Harry & Tonto

1974

Director: Paul Mazursky

Principal Actors: Art Carney, Tonto the Cat

Gut-level Take

Everything either changes or dies. Observe it, accept it, and keep moving on.

Basic Plot

Evicted from his lifelong apartment in New York, old-guy Harry and his old cat Tonto take a road trip west meeting sweet, eccentric people along the way.

Themes

• The death of your generation and its culture
• Meeting strangers is transformative
• Individualism vs community
• Animals as family
• Is the world really getting more dangerous, or do we just perceive it to be more so?

Unexpected Awesomeness

• 1970s economy referred to as the “worst since the Great Depression” — gave me hope that the dire economy now will eventually get better
• Melanie Mayron (eccentric photographer in Thirtysomething) as a kooky young runaway with crazy round glasses
• A road movie in which nothing bad happens to the travelers
• Larry Hagman as a wanna-be West Coast playboy with a penchant for tightly tied neck scarves

It was the summer of 1990. I was 14 years old and at a crossroads.

New Kids on the Block, Sweet Valley High books, and Growing Pains didn’t appeal to me anymore, and I was looking for whatever would come next.

I’m not sure how I came across Sassy magazine for the first time, but it was probably while browsing the magazine rack at a suburban Minneapolis Super America, looking for something to read other than the YM I had already read and the dozens of boy-crazy rags like The Big Bopper with Kirk Cameron’s goofy mug on the cover.

I remember reading Sassy for the first time knowing immediately that it was different. It called bullshit on the crap that other teen magazines fawned over and instead covered independent film, music and NYC culture. It was honest and funny and ironic, and it had the tone of a street-wise older sister who was much cooler than I was.

Sassy’s awesomeness is well documented on the internet—there’s even a book about it—so I’m not unique in saying that Sassy magazine changed my life. And it did, in a big way.

Back in the summer of 1990, Sassy’s editors compiled a small pull-out booklet for the July issue of the magazine. Titled 150 Things to Read, Watch, and Listen To, So You Don’t Die of Boredom This Summer, it was an annotated list of seminal records, movies, and books that were favorites of the editors and writers.

Not only had I not seen, listened to, or read any of the titles in the booklet, and I not even HEARD of most of them. And this intrigued me. It was like the cooler older sister was throwing down the gauntlet to see if I was up to the challenge.

And so I made it my personal quest to find the books, movies & music on the list and study them that summer.

Of course, this was all before the internet, before Amazon, Google, eBay, Netflix, YouTube, and iTunes made it ridiculously easy to find anything that you want instantly.

This was when tracking down physical copies of obscure titles was a quest, and the hunt became part of the media’s meaning.

A lot of the stuff on the list I flat-out didn’t get.

Movies I watched went right over my head—Dr. Strangelove for example. And when I listened to a band like the Buzzcocks, I heard mostly noise.

But though some of the movies, books, and music were cryptic to my 14-year-old brain, they planted something in my unconsciousness, and they created a life-long love of Stanley Kubrick, Lou Reed, and Frank Conroy.

In fact, I can trace just about every piece of media that I love back to that pull-out booklet from 1990.

Like almost all pieces of ephemera, my pull-out booklet was thrown out in the trash, and I never saw it again.

Until this spring when I was able to track down on eBay a July 1990 copy of Sassy with the booklet intact.

In the spirit of the true Internet, where everything is shared and nothing is ever lost, I decided to digitize the booklet’s suggestions so some 14-year-old girl has instant access to all the media it took me years to find on foot back in the ’90s.

To today’s 14-year-old girl, most of the stuff on the list is going to seem dated. But I hope it will help her understand her Gen X parents better, and know that wherever we are right now in culture, it came from someplace else.

The Movies/Videos

The Music

The Books

Download a copy of the scanned booklet

Get the background on this list.

Videos/Movies

Adam’s Rib

Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play husband-and-wife lawyers on opposite sides of a women’s right’s case. (Comedy/Drama)

Annie Hall

The best break-up movie ever, through the eyes of Woody Allen. (Comedy/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex.)

Baby, It’s You

A doctor’s preppy daughter takes up with a greaser, much to the horror of your equally preppie friends. (Drama/Romance/Comedy/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

Barbarella

Pre-politicized Jane Fonda as a space-traveling sex kitten. Also where Duran Duran got their name. (Comedy/Sci-Fi/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

Birdy

Matthew Modine is a shell-shocked Vietnam vet who thinks he’s a bird. Nicholas Cage tries to help. (Drama/There is no way you’ll guess the ending/Cute boy fest/Sob alert/Movie with a message)

The Blob

Double feature: See Steve McQueen in the 1958 original, then view the ’88 remake with Kevin Dillon. (Horror/Sci-Fi/Cute boy fest/Do not eat before, during or after this movie)

Blood Simple

This twisted tale of murder and passion will make you scared of rednecks. (Comedy/Drama/There is no way you’ll guess the ending)

Brazil

Mind-blowing futuristic nightmare that also manages to be darkly funny.  (Comedy/Drama/There is no way you’ll guess the ending/Movie with a message)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Starring Audrey Hepburn, featuring clothes you gotta have. (Comedy/Drama/Romance/Sob alert)

Dawn of the Dead

Ghouls in a shopping mall. Sequel to—and better than—Night of the Living Dead. (Horror/Comedy/Do not eat before, during or after this movie)

Decline of the Western Civilization, Part 1 and Part 2

The punk and heavy metal movements, featuring shockingly candid interviews with real musicians. (Documentary/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/Movie with a message)

Desperately Seeking Susan

Madonna is the very essence of early ’80s hip New York-ness. (Comedy/Romance/Mystery/Cute boy fest).

