Defining the missing age -- are we missing some good books?

[Andre Jute]

Some books define an age. Daisy riffling through Gatsy's shirts and sweaters isn't just a frustrated housewife with too many servants, she's symptomatic of the purposeless wistfulness of the Jazz Age. (If you don't know yet that I'm talking about The Great Gatsby, this thread may be an eye-opener for you.)

There are other books that similarly define ages. But some books that define ages have been overlooked, or in some cases not yet chosen or named because the age is historically within living memory. The other day I accidentally, in naming two books that I liked very much when they first appeared, named two such defining books that haven't yet had the recognition they deserve. I was amazed by the speed with which others agreed with my choices, so it isn't an idea I've had all by my lonesome.

Perhaps you have other candidates for books that define the ages I've selected, or books that define ages still in want of a definitive novel. I look forward to hearing your additions to the list. Here are my nominees, for adding to:

Anton Myrer, The Last Convertible -- Where did the golden generation of the 40s and the 50s go wrong to produce -- us! Okay, that's a joke, but this is a book you have to read to understand the days of infinite opportunity -- "sunlit uplands" in Winston Churchill's phrase -- from which your parents or grandparents arose.

James Webb, A Country Such as This -- the generation that came of age in the Vietnam War, which tore a great country from the consensus it could always find before.

[Margaret]

Andre Jute wrote: "Some books define an age. Daisy riffling through Gatsy's shirts and sweaters isn't just a frustrated housewife with too many servants, she's symptomatic of the purposeless wistfulness of the Jazz A..."

Thanks for the title, A Country Such As This. I can still remember sitting in my dorm room listening to the draft numbers being called over the radio, girls writing daily letters to their guys in the service, visiting my boyfriend who started out in the Honor Guard in DC and ended up airlifting the wounded out of Nam to Germany. It was a very turbulent time as it was for my Mom when Dad was serving during WWII.

[Andre Jute]

Webb was a serving Marine officer. He knows what he's talking about. Later he he was Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and he's now a Democratic Senator. His characters when we first meet them are serving in the Honor Guard in DC IIRC... Webb knows what he's talking about. One of those books that stays with you, for ringing so true.

[Keryl]

Not sure if it's missed the recognition it deserved, but The Things They Carried always struck me as a beautiful time capsule of the Vietnam experience. (Of course, all of it happened ten years before I was born, so I don't know this from first hand experience.)

As for things that defined my age, call it the '90s and '00's, well, nothing is immediately springing to mind. Of course if I read any real world set modern day fiction I might have an easier time thinking of something.

Bridget Jones diary? All about fags, diets, and men? Sex and the City and the rise and fall of Chick lit life? How depressing.

[K.A.]

This Depression will be a defining age for many. The books have to be written.

For me it was the decline of the Auto industry that turned my home town in an empty hulk in the Rust Belt. I was 21 and the poverty was grinding. The only reason my family had any money at all was the business.

That economic disaster didn't end for me until 1992 when I came to Kentucky and got a 'real job' with wages and benefits.

[Matt]

How about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time? With autism on the rise as a phenomenon (I have heard figures like 10% of all children born in the West), we have to consider it one of the crucial phenomena that define our age. This depiction of the autistic mind is fascinating, beautiful, and suspenseful.

[Claudine]

A book that I have reread a few times is The Man by Irving Wallace. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55.... I reread it after the US elected Obama and while the storyline is clearly dated, the mentality of the people is not.

[Andre Jute]

Irving Wallace, another unfairly forgotten writer, simply because he was popular, big themes and scope.

About Obama, I took a look at him, the compleat manufactured machine politician, above all intent on offending no one, zero positive impulse, and concluded he has neither the brains nor the will to break free of the net of restrictions the American Constitution (correctly in my view) places on an American President. To put it in understandable terms for the folk I was writing to, I forecast that the limmo liberals would be fed up with *their* president before his first term was out. That turned out to be an understatement! The man has nothing going for him except that he's black, and the Nobel Committee fixed that ruling aspect of his presidency forever in everyone's minds by giving him the Nobel Peace Prize for just being black.

[Patricia]

I didn't know they had a category for that.

