Boomsday by Christopher Buckley

Bought: Spring of 1L year (2008)

Read: Relatively soon after that, during the summer after 1L year.

I bought this book based on its cover. Sad, I know. But the cover is a peak--the Boomsday is on the title page and the thick cover is the blue and yellow explosion. I had recently seen Thank You for Smoking, so this intrigued me. The description on the back cover was also interesting.

Christopher Buckley's brand of satire takes something real, and pushes it to an extreme. The scary thing is, with both this book, Supreme Courtship and the movie version of Thank You for Smoking, you can actually see much of what he write happening in the real world.

Boomsday is about what happens when all the Boomers retire, and there isn't enough money to support the social security system. Sound familiar? Well the solution that the characters in the book come up with is... well, suicide. Boomers are given incentives to off themselves around 65 or so, I think. There's a huge youth-movement political push to get this pushed through the legislature, and a Senator is elected President by telling the incumbent to "Shut the Fuck Up" (it engaged the youth vote ;-))

The one thing that Buckley seemed to fall into when I read this was running into endings. He seemed to rush from the penultimate chapter to the end very quickly, like he was given a page limit or a deadline was coming up. I felt similarly with Smoking, so I felt this might be a common problem with Buckley's books. Supreme Courtship didn't seem to suffer from this problem, though, so perhaps it was a function of the movie adaptation of Smoking, and something in Boomsday in particular. Even if this were a common failing in Buckley's books, however, I'd probably still read them all (eventually.) He's got a great wit and ability to make the world's problems seem ridiculous. That's a good thing for someone like me who often feels utter despair when thinking about these issues. While I still have difficulty thinking about many current political issues, whilst actually reading the book.

I haven't decided if I'm going to give a rating to books, because I don't have a hope that I could be consistent with it. But Buckley has been added to my list of (current) authors to seek out, alongside Zahn, Laurie R. King, and a few others.