Diva

Cute postman loves opera and that’s what gets him in trouble. An amazing movie to look at—you’ll wish you were French. (Drama/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee directs a day in the life of a Brooklyn pizza joint and says more about racism in America than anyone else in Hollywood. (Comedy/Drama/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/Movie with a message/Sob alert)

Dr. Strangelove

Still brilliant (and true) political satire after 20 years; dead genius Peter Sellers plays three of the parts. (Comedy/Drama/There is no way you’ll guess the ending/Movie with a message)

Drugstore Cowboy

The first cliche-free movie about drug addicts. Plus Matt Dillon. (Comedy/Drama/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/Teenagers as they really are)

East of Eden

The only James Dean movie worth getting excited about. (Drama/Cute boy fest)

Fandango

Boys on the road right before Vietnam. (Comedy/Drama/Cute boy fest)

Gates of Heaven

This deadpan look at a pet cemetery proves truth is stranger than fiction. (Comedy/Documentry)

The Girl Can’t Help It

Bodacious Jayne Mansfield wants to be a rock star. Great early cameos by Little Richard and Eddie Cochran. (Comedy/Romance)

The Graduate

Angst-ridden college grad has an affair with a married woman, then falls in love with her daughter. (Comedy/Romance/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

A Hard Day’s Night

Comedy starring The Beatles that captures their early fabness. (Comedy/Cute boy fest)

Harold & Maude

Optimistic old lady + pessimistic young man = the kookiest love story ever. (Comedy/Drama/Romance/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/There is no way you’ll guess the ending/Movie with a message)

Heathers

(Teenagers as they really are, like, x5)

High School

A fly-on-the-wall view of a real, live high school in the ’70s. (Documentary)

High School Confidential

A 1950s anti-drug morality tale that’s a scream. Dig that crazy beatnik poet. (Comedy/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

How to Marry a Millionaire

Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable all snag rich husbands (Comedy/Romance).

Lady and the Tramp

And for that matter, 101 Dalmatians.

The Misfits

Marilyn Monroe again, this time trying to save lots of wild horses from dog-food-hunting cowboys. Her last film. (Drama/Romance/Sob alert)

My Life as a Dog

Gorgeous little boy loses dog. Loses mom. Finds quirky uncle. Finds friends. From Sweden. (Drama/Sob alert)

Near Dark

Even cooler than The Lost Boys. Gorier too. (Horror/Mystery/Cute boy fest/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex/Do not eat before, during or after this movie)

A Nightmare on Elm Street

See Johnny Depp get sucked into a bed. (Horror/Cute boy fest/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

Notorious

Ingrid Bergman was never so sexy, Cary Grant was never so dark. Arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s best. (Romance/Mystery)

Polyester

Forget Cry-Baby, this is the kind of truly sick stuff John Waters does best.  (Comedy/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/Do not eat before, during or after this movie)

Pumping Iron and Pumping Iron II, The Women

Real body builders (including Arnold Schwarzenegger) get big bodies and heads for the Mr./Ms. Universe contests. (Documentary/Movie with a message)

Repo Man

This movie about a punk-style car repossessor proves that Emilio Estevez was cool. Once. (Comedy/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex/Movie with a message)

River’s Edge

The dark side of friendship. Keanu has yet to top this. (Drama/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex/Teenagers the way they really are)

Rock ‘N’ Roll High School

Punk-era celebration of mindless adolescence, starring the Ramones (Comedy/Romance/Teenagers the way they really are)

Say Anything

You mean you haven’t seen this yet? (Comedy/Romance/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex/Teenagers the way they really are)

Some Kind of Wonderful

Eric Stoltz when he was humble. (Drama/Romance/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex/Teenagers the way they really are)

Soylent Green

Campy story about post-Greenhouse-effect life, and getting truer by the minute. (Sci-Fi/You’ll never guess the ending/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex/Movie with a message)

Stand by Me

River Phoenix was only this big. (Drama/Cute boy fest)

The Stepford Wives

You’ll never look at your mother the same way again. (Horror/Mystery)

A Streetcar Named Desire

If your mom’s always going on about Marlon Brando, this is why. (Drama/Romance/Sob alert)

This is Spinal Tap

Docu-style comedy about a trash metal band. If you’re left wondering who would make a movie about a band this bad, you didn’t get it. (Comedy/To be seen with a member of the opposite sex)

2,000 Maniacs

Do not eat before, during or after this movie!!!!!