[Andre Jute]

It's a sub-category of "Worthless, but Politically Correct and Uber-Trendy". Falls into the same category as giving the IPCC and Fat Al a Nobel Prize just before the whole world catches on that Global Warming is a Trillion Dollar Swindle.

[Claudine]

Hey now don't be so harsh on the Global Warming die hards ;)

While I mostly agree with you on Obama, I said to friends at the time of his election that he would never be elected for a second term purely because of the fiasco by the Bushes that he inherited. No matter what he did or what he tried to do, he'd never be able to fix that particular brand of stupid in his term of office. He has a lot to prove just because he is a black man in a white man's world.

[Keryl]

Claudine wrote: "Hey now don't be so harsh on the Global Warming die hards ;)

While I mostly agree with you on Obama, I said to friends at the time of his election that he would never be elected for a second ter..."

I'm fairly sure the Bush mess has nothing to do with his re-election chances. He has a vision of the good that's at odds with a lot of America. (Maybe not most of America, but a lot and an especially vocal lot who votes.)

He could have been elected with a booming economy and no wars and the health care debacle would have sunk his chances with a loud segment of the voting population. And if he had had a booming economy and no wars to deal with, he would have gone even further into the social issues, which would have motivated more of the right-wing stay at homes to get up and vote against him.

Also, bear in mind, he wasn't in office for long, but he voted in favor of almost everything Bush did that made things worse. Basically every lame-brained idea that Bush had in his last two years, Obama voted in favor of. He helped to make the mess he inherited.

[Andre Jute]

I don't think Obama ever had any intention, and certainly no capability, of fixing anything; it's as if his urge to pose as President is far stronger than his understanding of what a president does. I feel sorry for him. It wasn't so much that much was expected from him -- the man is after all the President of the United States, so a great deal should be expected from him. It was that his own supporters clearly brought with them entirely unreasonable expectations. It is not the Republicans who doomed Obama to a fall, nor any of the usual bogeymen (Wall Street gave big for Obama...), it is the so-called liberals who in their gaderene rush to self-gratification can't be bothered to learn how American government works. Which brings us back to what the president can and cannot do; in that sense, the last president to walk on water was Lyndon Johnson, who manipulated the Houses of Congress like finger-puppets and was probably the best-hated Democrat ever by the so-called liberals. Yet Johnson managed to ram through his Great Society, which is by a country mile the most successful social legislative programme of any Democratic president, ever. I don't mean the mess now, I mean just ramming it through into legislation after all the years it stalled under the empty-headed suit-rack Kennedy. (Now if Obama had a Bobby who was less interested in being vindictive to people who sneered at his gangster dad, and more interested in social policy, than yer akshul Robert F., he'd breeze into a second term and possibly into a posterity as a great man. Even a Kissinger would be good. Any nutcutter would be good. Those guys are in desperate need of someone to tell them what they think.) The next most successful president after Johnson is Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who freed the slaves, and then the prissy engineer Hoover, another Republican, whose semi-Keynesian works and deficit spending programme the now-sainted but in life frivolous Roosevelt paid lip service to, so that Hoover's policies (formed in Balkan relief expeditions -- history *does* repeat itself!) served four terms, his own and three by Roosevelt.

A good shortish book of 20th century history is Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. Johnson was Bertrand Russell's spearcarrier in the mathematician's marshmallow old age, so he was a guaranteed card-carrying leftie; he's also the most interesting of the Catholic writers, but he has such respect for the meaning of words that he cannot quite bring himself to lie. So his books crackle with tension.

[K.A.]

I disagree with both of you.

But I still respect you.

[Andre Jute]

In the morning as well?

[K.A.]

I don't respect anyone pre-coffee. Sorry.

[Andre Jute]

Now the truth comes out!

[Patricia]

I hate to admit it, but I find myself agreeing with some of what Andre said.

Also agree with Kat about pre-coffee.

[K.A.]

I feel sorry for Obama. He got the country at it's most FUBARed.

He's not hard-ass enough to make Congress respect him. He's too honest, too inexperienced, and too civilized for the screaming ID10Ts he's been pitted against.

Poor schumuck.

