Reading Guide for Y2K: How The 2000's Became Everything

Short Stories or Essays

As any millennial knows, the Y2K era was a phenomenon that shaped an entire generation. From the boy bands and inflatable furniture to the rise of AOL and the looming dread of the “end of the world” as we knew it. Let’s take a step back in time and reflect on what made this era truly unique and completely unforgettable. 

Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) by Colette Shade

THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.

In Y2K, one of our most brilliant young critics Colette Shade offers a darkly funny meditation on everything from the pop culture to the political economy of the period. By close reading Y2K artifacts like the Hummer H2, Smash Mouth's "All Star," body glitter, AOL chatrooms, Total Request Live, and early internet porn, Shade produces an affectionate yet searing critique of a decade that started with a boom and ended with a crash.

In one essay Colette unpacks how hearing Ludacris's hit song "What's Your Fantasy" shaped a generation's sexual awakening; in another she interrogates how her eating disorder developed as rail-thin models from the collapsed USSR flooded the pages of Vogue; in another she reveals how the McMansion became an ominous symbol of the housing collapse.
 

To Drink 

Cosmopolitan

Thanks to a little known TV sensation, “Sex and the City,” THE drink of the 2000s was the cosmopolitan. It was sophisticated and feminine, fruity and sweet, easy to make, and was associated with the perfect girls night out. 

 Of course, if a pink cosmopolitan isn’t your style, another popular drink of the Y2K era is the classic appletini. This bright green, sweet drink fit right in with the cocktail culture of the times, where everyone wanted something bright and tasty served in a martini glass. The best part of an appletini, however, is that it is just as delicious as a non-alcoholic mocktail.

Appletini Mocktail

Ingredients

Granulated sugar for rim

¼ cup fresh pressed apple juice

½ tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 tablespoon simple syrup

Apple slices for garnish

Ice 

Directions

Step 1. Fill cocktail shaker with ice, apple juice, simply syrup, and lemon juice. Shake well until chilled and mixed.

Step 2. Rim glass with sugar.

Step 3. Strain shaker into glass, garnish, and enjoy.

To Cook

If you were learning to cook in the 2000s, or were just a busy adult in need of a 30-minute meal, then you know your way around a Rachel Ray recipe. The food sensation rose to stardom during the Y2K era, but is still sharing her recipes and cooking tips today in her latest book. 

This Must Be the Place: Dispatches & Food from the Home Front by Rachel Ray

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Rachael Ray presents 125+ recipes straight from her home kitchen in upstate New York, with personal stories on loss, gratitude, and the special memories that make a house a home.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOOD NETWORK

"I wanted to write this book because for the first time in my fifty-two years, everyone on the planet was going through the same thing at the same time. We were all feeling the same fear, heartsickness, worry, and sadness, but due to the nature of the virus, it was hard to connect. I connect through cooking, and I noticed that's what many others were doing as well. We took to the kitchen to share something of ourselves--and cooking became the discipline, diversion, and devotion that got us through."

You may think you know Rachael Ray after decades of TV appearances and dozens of books, but 2020 changed us all and it changed her, too--her life and her direction. During the early months of the pandemic in upstate New York, far away from her New York City television studio, Rachael Ray and her husband, John, went to work in their home kitchen hosting the only cooking show on broadcast TV. 
 

A Tragic Account 

The early 2000s were fraught with tragedies and natural disasters. One of the most devastating was the 2004 tsunami that ravaged countries all along the Indian Ocean. Read a first hand account of the disaster by survivor Sonali Deraniyagala.

 Wave: A Memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST - One woman's searing account of losing her entire family in a tsunami.

"The most exceptional book about grief I've ever read.... As unsparing as they come, but also defiantly flooded with light.... Extraordinary." --Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century

In 2004, at a beach resort on the coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala and her family--parents, husband, sons--were swept away by a tsunami. Only Sonali survived to tell their tale. This is her account of the nearly incomprehensible event and its aftermath.
 

If you like Y2K, then you’ll enjoy:

Set during the 2000s

Set during the Y2K era, this coming of age story follows two young adults as they figure out what “adulting” really means. Full of the nostalgia of life as a twenty something combined with the witty humor of the era, The Rachel Incident will take you back to a time when life was big and complicated and full of new experiences.   

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A USA TODAY BESTSELLER - A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three - "O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." --People

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it's love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred's glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
 

Best-seller of the 2000s

If there was one book that everyone read in the 2000s, it was The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. This bestselling novel was always at the top of book club reading lists, showcased on library and bookstore displays, and the book all the women in the airport were reading during their flight. For a real piece of Y2K nostalgia, grab a gently worn copy of this modern classic.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.