Valley of the Dolls

Classic ’60s bitchery between Hollywood starlets, and some mighty swell hairdos. (Comedy/Drama/Romance)

Viva Las Vegas

Indisputable proof that Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley are the same person. (Comedy/Action/Romance)

The Year My Voice Broke

A younger boy loves an older girl. She gets pregnant and he gets burned. (Comedy/Drama/Potentially embarrassing if viewed with the folks/Teenagers the way they really are)

Get the background on this list.

Music

After the Gold Rush

Neil Young. Yeah, he’s weird, but this stuff comes straight from the heart. (Folk rock/Music to be alone with)

Ain’t That a Groove

James Brown. He’s old enough to be your grandfather but still showing the world how it’s done. (Soul/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

Avalon

Roxy Music. Bryan Ferry is the master scribe of superior love songs. Great makeout or pining music. (Rock/Soul/Music to be alone with/To be heard with a member of the opposite sex)

Back to Mystery City

Hanoi Rocks. The ultimate of their trashy-metal-glam sound for those who like to crank up the volume. (Metal/Best at speaker-busting volume/Music to be in the car with)

Blood on the Tracks

Bob Dylan. Released in ’75, this was Bob’s last true masterpiece. (Folk rock/Rock/Music to be alone with)

Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits

Miss Cline is the Bob Dylan of barn dances. (Country/Dead artist/Music to be alone with/Music to be in the car with)

Cosmic Thing

The B-52′s. Surreal meets funky in outer space. Rock the house. (New Wave/Rock/Take to a party/Music to be in the car with)

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen. Raw boss, not the commercial stuff of Born in the U.S.A. (Rock/Music to be in the car with)

Different Light

Bangles. Their second, most popular and least predictable. (Rock/Take to a party/Music to be in the car with)

Dirty Mind

Prince. The Purple One when he was still controversial—crude, throbbing and very danceable. (Soul/Take to a party/Music to be in the car with)

English Settlement

XTC. The British quartet’s multi-layered sound takes some getting used to, but then it becomes addictive. Get the two-record British version. (New Wave/Music to be alone with)

Exile on Main Street

Rolling Stones. The Stones discover America and let it all hang out. Their zenith—and that’s saying something. (R0ck/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

More Fun in the New World

X. The best cruising music on this or any planet, by the vastly underrated L.A. post-punks. (Punk/Best at speaker-busting volume/Music to be in the car with)

Al Green/Greatest Hits

A good place to start getting to know one of the best R&B voices in the biz. (To be heard with a member of the opposite sex)

The Harder They Come, Soundtrack

Jimmy Cliff and others. Beach music doesn’t get much better than this. Pass the coconut oil, mon. (Reggae/Take to a party)

Hexbreaker!

The Fleshtones. Semi-psychedelic ’80s garage rock from one New York’s finest. (Rock/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

Hunky Dory

David Bowie. This is pre-Ziggy Stardust,  with charming acoustic stuff like “Fill Your Heart” and “Kooks.” (Rock/Music to be alone with)

King of Rock

Run-D.M.C. These rotund masters of the mike have an awesome sense of humor. “You Talk Too Much” could be the soundtrack to your worst dates. (Rap/Best at speaker-busting volume)

Eartha Kitt’s Greatest Hits

“Sort of like being in a dinky Paris nightclub in the ’40s–with a sense of humor,” Karen Catchpole, Sassy Magazine. (Music to be alone with)

Labour of Love

UB40. Reggae classics lovingly recreated by these Brits. This one stands the test of time. (Reggae/Bring to a party/Music to be in a car with)

The Lion and the Cobra

Sinéad O’Connor. Her debut album is angrier than her latest, but just as hypnotic. Wear it out. (Rock rock/Rock/Music to be alone with/To be heard with a member of the opposite sex.)

London Calling

The Clash. The pop-rock-shock of this two-record set has made it a punk staple, but less aggressive people will love it too. (Punk/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

Marquee Moon

Television. A searing, guitar-soaked melding of poetry and punk. Strap on the headphones and hold tight. (Punk/Rock/Best at speaker-busting volume/Music to be alone with)

Me Myself and I

Joan Armatrading. The woman they kept comparing Tracy Chapman to. Joan’s songs will get you through many a love crisis. (Folk rock/Music to be alone with)

Moondance

Van Morrison. Mood music for a rainy day–mossy green and wet. Bono loves this guy. (Rock rock/Music to be alone with)

Murmur

R.E.M. We chose this album over their others ’cause it’s the first, back when their voice-as-another-instrument, smart words, and jangly guitars really stood out. (Rock/Music to be alone with/Music to be in a car with)

October

U2. Raw stuff, before they were deified. (Rock/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

Parallel Lines

Blondie. Prior to Madonna there was Debbie Harry. (New Wave/Take to a party)

Physical Graffiti

Led Zeppelin. Zep’s only double album is also their most varied. A proven cure for metalphobia. (Rock x 3/Metal/Best at speaker-busting volume)

Pure Pop for Now People

Nick Lowe. Pop-punk cynicism, English pub rock and sugary-sweet balladeering make for some fun. (New Wave/Rock.)