[Andre Jute]

Interesting that Kathleen Valentine's friend Maureen in a long post that appeared on my Facebook News, which of course I can't now find, said roughly the same thing as I did, with additional examples to make my points, and added the claim that Obama has achieved more in half a term than Roosevelt did in three. She's another card-carrying Catholic liberal, but she also happens to be a writer of history, so she has considerable credibility. (I probably got some of the background for my opinions above from one of her books without recognizing her name...)

Even more interesting was one silly woman saying Obama betrayed those who voted for him, by staying in Afghanistan and institutionalizing Guantanamo after he promised to pull out the troops and close Guantanomo. It's that sort of single-cause "liberal" who bedevil American politics. She trusted the man to be chief executive of the most powerful nation on earth -- and then she wants to dictate policy to him! This is symptomatic of the way most American politicians now are elected, as a logrolling exercise, putting together enough one to five per cent groups of single-cause interest to make some kind of a majority, people who think they elected the President to do their single thing and bugger the rest of the world including every other American. If a shareholder ever spoke to me like Americans think they can speak to their President, I would have rolled over him and his shareholding, no matter how big, like a panzer brigade.

I wake up beautiful and chipper, cracking a joke. Those with clear consciences do, I'm told. Until then, I thought everyone did.

[K.A.]

There is no life before coffee.

Clear Conscience? You? (cough, cough, cough) People with a clear conscience have crappy memories. LOL

[Patricia]

I miss the days when I still did things that would weigh on my conscience.

[Claudine]

I agree with the coffee respect thing in the morning. For me, a triple espresso. I don't wake up until at least 4 cups have been inhaled.

[Andre Jute]

Patricia wrote: "I miss the days when I still did things that would weigh on my conscience."

Don't we all?

[Patricia]

Only old coots like us, Andre.

[Claudine]

The older I get the more my conscience weighs.

[Patricia]

There are things about me that weigh more with age, but they're not my conscience.

Just noticed something (boy, is this ever off topic): text-to-speech is now enabled on my Random House books. That's something I fought for when the blind were lobbying the Authors Guild. RH initially agreed to enable the feature when authors requested it, then changed their mind. Now they've changed again, and based on a search I did through RH books in the Kindle Store, it appears to be across the board. All the RH books I clicked on had the feature enabled. It looks like they've resolved the audio rights issue, deciding that text-to-speech doesn't meet the definition of an audio book. I checked one author who held onto her audio rights to sell separately and text-to-speech is also available on her titles. Haven't seen it discussed here, so I don't know if any of you use that feature (it's certainly nothing like listening to an audio book), but I use it from time to time.

[Claudine]

It's the least offensive part of my body. I don't talk about the rest. :)

That is awesome if it is something they've done across the board. I myself have never listened to an audio book, don't need that right now. I prefer listening to music when I drive. It's the only place I don't get trashed for listening to what I do.

[Andre Jute]

My mother used to love listening to my books on tape. Said she could close her eyes and imagine the scene. She bought them from Books for the Blind by wheelbarrow load to give away to blind people and thus discovered her affinity for audiobooks.

I find audiobooks distracting, unless produced as a long stream of poetry, like Ulysses read by proper Irish actors, in which case I listen to it as a sort of wall of music just like Mozart, and happily do something else all the while.

[Patricia]

Text-to-speech would never be mistaken for an audio book. It's robotic with some pretty funny results (just search for tomisms on the Kindle forum).

I tend to fall asleep when listening to an audio book, but the book keeps playing so I lose my place.

[K.A.]

My wasted youth is the wellspring for all my stories.

LOL - I have the right to exploit my own adventures.

[Patricia]

My problem isn't that I wasted my youth. It's that I used it...

[Claudine]

I still have to waste mine. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

[Patricia]

Growing old doesn't necessarily mean growing up. I'm proof of that.

Meanwhile, in ereading news: Microsoft gives up on Microsoft Reader:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08...

[Sharon]

Andre wrote: I wake up beautiful and chipper, cracking a joke. Those with clear consciences do, I'm told. Until then, I thought everyone did.

