Let’s get one thing out of the way: despite the headline, I’m not actually a 90s baby. For the record, I’m a 70s baby and a proud Gen X-er. But it’s a catchy song and I’m sticking by it for a way to ease on in to this week’s topic: the 1990s. 

It all started when the newest work from Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties, arrived on our shelves and cemented its Friday Five lead spot after a Super Bowl halftime show that was, in a word, lit (I can see my children cringing in the corner — but yes, lit is indeed the term that first popped into my head and second-guess editing be damned, I’m sticking with it). Despite the fact that over thirty years have passed since the dawning of that storied decade, it was a celebratory meeting of long-lost friends, not dissimilar to what’s been happening in the past few weeks as restrictions ease and life transitions to a new normal; joyous reunions abound.

But back to the idea of being a 90s baby; I come to the phrase honestly, at least as it relates to my reading life. The 90s were a time post-Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High and pre-venturing out into the adulting world. It was a time when I eagerly consumed whatever my teachers offered up, grateful to those who opened doors into literary worlds I'd never experienced. In other words, the 90s was the infancy phase of my lifelong love affair with reading and writing.  

What did I read when left to my own devices? The Mists of Avalon, for one. How did I stumble across this retelling of the Arthurian legend through the eyes of women? I saw it on a camp counselor's bed (the cool counselor - the one who wore faded, well-worn button downs and delicate piercings that danced all the way up her earlobes). This was the age before Bookstagram, BookTok, book bloggers, celebrity book clubs, and websites filled with top ten lists for every category imaginable. Was it any good? It was to me. If memory serves, I devoured it, lugging that 912 page tome around looking for any stolen moment in which I could find out what those strong, former-sidekick-now-leading-ladies were up to. Apparently the critics thought it was decent as well. Who knew?

What were those critics reading and recommending? Reviewing the 90s National Book Award winners sent me on a surprisingly pleasing trip down memory lane. With gratitude to all the treasured teachers, librarians, and booksellers who adroitly advised with heaps of worthy recommendations (Bastard Out of Carolina, Underworld, My Brother, Ship Fever, All the Pretty Horses, and on and on), the one that topped my list was The Shipping News. The action in The Shipping News takes place in Killick-Claw, a small town nestled on the coast of Newfoundland. More than plot details, it was the writing that stuck with me; Proulx's taut prose and deft description of the unforgiving landscape and small town woes were revelatory. I simply didn't know one could write that way and it changed the way I read forevermore.

What were the poets writing about? I could go off on a tangent about how some of the 90s greatest musicians were poets in disguise but let me instead share with you a fact that I didn’t know was a fact until I found myself falling down a rabbit hole: the poetry slam was a 90s invention and The Poetry Foundation credits the slam with revitalizing and reinvigorating the poetry scene in that decade and for years to come. Where to begin? Perhaps with Rita Dove, the Poet Laureate (and the first African American to serve in the role at that) of the United States from 1993-1995. Dove was born in Akron, Ohio and from an early age showed a great proclivity for learning and writing. In 1986 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her verse novel Thomas and Beulah. In the review for her 1999 collection, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Publishers Weekly noted: “Dove's brilliance — as with all great writers — is inextricable from her formal gifts: her poems effortlessly suggest grand narratives and American myths, yet ground themselves tersely in localities, characters, practicalities and particulars.” Below, I’m including her most recent release from 2021, Playlist for the Apocalypse. Fate had me pull it off the shelf and open directly to “World Wide Welcome Ninth Testimony: The 1990s” , the poet’s response to Klosterman’s review. Need more urging? From The Boston Globe: “A piercing, unflinching new volume [that] offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from 'perhaps the best public poet we have.'"

Finally, what can we learn from the 90s? It feels impossible to sign off without thinking about the history of Eastern Europe. I caught Anne Applebaum on Fresh Air earlier this week; Applebaum is an incredibly smart and insightful voice on the current situation in Ukraine and she's also one of the leading authorities on authoritarian regimes. From 1988-1991 Applebaum served as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist magazine and the Independent newsletter, thereby covering the collapse of communism from the front lines. While not published in the 1990s, Red Famine has been hailed as “compulsively readable” and it straddles the 90s with a wide berth (Stalin to the publication in 2016). As you might imagine, it's a hot commodity and we're waiting on restock but you can listen this important work via Libro.fm.