Ramones

Ramones. Unrelenting. Brilliant. Enough said. (Punk/Best at speaker-busting volume/Music to be in a car with)

Rebel Yell

Billy Idol. Rock doesn’t get more straight-ahead than this. The essential beach accessory. (Rock/Best at speaker-busting volume/Music to be in a car with.)

Roachford

Roachford.  A brill R&B debut that was virtually ignored. (Rock/Soul/Take to a party.)

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Imagine if Otis Redding were British and white. (Soul/Take to a party.)

Singles Going Steady

Buzzcocks. A collection of their A- and B-sides, these frenetic Brits are like the Ramones with intellect. (New Wave/Best at speaker-busting volume)

The Slider/Electric Warrior

T. Rex. The best in early ’70s glam rock, contains the original “Bang a Gong” (two-album set). (Rock/Dead artist/Take to a party)

Sly and the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits

Hot fun in the summertime from the king of shake your thing. (Soul/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

So

Peter Gabriel. This one’s more accessible than his usual stuff. Selections from “Sledgehammer” to “Don’t Give Up” make for some cool variety. (Rock/Music to be alone with/Music to be in a car with/To be heard with a member of the opposite sex)

Soul Mining

The The. No matter how depressed you are, singer/songwriter Matt Johnson will inevitably be more so. (New Wave/Music to be alone with)

Special Beat Service

The English Beat. Early ’80s ska (a faster predecessor of reggae). Some of its members went on to form Fine Young Cannibals. (Reggae/Take to a party)

Squeezing Out Sparks

Graham Parker. The underrated British rocker in all his nasal-voiced glory. (Reggae/Music to be alone with/To be heard with a member of the opposite sex)

Tender Prey

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Surreal lyrics and heavy, dark music–a must-have for alternative music fans. (Rock/Music to be alone with)

Ten Years of Gold

Aretha Franklin. Why Aretha is the goddess of soul. Includes some of her massive torch songs. (Soul/Take to a party/Music to be in a car with)

This Year’s Model

Elvis Costello. (Though the old, chubby, contemplating Elvis is great, let’s not forget the young, skinny, angry man he once was. (New Wave/Best at speaker-busting volume)

3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul. We defy you to listen to rap’s most innovative threesome and be in a bad mood afterward. (Rap/Soul/Best at speaker-busting volume/Take to a party)

Toys in the Attic

Aerosmith. Any rock and roll fan who doesn’t have this in their collection is committing a heinous crime. (Rock/Metal/Best at speaker-busting volume/Music to be in a car with)

Transformer

Lou Reed. A kinder, gentler, almost sweet Lou. Contains the classic “Walk on the Wild Side.” (Rap/Rock/Music to be alone with)

Trouble Funk, Live from D.C.

Go-go music is like rap with a melody and horns, and it’s rarely captured on vinyl. Which is why this record is such a party. (Rap/Take to a party)

Union

Toni Childs. A voice more powerful than Aretha Franklin’s beautiful African instrumentation and poetic lyrics. A stirring album. (Folk rock/Music to be alone with)

The Kinks and the Village Green Preservation Society

The Kinks. Forget about “Lola” and “You Really Got Me.” This pastoral, poetic beauty will show you the real soul of The Kinks. (Folk rock/Rock)

Get the background on this list.

The Books

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Three years in a Jewish teenager’s life while hiding from the Nazis. Most poignant and timely. (Autobiography/Sob alert/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway/People have tried to ban this)

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner.  A stream-of-consciousness hayride with an eccentric southern family (Novel/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway/An intellectual workout)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm’s popularity is on the rise–here’s a clue as to what he was about. (Autobiography/An intellectual workout)

The Awakening

Kate Chopin. Privileged married woman want to be her own person back when women didn’t do that. Bonus: steamy love scenes. (Novel/Romance/Sob alert)

The Basketball Diaries

Jim Carroll. The very real diary of a New York teen’s loss of innocence. Totally deglamorizes drug use. (Autobiography/Teenagers the way they really are)

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath. Overly sensitive and bright college girl has a breakdown. (Novel/Beach reading)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Truman Capote. Introducing the enchantingly wacko Holly Golightly. Better than the movie, which has the obligatory happy ending. (Novel/Beach reading)

Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger. A day in the life of Holden Caulfield, who just got kicked out of prep school and hasn’t told his parents yet. (Novel/Humor/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway)

Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

Florence King. Completely hilarious autobiography about a girl who just doesn’t fit the southern-lady criteria. Great menstual scenes. (Autobiography/Humor/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

The Country Girls

Edna O’Brien. The bittersweet misadventures of two Irish girls growing up in the ’60s, one of whom has an alcoholic father. (Novel/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

Crossing the Line

William Finnegan. White American lands in South Africa and gets a job teaching “colored” kids. Makes that country’s terrifying racism very clear. (Non-fiction)

Daughter of Time

Josephine Tey. Modern-day, bed-ridden sleuth investigates a murder committed by Richard III. An offbeat whodunnit. (Mystery/Beach reading)

Dicey’s Song

Cynthia Voigt. A 13-year old girl has to take care of her younger brothers and sisters when her parents can’t. (Novel/Sob alert)

Edie: An American Biography

George Plimpton and Jean Stein. Fabulous rich girl parties it up with Andy Warhol and come to a tragic end. (Biography/Beach reading)

