What are you reading?

[ytowndan]

The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson

If you enjoy his novels I highly recommend this one.   It's out of print but I found a reasonably priced used one.  I think I paid 30 plus shipping.

[emay]

I enjoyed fear and loathing and rum diary. I still don't see what Fear and Loathing has to do with the American Dream...getting fucked up and going on wild and crazy rampages?

[ucusty]

nice cookbook since thats really all I read nowadays...  check it out
"Happy in the Kitchen"

[gainesvillegreen]

finished The Road by McCarthy.
very sparse and very bleak.
but good!
not the dense, beautiful masterpiece that was Blood Meridian, but still excellent.

now i'm reading Against The Day, the new Pynchon novel.
it's loooong. and kind of all over the place. we'll see...

Nice!  McCarthy has gone spare, and while I don't think it worked in No Country For Old Men it damn sure worked in The Road.  In a word, distilled.

I, too, am wading my way through Pynchon (about 700 pages in) and it is like falling down an elevator shaft.
I always try to read two at a time, so the other right now is Don DeLillo's Americana.

[ytowndan]

I enjoyed fear and loathing and rum diary. I still don't see what Fear and Loathing has to do with the American Dream...getting fucked up and going on wild and crazy rampages?

This one is kind of like a somewhat tamed fear and loathing, but in Hawaii.  Its not quite as crazy as F&L but a bit more on the edge than rum dairy. 

Rum Diary is still my favorite "novel" of his.  Can't wait for the movie...

[Guyute]

Nice!  McCarthy has gone spare, and while I don't think it worked in No Country For Old Men it damn sure worked in The Road.  In a word, distilled.

I, too, am wading my way through Pynchon (about 700 pages in) and it is like falling down an elevator shaft.
I always try to read two at a time, so the other right now is Don DeLillo's Americana.

I like the 2 at a time idea.  You don't find you get distracted by them?

[gainesvillegreen]

I like the 2 at a time idea.  You don't find you get distracted by them?

No, I don't get distracted.  I think it is a carry over from college and having to read multiple Philosophy texts at the same time (from different eras, disciplines, etc...).

Because of the length of Against The Day it makes the need to read something else more acute.  The one book, Americana or whatever the case may be, forces me to take a break from Against The Day which is a good thing. 

[rowjimmy]

I tend to keep one bok in my bag for my commute and another by my bed for reading @ home.

[sophist]

I enjoyed fear and loathing and rum diary. I still don't see what Fear and Loathing has to do with the American Dream...getting fucked up and going on wild and crazy rampages?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_loathing_in_las_vegas

Major themes

The book was an attempt to place the radical activism and drug culture of the 1960s into the context of what was the mainstream American experience at the time. It explores the idea that 1971 was a turning point in hippie and drug culture in America, when the countercultural movement no longer had momentum and its innocence and optimism of the late 1960s turned to cynicism.

Throughout the novel, the main characters go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy symbols of American consumerism and excess. Much of Las Vegas is used to symbolize the ugliness of mainstream American culture, to which the characters give little respect. In the DVD commentary of his film version of the novel, Director Terry Gilliam characterizes these actions as a theme of anarchism.

Some have suggested that the book's themes resemble those of The Great Gatsby, which deals with the state of the American Dream and the lives of the rich and careless. Others have surmised that the white Cadillac Journalist Raoul Duke drives (referred to as the "White Whale" in the book) is an allusion to the white whale in Moby Dick, symbolically representative of good and evil and a metaphor for elements of life that are out of people's control.

[edit] The "wave speech"

The "wave speech" is an important passage that appears about a third of the way through the novel, at the end of the eighth chapter (although the same "speech" is given toward the middle of the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Thompson considered the "wave speech" to be "probably the finest thing I've ever written." It tries to capture the zeitgeist of the hippie era, and the way it came to an end.
"    San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

wikipedia does a better job of explaining the answer to your question than I can.

[rowjimmy]

And Terry Gilliam did as good a job as is humanly possible in making it a film.

I just got the Criterion Collection DVD and it is amazing.

[rowjimmy]

On topic:
Just started reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Never read it before but, I remember enjoying the mini-series.

[cactusfan]

On topic:
Just started reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Never read it before but, I remember enjoying the mini-series.

that's really a great read. way better than the miniseries, as one would expect.

and speaking of mcmurtry and movies, the movie The Last Picture Show, based on one of his books, is a masterpiece i highly recommened.

[susep]

Catch A Fire - The Life of Bob Marley by Timothy White

Its ok so far but the Author's style is a bit dry in that he over intellectualizes everything.

[rowjimmy]

I found that to be be the case, also.

[rowjimmy]

I just read a great little book that my Wife brought home from work (she works @ the local library):

The Crane Wife as retold by 'Odds Bodkins'


This is a retelling of the Japanese folk tale that The Decemberists are telling in "The Crane Wife pt 1-3" on their album of the same name.
I just read it to my daughter... totally beautiful.

http://www.amazon.com/Crane-Wife-Odds-Bodkin/dp/0152163506