Wednesday, October 02, 2019

Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era (by Saul Austerlitz)

I learned about this book in Entertainment Weekly, which has now turned into a low-quality monthly magazine, which means my main source of book reviews and news has been pretty much gutted. I love(d) its mix of highbrow and lowbrow recommendations, along with pithy reviews. 

I get my litfic recs from the Tournament of Books and my sci-fi from John Scalzi's Big Idea series, but where will I find reviews of beach reads, young adult novels, women's contemporary, and nonfiction? If anyone has a good source for reviews in any of those genres, let me know, I am bereft and my library holds list is sad now.

Anyway, like many Gen X-ers (remember us? the forgotten generation?) I love Friends and was excited to read this. I wish it were in oral history format; instead it is told in very loose chronological order and has a lot of editorializing by the author. (I hate Donald Trump as much as the next person but did we really need Austerlitz's political musings? Not so much.)  I expected to tear through this like a sleeve of Thin Mints but instead it was kinda slow going.

I basically want to recapture the magic of Live from New York (the first edition only) with other shows I love, but it hasn't happened yet. 

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