Easy in the Islands

Bob Shacochis. Set in the Caribbean, by a writer who lived there. (Short stories/Beach reading)

Endless Love

Scott Spencer. One teenager’s obsession for another destroys them both. Don’t see the movie. (Novel/Romance/Beach reading/ Sob alert)

The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand. Young architect rebels against the world and has a torrid affair. Some philosophy called objectivism is expounded. (Novel/An intellectual workout/People have tried to ban this)

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor. Weird southern people and not the easily spooked. (Short stories/humor)

Gorillas in the Mist

Dian Fossey. The author was murdered for caring too much about Africa’s endangered gorillas. (Autobiography/Sob alert)

The Greengage Summer

Rumer Godden. English sisters spend one memorable summer in France. (Novel/Teenagers the way they really are)

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald. All about the American Dream, with lots of flappers and things. (Novel/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway/People have tried to ban this)

Grown-Up Fast

Betsy Israel. The author gets pregnant the night of her senior prom and denies it to herself for seven months. (Autobiography/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

Hollywood

Charles Bukowski. Loosely based on the underground author’s experiences when his novel was made into a movie. (Autobiography/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway)

I’m With The Band

Pamela Des Barres. Very engrossing tales of a wild yet innocent ’60s groupie costarring Jim Morrison and Jimmy Page. (Autobiography/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee. Portraits of poor sharecropping families during the Depression, with Walker Evans photographs. (Non-fiction/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway)

Manchild in the Promised Land

Claude Brown. A Harlem boy fights crime, drugs and poverty to become a law student. (Autobiography)

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka. Man wakes up one day and finds out he’s a beetle. Haven’t we all felt that way? (Novella/They’re gonna make you read this one in school sooner or later anyway/An intellectual workout)

Minor Characters

Joyce Johnson. The author was Jack Kerouac’s girl for a while. This book is about that. (Autobiography/Beach reading)

Monkeys

Susan Minot. Modern minimalist first novel about growing up in a big New England family, and then the mother dies. (Novel/Beach reading/Sob alert/Teenagers the way they really are)

The Mountain People

Colin M. Turnbull. A formerly powerful African tribe slowly starves to death. A scary parallel to the selfishness of our own society. (Non-fiction)

My Antonìa

Willa Cather. Pioneer boy and girl at the turn of the century. May be the most beautiful romance written by an American. (Novel/Romance/Beach reading/Sob alert)

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

Mark Leyner. Weird things happen. Strange language is used. Brand names are bandied about. Very bizarre. (Novel/An intellectual workout)

Nadja

André Breton. Surrealist love story set in Paris in the ’20s. Illustrated with really cool paintings of the time. (Novel/Romance/An intellectual workout)

No One Here Gets Out Alive

Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins. Way-above-average biography of Jim Morrison (Biography/Beach reading)

Other Fires

Modern short fiction by Latin American women. Very much about the female experience. (Short stories/Beach reading)

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Gloria Steinem. Some of her best essays, including her undercover stint as a Playboy bunny. (Non-fiction/Beach reading)

The Outsiders

S.E. Hinton. You’ve seen the TV series, now read the book about poor teenagers persecuted by rich ones. (Novel/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard. Even if you’re not a nature type, you’ll love the way Dillard’s nature essays put a microscope to the outdoors. (Non-fiction/An intellectual workout)

Celine

Brock Cole. A 16-year-old painter lives in a Chicago loft with her 22-year-old stepmother. Nicely unpredictable. (Novel/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

Slaves of New York

Tama Janowitz. Hip short stories about the East Village art scene of the early ‘ 80s. (Short stories/Beach reading).

Stop-Time

Frank Conroy. A ’50s cult classic that makes you understand what it’s like being a boy. Great for would-be writers. (Autobiography/Beach reading/Teenagers the way they really are)

Tar Baby

Toni Morrison. Caribbean girl grows up, becomes a high fashion model and gets involved with the homeless man. (Novel/ Beach reading/Sob alert)

That Was Then, This is Now

S.E. Hinton. Why friends grow apart. (Novel/Beach reading/Sob alert/Teenagers the way they really are)

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston. A young black woman comes of age just after the civil war. (Novel/Sob alert/An intellectual workout)

Wearing Dad’s Head

Barry Yourgrau. What Kafka would have written if he’d grown up in the suburbs and watched too much TV. (Short stories/Humor/Beach reading/An intellectual workout)

Welcome to the Monkey House

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Jane swears she’s read these twisted stories a zillion times. (Short stories/Humor/An intellectual workout/People have tried to ban this)

White Palace

Glenn Savan. A grittier version of the yuppie-falls-in-love-with-lower-class-woman story. (Novel)

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys. If you’ve read Jane Eyre, you must have wondered about Mr. Rochester’s mad wife. This is a poetic answer. (Novel/Romance/Sob alert)

The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston. A beautiful and scary book about growing up female and Chinese-American. (Autobiography/An intellectual workout)

Dad, thanks for taking me snowshoeing, fishing, camping, boating, shooting, skiing, X-country skiing, hiking, swimming and biking. Thanks for insisting on educational summer vacations, for teaching me how to change the oil in my car, for showing me how to use power tools. Thanks for always showing up, no matter what.

