Explore Booksellers offers readers a cultural smorgasbord

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends titles exploring ’90s politics, a Conrad classic and millennial malaise.

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From the publisher: A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era—and their dark legacy today. With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today. Acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents.

Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.

From Krista Vendetti, staff: In “When the Clock Broke,” John Ganz offers an interesting exploration of the politics of the 1980s and 1990s, which he argues laid the groundwork for much of the polarization and discontent of today. While not all of his arguments are compelling, his most thought-provoking insight is his assertion that, counter the commonly held conception of the ’90s being an era of bland consensus coalescing around the political middle, it really it was a time of social unrest, alienation, anguish & resentment.

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From the publisher: This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor’s life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of a literary hero.

From Mo Kirk, membership coordinator: “Lord Jim” by Joseph Conrad is a deep and beautifully written novel that explores themes of guilt, redemption, and the complexities of human nature. Pick this one up if you enjoy deep psychological portraits and adventure stories with a philosophical edge. Tales of mariners and sea journeys seem to be having a moment, with people re-reading “Moby Dick” and “The Odyssey: of late. This one will hold its own with those.

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From the publisher: Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation, and Berlin’s 24-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon.

Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life, Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer: This short novel about a millennial couple living in Berlin in the 2010s expertly captures the narcissism of contemporary life and the naive yearnings of youth. Through neutral observations with a sharp edge, the narrator follows Tom and Anna as they wander the city in search of an elusive happiness and attempt to declare their individuality through various acts of consumption and hollow activism. You’ll likely find yourself cringing as the pages breeze by, but you will definitely be entertained. 

Type of Story: Review

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