2025 Reading Challenge 09 Generation X
I picked up and first read Generation X as a disaffected youth looking for a job. I'd left university and was taking on various McJobs, whilst trying to find a career, a home, a lovelife.
When I read the book first time round, I strongly remember it as a love story, unrequited, between Andy and Claire, latterly Dag. But re-reading I think that was minimal, the bigger life issues lost on someone who hadn't experienced life but it was definitely about finding some kind of love or connection as the final scene highlights.
The book concerns the life of three twenty something's as they try to resolve their place in society, with their family and each other. Inventing stories to try and make sense or just entertain. It's all very matter of fact coolness but has heart stopping moments, laugh out loud lines and quotable, thought provoking prose.
I got a lot out of reading this again, so much of it was memory prompts back to the early and mid 90s, that lack of direction but also the wealth of possibilities. Feeling original and also worn out. But also it feels like it's a book trapped very much in its time, it's hard to relate to it as me now; given the specifics of the setting, the phrases, the age of the protagonists.
If you want to know what American twenty something's were thinking in the 1990s, this does the (Mc)Job.
I rated it 7.5 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
Not a great deal to mine here, I'm thinking of dialogue and NPC types, one aspect that aligns with a game I am playing, The Electric State, is Tension. In this TTRPG, Tension is used as a way of getting PCs to interact with each other but also as a resource, resolving Tension can increase your Hope (essentially you lose Hope, your mental resolve, as you encounter the horrors of a pre-apocalypse world). PCs develop and resolve Tension during each Stop or encounter on their Journey and Generation X can inform those relationship foibles; why do we or do we not get on with each other.
Okay, this is tenuous at best, Generation X is a wholly introverted book and as such translating to a TTRPG doesn't come naturally.