Boomsday Book

Couldn't really stomach this, though I did finish it. Twenty-nine year old Cassandra Devine is a PR professional and blogger who proposes a solution to the increasing Social Security debt: give Baby Boomers incentives to kill themselves by the age of seventy. She calls it "voluntary transitioning."

I loved the premise, and I'm usually all for political satire, but I just didn't care for the writing. I think this is a good example of how everyone talks in the novel:

"Ask yourself, Do you really want that douchebag Randy Jepperson in our face? I'd rather eat caterpillars off a hot sidewalk. Now look at him - Pied Piper to the just-out-of-diapers generation. He's milking this thing like a Jersey cow. His PR guy, Tucker, has his fingerprints all over the udder. The girl, Devine - she works for him. This thing's more incestuous than an Arkansas family reunion. I say get out the ten-foot pole and don't touch it."

If that's your thing, cool. It's not mine. I think my eye muscles got tired of rolling around the time Cassandra Devine says "I'm calling on every member of my generation to take their iPods out of their ears and send the U.S. government a message. Not a text message, either." Ugh.

I found myself thinking that if I lived in a world where everyone talked like characters in a Christopher Buckley novel, "voluntary transitioning" wouldn't look so bad.