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.

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 wants 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)

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.

“I don’t know how long this feeling is going to last, but the best thing the book did was to push me to really consciously treasure feeling fine. It’s very difficult to feel grateful for the absence of something, but feeling well is really the precondition for every pleasure.” – Lionel Shriver, talking about her new novel So Much for That in the Washington Post

This has been around a while I’m told, but it’s still funny. A good reminder that books were once, at one point, new technology (via DRS).

• Serious Eats pulled a recipe for Candied Pecans (SCD legal!) from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home and I’m baking them up now. It’s a snowy, cold night and the house smells like candy shoppe.
• Jeffery Eugenides’ love-story anthology, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead — one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read — has so far introduced me to two remarkable authors I’ve never heard of before: David Bezmozgis (ordered Natasha) and Deborah Eisenberg (The Collected Stories comes out at the end of March).