I was cleaning out old files from Google Docs and came across these two interviews I did with a couple Google engineers for NCWIT in 2008, just before I left Google. Portraits by Jason of course. The two things I remember vividly about the experience: 1) we had to sneak Jason’s photo equipment into the building because I was nervous that Google security would bust us for unauthorized photography on campus, and 2) transcribing interviews is more difficult than I had imagined because  you have balance the “cleaning up” of the spoken word while maintaining the integrity of what was said.

Fewer and fewer women are joining the IT field these days (the official stat is that there’s been a 70 percent decline in the number of undergraduate women choosing to major in Computer Science between 2000 and 2005) and NCWIT is working to understand why that is and reverse the downward trend.

Working at Google, I’m surrounded by some of the most intelligent and driven people I’ve ever met, so I decided to take advantage of that proximity and sit down with a couple of Google Women Engineers and talk to them about how they first got interested in technology, why they think women are underrepresented in IT, and what advice they would give young women who are interested in Computer Science.

An interview with Sharon Perl, Software Engineer at Google (from April 2008)

Tell me what you do for Google.

I’m a software engineer — that’s my general title. I’ve always worked in the systems and infrastructure group at Google. And right now I’m working on project to build a storage system that will store photos, videos, images — anything that’s blobby, anything that’s a chunk of bits that you would tend to store, retrieve and not manipulate a lot in the meantime.

What degrees do you hold?

Ph.D., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

S.M., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

B.S.E., Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania

What is your typical day like at Google?

In the last six months or so, I haven’t been writing much code. Before that, I was writing code fairly often, so my day could easily have a chunk of several hours where I was coding.

What I’ve been doing a lot of lately is project management and design. I spend time reading design documents, talking to people on my team and outside my team about the system design and where it’s going.

And I spend time meeting with clients about applications that might store their data in the blob storage — figuring out what their requirements are and if the properties of their data suit this storage system. That’s a bit of evangelizing.

I spend a fair amount of my day working on stuff related to this project.

I go to talks — one or two talks per week. Sometimes they’re technical, fairly often they’re not technical talks.

For example this week I went to a talk by Patricia Ryan Madson about improv wisdom. She talked about how to take skills that are taught to improvisational actors and apply them to your life — making mistakes, saying “yes and”, committing, jumping in full force, going with whatever is happening around you, and being open to change. That was cool.

Yesterday I lead a breakout session for the Google Women Engineers career development event. So I do leadership development stuff, both for myself to improve and to help other people.

How did you decide to go into computer science?

I had no clue what I wanted to do when I first got to college. I don’t even think I knew what engineering was back then.

I was good in math and science. My father was a chemist, so I think I signed up for chemical engineering.

I think maybe one of my math teachers I really liked said that engineering is something I should look into.

I got accepted to the school of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. I actually got accepted into a dual degree program for engineering and management at the Engineering School and the Wharton School.

My mother had a friend whose son was in the program, and because he said it was a good program, I signed up for it. That tells you how low my level of awareness was.

One of the requirements in the first semester of my freshman year was a computer programming course, and we got to choose between learning Pascal or Fortran. I didn’t know what either of those things was.

My mother’s friend’s son said to go for Pascal, because you get to use terminals and don’t have to do it on punch cards.

So I took the Pascal class, and I found that I really loved programming. I’d never done it before, and I’d never done anything quite like it.

It actually reminded me of proofs in geometry, which I liked to do in math in high school. I loved proofs in geometry. I remember when I did my first proof; it was so wonderful that you could find a set of axioms that when put together in the right order, they lead you to a conclusion inevitably.

And somehow the programming felt similar to that. I just loved my first programming class, and that’s when I decided to make my engineering major computer science.

But I was very intimidated because there were many of people in the computer science department who knew a lot — geeky guys who had already programmed as kids. I always felt that everyone knew more than I did. So I was intimidated by it.

I also took my management side classes — the Wharton classes — the first year, and I really did not like them. I think it was accounting that did it for me. I said no way, I’m not majoring on this side.

So I made the decision to major in just computer science. I dropped out the dual degree program and switched to computer science.

Did you have any people you modeled yourself after or wanted to be like when you were growing up?

I don’t remember having somebody I wanted to be like.

I had a lot of adults who were very influential — teachers especially. I tended to have good relationships with my teachers, especially in high school.

I knew the teachers really well. My friends and I worked for them outside of class, and so we’d hang out with them. And they were very influential.

Certainly my math teacher who encouraged me to go on with math was very influential, but I don’t remember wanting to be like anyone.

Why do you think there’s been such a drop in women getting computer science degrees?

I’ve heard that from many places, and I’ve looked at some of the research, and it seems quite plausible to me that the image of somebody who does computer science is still the geeky guy. Someone who doesn’t talk to people, who cares more about machines than about making things happen in the world.

And I think there’s probably a certain amount of girls not getting the exposure to computer science young enough.

