother of his two children. She’s just “my wife.” Also, I didn’t bookmark it, but I was floored in a passing remark he makes about this wife “insisting” on resuming her career after the children were born. The nerve.

So how was it as a memoir? In the preface, he promises that he will not try to “tell an exhaustive story.” But I did feel at the beginning that we were getting every little nook and cranny of remembrance he could come up with, which often felt like paths that led nowhere. I picked up this book because I thought it would be interesting to read about the life and intellectual development of a Black conservative thinker. Sowell started out as a Marxist. How did his thinking evolve? How did he come to be at odds with with Marxism and with the other Black “leaders” (he always puts that in quotes) of his time? There wasn’t much narrative arc to answer that question. The book read more like an overgrown curriculum vitae.

by Chuck Klosterman

You say it’s two thousand WHAT? And I’m fifty-WHO? The nineties were just a few years ago, weren’t they?

This book was absolutely scrumptious. If I have a complaint, it was that it was almost too good to read for an hour at a time. It’s essays, and almost every one is fantastic; and getting to the end of one was often like when you want to turn off the music when one of your favorite songs ends. Maybe I’m the only one who does that? Oh. Moving on…

The essays don’t follow a narrative or temporal arc. Normally I might feel that to be a detraction. I loves me some strong plot lines. But real life doesn’t follow arcs, and that’s what this was about: what the nineties were really like. You have to accept whatever comes next.

Let’s put it this way, which is a good starting point: “Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.” Two words: Hear and Hear!

The “remember when” vibe is there in full force, but in ways that make you think. “Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it.”

The most important thing about the nineties, though, and what he gets, over and over, is… how GOOD they were. Everything was really going… well. The economy? Boom. The cold war? Over. It was all going to be fine, and it didn’t really matter all that much who was going to be president or not… really, at the end of the day, one choice was as good as another. “Did the direction of change even matter? What’s the worst that could happen?” Exactly. I fooled around with third party candidates and affiliations; it was a good time to do that. I distinctly remember a friend of mine feeling slightly put off to see a protest against George W. Bush winning the election. Making a big deal about it seemed almost unseemly.

The entire Ted Kaczynski chapter was phenomenal. I take it back that I had only one complaint; this isn’t so much a complaint as a reaction of shock: WHERE ARE THE SIMPSONS? Could it be Klosterman just wasn’t that into them? But… sputter… that couldn’t be. Could it be he didn’t think they really had that much effect on the culture? I’m not culturally literate enough to really opine; but they were HUGE to me and everyone I knew. They got literally one reference.

It started with NEVERMIND and ended with the Twin Towers. Those were the nineties. And I’m Gen X, so the nineties are me: they were when I built myself.