Hi! I've been trying to read more 90s books. However I feel like whenever I look up "popular books of the 90s" I get Harry Potter, Perks of Being a Wallflower and other children's books. While I love that era of kid's lit, I've read most of it! I'm really interested in reading literary fiction, esp. whatever "cool girls" would have been reading at the time!
I've read and enjoyed The Secret History, The Virgin Suicides, Bridget Jones's Diary, and most of Banana Yoshimoto and Bret Easton Ellis's backlist. I'm not particular about genre, I'd just love to get more of a feel for what was popular with young women my age (late 20s) during that era!
Thanks!
by smile_baby
8 Comments
The Bridges of Madison County was huge in the 90s. Not sure if the “cool girls” read it as I wasn’t then, nor am I now, cool.
Definitely White Oleander by Janet Fitch (one of my very, very favourites as a teen in the 90s!) and Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone (1992) and I Know This Much Is True (1998). All so good and hugely popular/defining in the 90s.
The English Patient was very popular but I absolutely hated it.
There are some great Stephen King and Anne Rice novels that were quite popular during that decade. Look up “Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1990s” and you should get a pretty complete list.
Any Choose Your Own Adventure book ! Those were great. Maybe 80s though…. But I definitely remember them being around in France in the 90s !
Douglas Coupland
Fight Club (1996)
*Generation X* by Douglas Coupland in 1991 and *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* in 2000, each of them bookending the 90s, were both very definitional of their times in terms of style and influence. Both were considered very cool at the time.
Margaret Atwood was incredibly influential in the late 80s through the 90s – *The Robber Bride* and *Alias Grace.*
Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz