books to recommend to an angsty 18 yr old

[kabbes]

Actually yes. Gulliver's Travels should be first on the list. It is and always has been brilliant.

 

[Dillinger4]

I love Coupland. Although my favourite is still Gen X, Microserfs and Shampoo Planet are also superb.

A lot of people say Gen X is very dated. I agree that some of it seems very dated. But I think a lot of it endures, as well.

 

[Dillinger4]

take it old school and go with Gullivers Travel. That book drips with contempt for humanity

Menippean satire.

 

[sim667]

im guessing you've suggested 'junk' and 'clockwork orange'

if they're into all that fantasy bollocks then the gormenghast stuff might be a winner (titus alone, titus groan etc).

 

[butchersapron]

Communist Manifesto

 

[Dillinger4]

Plato.

 

[marty21]

I read Bright Lights, Big City recently and found it to be wonderfully entertaining and droll. Therefore I propose that for the younger reader.

i read that when it came out, was blown away at the time, haven't read it since though

 

[kabbes]

A lot of people say Gen X is very dated. I agree that some of it seems very dated. But I think a lot of it endures, as well.

I think that if you're of my kind of age and you remember growing up completely convinced that the world WOULD end in a nuclear war and that this could happen any minute, the obsession with this has a resonance that is timeless.

A current rewrite would need to focus on an epidemic instead or something like it. Even then, though, it wouldn't be the same. It's the fact that it could have happened without warning at any time that was a weird thing to grow up with.

I am (just about) Gen X too, so there is a resonance there too.

 

[Jon-of-arc]

she can stay well away from Bret Easton Ellis

none of my proteges are going to read that bourgeoise rubbish

early chuck palahniuk? fight club, survivor and stuff?

 

[DotCommunist]

on a fantasy trip, Peter Straubs Shadowland is very american gothic. Not sure you could class it as angsty, but it is very darkly gothic. An angsty person might enjoy it. I know I did.

 

[Jon-of-arc]

Dice Man, just for fun...

 

[Dillinger4]

I think that if you're of my kind of age and you remember growing up completely convinced that the world WOULD end in a nuclear war and that this could happen any minute, the obsession with this has a resonance that is timeless.

A current rewrite would need to focus on an epidemic instead or something like it. Even then, though, it wouldn't be the same. It's the fact that it could have happened without warning at any time that was a weird thing to grow up with.

I am (just about) Gen X too, so there is a resonance there too.

I am to young to ever really be anything like 'gen x', but I understand a lot of the fear and neurosis at work within it.

Incidentally, Douglas Coupland's next book is something of a rewrite of Generation X

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Generation-Douglas-Coupland/dp/0434019836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247579845&sr=8-1

Product Description
In the near future bees are extinct - until five unconnected individuals, in different parts of the world, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Idea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together, and their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined. "Generation A" mirrors the structure of 1991's 'Generation X' as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world. Like much of Coupland's writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday, apocalyptic paranoia, and is his most ambitious and entertaining novel to date.

 

[butchersapron]

What's meant - in this thread - by angsty anyway?

 

[kabbes]

I am to young to ever really be anything like 'gen x', but I understand a lot of the fear and neurosis at work within it.

Incidentally, Douglas Coupland's next book is something of a rewrite of Generation X

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Generation-Douglas-Coupland/dp/0434019836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247579845&sr=8-1

In a way everything that he has written is a rewrite of Gen X

I did love Microserfs too. He's surperb at capturing banality without condemning it.

 

[kabbes]

The end of Gen X actually made me cry and I didn't even know why.

 

[Dillinger4]

Life After God is probably the one I have read more than any other. It has helped me through some tough times that one.

 

[Dillinger4]

Didn't have you down as a Coupland fan, Kabbes. This pleases me.

 

[kabbes]

Oh yes. I think I have all of his (although I may have missed the latest -- there's nothing wrong with his most recent ones but I don't find them as memorable somehow).

I think that Coupland has an astonishing ability to say an awful lot with just one well crafted sentence. One that has always stayed with me occurs in Shampoo Planet when the protagonist takes a photo of his mother, Jasmine. It's Halloween and he asks her to pose with the pumpkin lantern that she has made. And he ends up with...

"...a portrait of Jasmine, facing the world as she does at this point of her life, utterly frightened by a monster entirely of her own carving."

That line still sends a shiver down me.

 

[Philip Pomper]

With regard to the OP, why don't you just tell her to stop being a pretentious cow, and grow up.

 

[Diamond]

Charmant

 

[Pickman's model]

maldoror by lautreamont
flowers of evil by baudelaire
a season in hell by rimbaud

 

[Idris2002]

With regard to the OP, why don't you just tell her to stop being a pretentious cow, and grow up.

Remember on MATB, when I said that being anti-pretension is actually the highest form of pretension?

Good times, good times.

 

[tangerinedream]

With regard to the OP, why don't you just tell her to stop being a pretentious cow, and grow up.

What books should a grown up read?

 

[ada]

When I was 18 I really liked Tom Robbins - especially Another Roadside Attraction, and Jitterbug Perfume. And Lawrence Durrell, the Alexandria Quartet. And Robertson Davies.

 

[Pseudopsycho]

If you're an angsty medical student with a desire to murder your shite landlady then crime and punishment is quite cathartic

 

[isitme]

With regard to the OP, why don't you just tell her to stop being a pretentious cow, and grow up.

fuck off

 

[Riklet]

The Brothers Karamazov
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - just cos it's a good book and she might dig Kesey's style? Thought provoking innit...
Crash or some other J.G. Ballard to twist her mind up
Some Hunter S. Thompson?
Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trillogy are kids books, but she might get something from them? Long books...
Has she really read all of Orwell's stuff? What about Down and Out In Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia?
Stephen Fry's autobiography? Moab Is My Washpot - fucking good read, and dripping with awesome but regretful angst.
Brave New World?
Some Kurt Vonnegut? I read "Breakfast of Champions" at 18 and seriously enjoyed it...

 

[isitme]

she hasn't read all of orwells stuff i just gave her those names i listed in the OP and she had heard of them.....

i'll make a big list off this thread and bring it in to her

tbh i'd prefer to recommend her more positive uplifting stuff because how i recall being 18 i was really into dark stuff and it just sort of went into a big puddle of darkness, i think i got more out of stuff with a good message...

 

[Riklet]

I thought of another book, although it might be a bit too "far out" culturally?

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Good read...

 

[isitme]

that's a bit specific to england innit?

i only vaguely remember the TV show, but i don't know how interesting it would be to a chinese teenager...