10 books to crimp your hair to

For those of you nursing a nostalgia for 1980’s Britain: get out your acid-wash jeans and slap bracelets, because Andy McSmith over at the Guardian wants to give you a refresher course in Gen-X literature. Sez McSmith:

Each decade leaves its imprint on the memory. Images from the 1980s suggest a time of excitement and bustle – Live Aid, Princess Diana, the Falklands War, mass pickets outside Rupert Murdoch's new Wapping plant, testosterone-driven yuppies doing frenetic trade on the floor of a deregulated stock market, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall coming tumbling down, apartheid in its final throes. The western world saw more social change in those 10 years than in any other decade since the war.

And with it, more literary treasures than you could shake a lightsaber at:

In the bookshops, you could find some very good books firmly located in the 1980s which dealt with topics like the rise of Thatcher or the causes of the Brixton riots, but equally there was escapist fiction or interesting non-fiction that took out of everyday life. Not a year passed without something new and memorable landing on the shelves.

The year-by-year list includes Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams, and Lord Scarman—find it here!