Misty water-colored memories

Maybe you’re like me. I have recently aged out of the coveted “key demo” for most advertisers, but that just means that I’ve crossed a threshold into another apparently lucrative set: Not quite old enough to feel old, but too old to sustain denial of onrushing oldness. One, shall we say, age-old strategy to deal with the terror of the onrushing void is buying stuff, and marketers are here to help. For children of the 1970s and ’80s, this is our Golden Age of nostalgia, and we can retreat (often kind of smugly, although also deservedly IMHO) into reveries of our pre-internet universe of 8-bit graphics, Cannonball Run movies, Leif Garrett/Kristy McNichol, and overlong wide-leg jeans that sucked up water to the knees when it rained. So if you’re feeling wistful about the past, here’s a list to wallow in.

Back in my day, a trip to Disneyland meant loading the beige ’81 Honda Accord with family and bags and hitting the Interstate for 2,000 miles, stopping only for Thunderbird motels, Grand Slam breakfasts, and rest stop bathrooms. We had no GPS or cockpit DVD players; we had Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II on the Grundig tape deck, Dynamite magazine, and backseat car-sickness. There was no point in asking Are we there yet? because we so obviously weren’t. Richard Ratay remembers. Don’t Make Me Pull Over re-creates the halcyon days of family road trips, with all tacky tourist traps, endless highway, and terrible food that made them so great.

I am a child of the ’70s, and for me, the years before I became burdened with job/girls/nuclear holocaust-based insomnia were filled with the Six-Million Dollar Man, Evel Knievel, baseball cards, and Gilligan’s Island reruns. If you can relate to any or all of that last paragraph (and it’s perfectly understandable if you can’t) imagine it extended to over 300 pages. Sting-Ray Afternoons—Steve Rushin’s memoir of the Golden Age of candy cigarettes, sugar on your grapefruit, and Nixon on the TV—is an exhaustively thorough, exuberant recollection of growing up in the Me Decade. It’s the best kind of nostalgia: celebratory yet clear-eyed, wistful but not overly sentimental.

Man of the Year calls itself a “memoir,” but it reads more like Portnoy’s Complaint via Gary Shteyngart: In 1978, 12-year-old Lou Cove preoccupies himself with the standard boy-tweener obsessions of girls and bullies, when a friend of his father’s—handsome Howie Gordon—descends on his house with a plan to become the “next Burt Reynolds.” Phase One is already complete: Howie is Playgirl magazine’s Mr. November. Phase Two: Become Man of Year, with Lou as his campaign manager. Here’s a book engineered to appeal most to readers who came of age in the ’70s themselves, for whom Lou’s experience seems horribly, wonderfully familiar. Perhaps you’re one of them?

The Impossible Fortress is a coming-of-age story tucked inside a love letter to that strange and wonderful decade. The novel is set in 1987 when computer games had only recently entered our homes, Jolt cola was still a thing, and Playboy magazine had countless 14-year-old boys across the country trying to get their hands on a copy of the Vanna White issue. Billy Martin and his two best friends are three such boys, and their pursuit of the epic magazine leads them to the local office supply store, computer whiz Mary Zelinsky, and a hero’s quest to save a princess—all of it with a 1980s mix tape running in the background.

Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, Volume One is a book for every Star Wars-obsessed kid with an insatiable appetite for every scrap of merch produced a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. That is to say, most kids. If you were one of them, this volume, with its presentation of the fronts and backs of all 330 cards and 55 stickers, will send you through a wormhole, taking you back to the time when Darth Vader’s true identity was somehow not obvious (when “Darth” was actually his first name) and back yards everywhere were strewn with the debris of homemade lightsabers. It’s also a much less expensive than rebuilding your collection discarded sometime after the Battle of Endor.

If there’s a pantheon of late-night cable TV movies watched by teenage boys with one hand on the premium channel switch—poised to flip back to the vanilla fantasy fulfillment of Mr. Roarke at the first hint of parental interlopers—it includes Animal House, Porky’s, and one classic tale of golf and warfare: one pitting snobs against slobs, and one man’s battle against the animal kingdom. Chris Nashawaty’s Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, dives into the deep end to present tales of candy bars in the swimming pool, robot gophers, and the film’s inimitable cast of weirdoes, all in the context of the comedy and iconoclasm of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction is the definitive-for-all-time survey of ’70s and ’80s mass market pulp. Hundreds of titles—many featuring grinning skulls, glowing-eyed children, or ventriloquist’s dummies on tuxedo-black covers—are summarized, critiqued, and conveniently organized by subject matter. It can’t have been easy, but Hendrix is no stranger to the eldritch, and he’s up to the task. Where does one file Rabid, wherein “a small dog moves into a loving home and a living bomb explodes in madness, agony, and death!”? That goes in Chapter Three, “When Animals Attack,” along with Squelch (caterpillar horror), and Crabs: The Human Sacrifice.

Though it’s enjoying a resurgence of popularity, in the ’70s and early ’80s. Yacht Rock was enjoyed entirely without irony. It was a time of wide-open water and wide-open collars, of golden sunsets and golden chains. Boatloads of milky-voiced white guys filled the charts and airwaves, spinning non-threatening odes to special lovely ladies, light innuendo sung over light grooves. The age of Kenny Loggins, Loggins & Messina, and a man called Boz. How did this happen? Greg Prato goes straight to the sources for answers. Through interviews with its demigods—Loggins, Christopher Cross, John Oates, Daryl “The Captain” Dragon, and more—The Yacht Rock Book explores the Y.R. universe from its inception and mellow rise to its recent revival.