Fear and Loathing-kinds of books

Sometimes readers will discover authors like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac, and will start looking for books in a similar vein. In fact it's almost like there's an unwritten list of "cool" books that people seem to read; as though some kind of anonymous committee of old hippies, backpackers and university students got together and drew it up. Some of these books are actually worth reading; but it can take years to find out about them, so I've listed a few here.

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Fans of the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might try Danny Sugarman’s memoir, Wonderland Avenue. This is a Fear and Loathing-style book about Sugarman’s friendship with Jim Morrison, his career as the teenage manager of The Doors, and his excessive lifestyle in L.A..

The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan. Two cowboy hitmen are hired to kill a monster under a house in Oregon. Brautigan had a unique writing style, which was funny and beautiful. Other titles include Sombrero Fallout; and An Unfortunate Woman.

Post Office, by Charles Bukowski. Most of Bukowski’s novels are based on the alcoholic author’s life in L.A.. A contagious, chatty writing style, funny and fearless, with profound insights into life. Other titles include Factotum; Hollywood, and Ham on Rye.

Ask the Dust, by John Fante. An author who inspired Charles Bukowski.

Pop. 1280; and The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson. Amoral crime fiction with a sense of humor. Jim Thompson turns hard-boiled crime fiction, or pulp fiction, into literature.
There is also a good biography of Jim Thompson, called Savage Art, by Robert Polito.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. Probably the best crime writer since Chandler and Thompson, James Ellroy knows police and the history of L.A. back to front. His narrators often speak in a 1940s and ‘50s hipster lingo, which adds another dimension to his novels. An amoral writer concerned with perennial evils.

Blood Meridian; and No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. The first is a tale of 19th century Indian-hunters, featuring the diabolic Judge Holden. The second is more of a crime genre novel set in modern times, with some western elements and another psychopath running loose and causing mischief. It showed that page-turning plots and literary novels don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Fevre Dream, by George R. R. Martin. I couldn’t wait to get back to this book each day. Vampires on a Mississippi river boat, featuring a touching friendship between a vampire (who reminded me a lot of actor Julian Sands) and a river boat captain.

Tropic of Capricorn, by Henry Miller. A writer with a love of words and life, advocating self-liberation. Tropic of Capricorn, first published in Paris in 1938, is a sexually explicit novel set in 1920s New York, where the narrator works for the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. (Henry Miller worked for the Western Union Telegraph Company in New York.)
Other great novels include Tropic of Cancer, and Plexus.

Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald. Written like a travel memoir of a guy wandering around England, but also a work of fiction, the book has a haunting and nostalgic tone. He uses photos in the text, and has an interesting style: the narrator will come across a herring fisherman and then there’ll be pages of exposition about the history of herring fishing. Austerlitz is another fine novel by the same author.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. A work of “New” Journalism where the author travels with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Merry Pranksters on a psychedelic bus trip in the 1960s.

Skywriting by Word of Mouth, by John Lennon. Brilliant wordplay. Earlier books include A Spaniard in the Works, and In His Own Write.

Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. See the love of folk music and reading that went into making the song-writing genius. A well-structured book, too.

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick. Published in 1965, this science fiction novel features corporate psychics and satanic takeover artists. An author with a profound philosophical mind and wit.

Diary of a Mad Old Man, by Junichiro Tanizaki. Published in 1965, the novel is the journal of Utsugi, a 77-year-old man of refined tastes who is recovering from a stroke. Other great books include The Key. Richard Brautigan dedicated one of his novels to this author.

The Tin Drum, by Gunther Grass. The autobiography of 30-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who at age three is given a tin drum and also, disgusted at the obtuseness of the adult world, decides to stop growing. He experiences the Nazi era, all the while treasuring his tin drum.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Published in 1980, 11 years after the suicide of the author, the novel is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Ignatius J.Reilly, a slothful, intelligent 30-year-old living with his mother, sets out to get a job. Along the way he has adventures with colorful characters from the French Quarter.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. A semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl working as a guest editor at a New York fashion magazine, whose mental breakdown and suicide attempt parallel the author’s own.

Ice, by Anna Kavan. (1967) A dream-like novel about a man on a quest for a woman he sees in dreams and hallucinations, while a doomed world heads into a new ice age.

Complete Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor. A Southern Gothic writer.

Comics: Viz (the English satirical comic). Sometimes a bit hit-and-miss, occasionally puerile, yet often intelligent satire. It's also refreshingly non-partisan. Viz has taken swipes at the follies and vices, ideological and otherwise, of all kinds of people - Left, Right and anything else.
A lot of so-called satire these days is biased. It aims to degrade and destroy the opposition more than to remedy the follies and vices of all people or groups: Party A will make fun of Party B, but when someone makes fun of Party A they quickly lose their sense of humor. This sort of one-sided, selective satire is just propaganda from "ideological opportunists and moral hypocrites" to borrow a phrase. It's mundane at best. Viz puts the boot into everyone and it's a lot funnier.

Robert Crumb anthologies, like Carload O’ Comics. Autobiographical and other comics drawn in an old fashioned style. He pulls no punches with his honesty about his life and in his social criticism.

Underworld by Kaz.

Schizo by Ivan Brunetti.

Eightball by Dan Clowes. These three comics artists are some of the best comics artists of modern times, although there are a lot of other great comics artists. Fantagraphics seems to have the pick of them.

Raw. Anthologies of interesting comics, published by Penguin.

Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, by Suehiro Maruo. A grim manga about a little orphan ensnared in a traveling freak show.

Biographies: Wired, The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward. This has been criticized by some close to John Belushi, but it’s still good.

No-one Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman. The Jim Morrison story.

Dylan Thomas in America, by J.M. Brinnin. An account of the great poet’s reading tour of the U.S., up to his last days.

Poetry: French Symbolists. Many rock musicians, including Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Steve Kilbey and Patti Smith, have been greatly influenced by the French Symbolist poets. These believed that words could not adequately express reality, as the realists believed, and they sought to recreate reality through symbols to express what is seen and felt. The best-known Symbolists include Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell) and Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil).

At the risk of sounding like an old Catholic, The Bible (maybe starting with The New Testament). This also is a favorite of some rock musicians known for the quality of their lyrics. Nick Cave has a very Old Testament tone in a lot of his lyrics and in his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Steve Kilbey of The Church said the New Testament was one of his favorite books.
But besides the great language, it’s an inspiring and wise guide to living and thinking.

- copyright Simon Sandall.