Was 80s literature as crap as 80s clothes?

[Nightynight]

Remember all those worthy, Booker Prize winning authors in the 1980s? Was it just me, or were they all really (whisper) ?

And isnt there a whole load of more interesting fiction being published today?

VS Naipaul, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, AS Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Ben Okri....I really tried to read their stuff in the 80s but I couldnt usually get past the first few pages.

I have revisited some of it recently, and find it just as turgid, just as pseudo-intellectual, just as boooooooring.....

is it just me, were the rest of you in raptures over Hotel du Lac, The Famished Road and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha?

Jeffrey Archer does NOT count as books.

Does anyone read those condensed-into-a-page joke versions in, is it the Guardian? Came across a collection of them the other day and they were hilarious. Especially the Paul Auster one, dino

I bet if we ever locate a numbers sold table for the 80s though bink he will be right up there with Judith Krantz and Catherine Cookson...

Oh yes I loved Peter Carey too

I so totally love this thread that I am not going to formally sign off so that I do some work today.

Catch up at the weekend (by which time I will have looked at dh's book collection which is a veritable time-capsule of what floppy-haired pseudo people were reading in 1986).

i read the whole of the new jm & really liked. raced through it on hol with no 'puter.... the digested version was pretty spot-on!

when I say "not going to sign off", that is very very Freudianly meant to be "now going to sign off"

a bientot

I was more a rag-market black lace and droopy vintage sort of gal dino!

i was at school :o

I knew that was coming you sprig...do tell, primary was it?!
Which Topsy and Tim did it for you, youthful-show-off-person...

sorry, couldn't resist! errr, primary school until '86....

and I until 1981...

1988

(I wore several brightly coloured woolly jumpers all on top of each other and lots of badges Objecting to things. Especially Bloke Things. Then I wondered disconsolately why nobody ever tried to chat me up.)

I am reading this thread and wondering what the hell I read in the 1980s....lots of stuff with black and white spines I would not recommend, apart from the Colour Purple.

I agree that quite a lot of that 'we're so shallow, aren't we deep about it' stuff makes me cringe (I can't do Martin Amis. I have tried).

Maggie Gee is still, I think, rather good.

And I do still try with Iain Banks but mostly out of misplaced adoration from the Crow Road.

Armistead...ahhhhh....

Did you have rainbow toe socks and an atomkraft - nein danke badge though MI? And a Chinese padded jacket? And Chinese velvet slippers? and electric blue mascara?
And did you frizz your hair by putting it into lots of silly little plaits....

I had a 'nuclear family no thank you' badge . And by that time I had taken to chopping my own Mohawk haircut with my nail scissors, when my boyfriend wasn't using them to trim his stubble.

My 20s were not my best decade, really - I was a mess in lots of ways. I am hoping for a Magnificent Old Age to compensate.

I had the electric blue mascara and the gold lipstick and the nein danke badge
since you ask (ed motherinferior)

aaah, what a nostalgic trip for moi....1983 for me! I was OBSESSED with Paul Auster and Ian McEwan but could never get past the first few lines of Possession.Love The Crow Road and The Wasp Factory too. Lots of Tom Wolfe for good measure, but the film version of Bonfire of the Vanities sucks....

excellent badge MI

Gold lippy, ah, yes, I remember it well...usually worn with rock 'ard sludge green Leichner nail varnish.
MI, I shared a flat with an adorable Mohican-wearer for a time. The sweetest of guys, it took hours of Robin starch and crouching next to a radiator to achieve scary perfection...
Did you distress and customise your Laura Ashleys though?

badges!!!! had loads of them - rock against racism, anti nazi league ( mind you I think that was more late 70s!)support the miners, no cruise etc. Wish I still had 'em.

Ian McEwan = perfect literature for moody sixth-formers I think. The frisson of reading First Love, Last Rites and knowing your mum would be

Good job none of us ever fell in a pond all badged up, I'd have sunk like a stone, with my ginormous folding gilt fan earrings and all...