There’s “the Greatest Generation” — thank you, Tom Brokaw! — and then there are 75 million Baby Boomers who came after.
P.J. O’Rourke is one of them, and in his book “The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way…and It Wasn’t My Fault…and I’ll Never Do It Again,” he hilariously analyzes his fellow Boomers: “We’re the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self, and said let there be self. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you maybe have noticed this YOURself.”
Boomers are also “the most fun generation,” says O’Rourke, who just kicked off the New York Public Library’s “Books at Noon” program, which meets every Wednesday.
Here’s what’s in O’Rourke’s library.
My Talks with Dean Spanley
by Lord Dunsany
Edward Plunkett, 18th baron of Dunsany, is a now-forgotten writer of dark pulp fantasy — hobbits, but they eat you. “My Talks” is about an Anglican cleric who, under the influence of just the right amount of Tokaj wine, can remember his previous incarnation as a spaniel. Forget “The Call of the Wild” — this is the real view out of a dog’s eyes. Hilarious, unless you were a dog yourself.
Get Shorty
by Elmore Leonard
“Leave out the parts people skip,” said Elmore. Not just the best but the only advice that can be given to a writer. It was also a fantastic movie with John Travolta — the rare example of a brilliant book that became a brilliant movie.
The Chequer Board
by Nevil Shute
I love a good sniffle-and-weep yarn of human redemption, the kind writerly writers don’t write any more. Shute never let the brush strokes show. If you can read “The Chequer Board” without hitting bottom in a box of Kleenex, you’re going to hell.
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
What’s a library without literary pretensions? I’ve read it three times. The best novel in the world because it’s about, well . . . war and peace, which pretty much covers it. But the last hundred pages stink — Tolstoy’s fool theory of history. I asked a Harvard professor of history, fluent in Russian, if I missed something in the translation. He said, “The last hundred pages stink.”