So, If I wake up beautiful and chipper in the morning, which I do - because I am a morning person and have been so all my life - that automatically makes me someone who has a clear conscience? (which I do). Does that mean, then, that my friend - whom I know to walk in the greatest integrity and who cannot wake up until the second or third cup of strong coffee, does not have a clear conscience? I think not.

[Sharon]

Andre wrote: About Obama, I took a look at him, the compleat manufactured machine politician, above all intent on offending no one, zero positive impulse, and concluded he has neither the brains nor the will to break free of the net of restrictions the American Constitution (correctly in my view) places on an American President...

Obama was doomed before he even took office. From my vantage point as next-door neighbour, Americans have been living in fear since 9/11. One cannot move forward living in fear. They became ever more insular, instituting severe security restrictions at airports, hospitals, at shopping malls forgodssake. (which did spawn a whole new job-force, to many of whom it gave their first taste of a little power). Bush fed on these fears and the result was the burgeoning recession that lead to the collapse of the economy and its domino collapse of financial institutions, real estate and employment just before the elections. Americans (as most would) wanted a quick fix to the chaos. Obama and his freshness offered hope where before there was none.

But no one, not you Andre with your intelligence, nor liberal old me, or any politition could fix that mess. It takes years, determination and hard work.

I love America, its bones, its people and its enthusiasm. It will come out of this a different people, as does everyone who goes through severe crisis. I have no doubt it will be a better place, perhaps even the 'kinder, gentler nation' Bush senior encouraged.

And then we will write books about the era that will define it...

[K.A.]

((Applauds Sharon))

[Andre Jute]

It's the economy, stoopid. -- Bill Clinton, who knew a thing or two about being elected.

[Sharon]

He did and it was...

[K.A.]

Can't help but wonder if Hilary would have done a better job.

With Bill as her husband, she was more saavy than poor Bambi.

[Andre Jute]

As in Bambi at the Road Kill Restaurant? Not the waitress! On the menu here.

[Sharon]

Kat wrote: "Can't help but wonder if Hilary would have done a better job.

With Bill as her husband, she was more saavy than poor Bambi."

It's too bad Bill thought with a nether part of his body, those two could have been a good team. Maybe still will be...

[Patricia]

I think they are and always have been.

[Sharon]

Yes, I think you are right. What I meant was that I think they could have done more if it hadn't been for that silly scandal. But of course, sometimes ppl do more out of power than in. Not that I am discounting Hilary in the political arena. It could wash out that it was a good thing she lost to Obama, it was an impossible time to take the reins of President. This way she could seem the fresh, experienced voice moving forward...

[Patricia]

I really liked the idea of getting two for the price of one, but 'twasn't to be. Maybe someday.

I've been listening to Bill's comments about his vegan diet and wondering if I could adapt to it. Not caring for beans is my undoing, protein-wise.

[K.A.]

Andre - Bambi as in 'lamb to the slaughter' with the likes of Caribou Barbie to pull the trigger.

What a ghastly bunch of fools we have to contend with.

[Andre Jute]

Kat wrote: "What a ghastly bunch of fools we have to contend with."

I once read up the comments of the doom and gloom brigade during the Coolidge and Eisenhower administrations, two riotously successful periods for America, two superb chief executives, and they sounded just as gloomy as during the Depression.

[K.A.]

They didn't have Palin and Bacheman to deal with.

[Keryl]

Patricia wrote: "I really liked the idea of getting two for the price of one, but 'twasn't to be. Maybe someday.

I've been listening to Bill's comments about his vegan diet and wondering if I could adapt to it. No..."

Vegan's a hard road to deal with, and if you're looking to lose weight instead of animal discomfort/cruelty/death, paleo is probably the way to go.

I know vegans who have done well with it, and felt good, but never for more than six months at a time. Basically it's hard to get enough protein and fat on an all veg diet. Most of the people I knew who did it felt bad for the first three weeks (detoxing supposedly) pretty good months 1-4, and then started to have memory and energy issues after that.

On a related but snarky note:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyl...

And while that bit of fun is rather mean, it is also quite funny.

[Claudine]

I like raw fillet drzzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar too much to ever go vegan. Vegan food can be great tasting though.