Sunday Salon: The essence of 80s and the Lambs

Given that I've had a bit of an 80s themed weekend, I thought I'd think about what book sums up the essence of 80s.

My 80s weekend consisted of joining the Real Hot Bitches dance troupe in their routine dancin to Bon Jovi (that's my dancing legwarmers). In Christchurch's Cathedral Square. And watching the honest and emotionally powerful movie by Shane Meadows (set in 1983) This is England.

What book is the essence of 80s? The novel that popped into my head was American Psycho . I'm not sure why ... yes it is set in the late 80s but there's more than that. It's not New Romantic, New Wave or any of the good bits of the 80s. It sums up the Gordon Gekko, Wall Street nasty venality of the "Greed is good" era.

It is cocaine, torture, hardbodies, Phil Collins and Huey Lewis, and rampant consumerism. It is the most disturbing book I've ever read.

Over on the Christchurch City Libraries blog, I wrote about 84 Charing Cross Road & The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, with a special tribute to Charles Lamb:

He had a genius for sympathy that not one of his great friends could touch. When Wordsworth chided him for not caring enough about nature, Charles wrote, ‘I have no passion for groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life … old chairs, old streets, squares where I have sunned myself … have I not enough, without your Mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing.’