Certainly in Silicon Valley the schools are very aware of that, and my daughter is in a middle school where she’s taking computer science classes.

But I look at her, and she’s not currently interested in math, science or computing — she doesn’t see it as cool and fun. And I suspect that it’s similar for lots of girls.

Other career opportunities seem better. Maybe it’s more obvious to girls to go into medicine or biology or chemistry because they can clearly see how they can improve people’s lives, or whatever it is they’re looking to do with their careers.

And for the girls who are interested in math and science, I think there’s still the problem that you can’t find the right role model.

This came up yesterday in the Google Women Engineers career development event: if you choose the wrong role models, it can be very discouraging because you start comparing yourself to someone who is really not like you. You’re not likely to have the same successes that that person has, or to succeed in exactly the same way, and it can be very discouraging.

So I think it’s probably all those factors that contribute to fewer computer science degrees.

What advice would you give to young women who are thinking of getting into computer science? Or to parents who want to encourage their daughters?

As a parent of an 11-year-old girl, I encourage her to do well in math. She’s smart, and I don’t want to let math slide, even if it’s not going to end up being her career.

I would really encourage parents to take advantage of the many opportunities out there — there are science camps, math camps, and lots of stuff that girls can do with computing these days. So if you see the interest, find her connections to people who are interested in the same stuff and can show her how much fun it can be.

And I think encouragement really matters, too. I was insecure, but I had people who believed in me, and I think that’s what helped me to stick with it. My thesis advisor was really supportive in grad school.

For undergraduates, I’d recommend they get a job. I had jobs outside of my classes. I worked for the systems administrator for the computer science department, and I got a lot of exposure — really got my hands into things. Find projects and jobs that can give you experience, because the experience is the thing that gives you confidence. It shows other people you can do it. So just do it, and don’t worry whether you’re as good as other people.

I also would take every chance you have to be a small fish in a big pond. It’s something that people worry about, that I worried about, from high school to college. Should I go to the college that’s a little smaller, or a little less prestigious, and be someone who’s likely to come in on top? Or should I go to an Ivy League school and potentially be just one of many?

When I think about it, I’ve always gone to the place that’s the bigger pond and has bigger fish to learn from. You learn more, and you grow more. So I would always go for the big pond, if there’s the opportunity.

Why did you choose to work at Google?

I was working at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) in the research lab. I had been in a lab for 9 years, ever since I’d gotten my Ph.D., and I decided that maybe I would prefer engineering — something a little more practical, where the problems were a little more clear.

So I decided to start looking at other companies. There had been people who had left the DEC research lab to go to Google — Sanjay Ghemawat was one of them. Some of the most senior engineers at Google now came out of the DEC research lab.

I had initially thought that I would never go to Google. I had heard it had reputation for being one of these place that consumes your life, demands huge amounts of work hours, and I had a young child.

So I wasn’t really looking at Google, but I ended up at a party with Sanjay Ghemawat. I told him I had decided to leave the lab, and he said, why don’t you come talk to us?

This is another one of these instances — this happens a lot to me, and I think for a lot of other women too — that if you don’t get invited, you assume that you’re not wanted.

Just having Sanjay ask me to talk with them made the difference for me.

Google was about 300 people at that time; it wasn’t by any means big, but it wasn’t in start-up mode.

And I knew people who had gone to Google, and I knew that they were really smart and that they wouldn’t have gone there and wouldn’t stay there if it wasn’t fun.

So it was the people that made me come here, and all that other stuff about Google, but it was also the shortest commute. It didn’t require me to get on the freeway to go to work.

I thought, great, I can still have my family life and still work.

An interview with Lea Kissner, Software Engineer at Google (from April 2008)

Tell me what do you do for Google.

I’m on the information security team at Google, and I do a combination of things.

I’m a software engineer; I work on infrastructure — making things run, making things work.

And I do security design reviews: people from all over the company e-mail me and say hey, I’m doing this cool new thing, can you tell me how to make it more secure.

I also work on privacy for Google, making sure information is anonymous and secure, and that we’re doing right by our users.

What degrees do you hold?

My undergrad degree is a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley. And I have a Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon in Computer Science.

What’s a typical day like for you at Google?

I bike in to work (my new bike is under 18 pounds and made of carbon fiber), and then get through all my e-mail. I help people out with their security problems, sometimes have meetings with them. I do some coding.

We work very collaboratively at Google, which is really great. I spend a lot of time with people figuring out what they need, figuring out what they want to do, to make sure what they want is to be secure.

How did you discover that you were interested in security?

I actually used to work in robotics. I did a lot of soldering, and I figured that sooner or later the solder fumes were going to eat my brain, and sooner or later my brain was going to come in handy. So I switched to cryptography because it involves a lot of theory, a lot of math, and it was really fun.

Crypto has lots and lots of really cool math in it. Crypto, security, and privacy have this advantage in that they’re really, really hard.

Partially because no one agrees what it means to be secure, what is means to be private, what math we should be using. And once you verbally agree to a definition of security, how do you write that down in terms of math? And then how do you use algorithms and mathematics to achieve that?

What fascinated you when you young?

Everything. I had the problem that I was interested in everything.

When I was 5 years old, I decided I was going to get my Ph.D. in Physics because that was when I was first introduced to liquid nitrogen.

I watched someone drop a rubber ball in liquid nitrogen, fish it out, and throw it on the floor and it shattered, and thought that is cool! And I thought, if becoming a physicist is what you have to do to get your hands on this stuff, that’s what I’m doing.

I wanted to be a veterinarian for while. And I wanted to be a history major, and I almost majored in history.

But I chose one of the things that I found most enjoyable and most difficult.

What were your favorite books growing up?

There was lots of reading, so that’s a very long list. I read everything that I could get my hands on.

There was one book that I found again recently called Emergence by David R. Palmer — it’s a book about an 11-year-old and her experience when someone sets off a biological weapon and kills most of the people in the US.

It turns out that there are some people who are transgenic: they have this mutation from their grandparents, who had gotten pregnant during the 1919 flu epidemic. So this transgenic group of people survives this biological attack and have to put society back together. And the Russians are trying to get them. I loved it.

Did you have anyone who influenced you growing up? Anyone you wanted to model yourself after?

Not really. My parents constantly told me: you could do whatever you want. You’re smart, you know how to do things, you can do whatever you find interesting. You shouldn’t worry what you should be doing. You should be thinking about what’s going to interest you down the line.

The woman that was always held up for me as a role model was Marie Curie. And I thought, great, she worked really hard, she did really interesting things, and she died of radiation poisoning, and I don’t want to do that.

What constitutes geekiness?

I’ve always been very geeky. Geekiness is not just a tech thing. Geekiness as I see it is passion.

Geekiness means you’re smart about something, you really love something, and you work really hard it. I’m really passionate about technology and bike riding.

Why do you think there’s been such a drop in women getting computer science degrees?

I know that not everyone has encountered this, but I’ve run into a lot of people who are very, very annoying about me being in computer science.

I’ve had people inappropriately hit on me, I’ve had people call me “little girl” (not at Google, mind you). I’ve run into a lot of negative things.

It’s interesting, I was part of an honor society at Berkeley, and we looked at the percentage of women who were in this honor society (membership was determined by GPA), and it was much higher than the percentage of women in the computer science program at the time.

What’s probably happening is that unless you’re really determined, and unless you’re really good at it, you’re much more likely to be dissuaded from getting into computer science. So you’re losing women who would be perfectly fine at computer science who may be very good at it, but who are turned off by some rather obnoxious behavior.

They may be turned off by the fact that every time you go places, you’re the representative of all womankind. That means, if someone doesn’t like you, all women are bad at computer science. I’ve run into a fair bit of annoyance from people.

But I’m very stubborn. The drop in computer science degrees for women is probably because it’s not easy.

What advice would you give young women who want to get into computer science?

First I have advice for anybody who wants to do just about anything: take a lot of math.

People who know what’s going on with the math can do everything else.

I have a Ph.D. in an extremely theoretical discipline. I wrote extremely theoretical papers, my math skills are what I had been working on. But when I first came to Google, I worked on really low-level coding infrastructure projects part of the time, and a lot of what’s given me the background to do that is not that I’m a coder — I’m not really a coder — but I have formal reasoning skills, I have the ability to look at things and see what’s happening on a high level.

You can see this in a lot of disciplines that the people who understand what’s going on with the math get to learn what’s going on with everything else — they have a much bigger box of tools to apply to any given situation.

It’s really about finding what you want, finding something that is so cool that you really want to play with it.

It’s not about just learning how to program, or learning about computers. Go and learn about philosophy, go and learn about sociology, go and learn about math — lots and lots of math — and all of these things come together, and they’re all useful.

You may end up working with privacy, in which case, knowing stuff about philosophical disciplines, knowing what things people say in literature are really, really helpful because it tells you a lot about how people think.

In terms of being a woman in computer science, you have to just realize that some people are idiots. And you’re unfortunately going to have to deal with some people being idiots.

When somebody says something stupid, women need to say something about it. I’m hoping that’s something people don’t have to do down the road, but that seems to be something we’re still dealing with.

This spring, it will be 10 years since I graduated from grad school.

With all of the hoopla around the iPad, iPhone apps, Google Books and ubiquitous instantaneous information access in general, I keep imagining what it would be like to be  a grad student in English now.

Back in 2000, I was thrilled to be able to access OASIS, our university’s online “card catalog”, via dial-up at my apartment so that I could put in an interlibrary loan order for a rare academic book housed at the University of Michigan library, delivery of which would take 5 days at least. How quaint.

All of my massive reference books that I’ve been hauling around for a decade are now iPhone apps — like The American Heritage Dictionary 4th edition (with 60,ooo pronunciation sound files!), which I bought last week.

The fact that I’m happy to pay $29.99 for a dictionary app makes me a dinosaur, because it doesn’t seem like most under-20s particularly care about exact meaning or etymology or spelling. Words to them are more pliable and meaning is conveyed through spoken inflection and typography rather than through a varied vocabulary.

I would have loved having the American Heritage app back in 2000, when I was so worried about mispronouncing, misspelling, and misusing words. I would have come off as way more erudite than I actually was.