Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson

The Story: Thompson and his Samoan attorney have, “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers laughers… also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls,” when they head off across the desert in a car that.. ahem… stood out.  For 200 pages they trash hotel rooms, hallucinate, run from the “pigs”, and attend a seminar for cops about drug use. You get the picture.

What I Thought: I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to like this one.  I kind of had this idea in my head that it was just popular because of the antics. It’s not. I get it.  Even through is drug-induced haze, Hunter S. Thompson was able to be witty and kind of capture what America was at that time.  I wasn’t there, so I can’t say if it is spot on, but I’ll tell you this much: it felt honest.

There were parts that made me laugh out loud.  I love how they got stoned and then got totally ballsy.  When they were intimating other people, I cracked up every time.  Good stuff.

Not sure if every edition does, but mine was illustrated by Ralph Steadman, and the pictures added so much to the book.  They were just ink-and-paper drawings, but they were amazing.  The picture of the attorney naked, throwing up in front of the hotel maid was hysterical and I even dreamed about it the next night.

Until I read this, I didn’t realize just how many tv shows/movies/books knocked off different parts of this.  The first thing that comes to mind is the part in Knocked Up where Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan take mushrooms and go see Cirque du Soleil.  Hilarious.

I think what made me want to read this was a video clip that my husband sent me on youtube of Hunter S. Thompson. I laughed until I cried a little. Enjoy.  (If you’re at work, may want to grab your headphones.  Ol’ Hunter has a dirty mouth.)

Conclusion: Maybe I would have enjoyed this more had I been alive when it was written or really into drug culture or whatever, but I managed to like it quite a bit anyway.  It’s a modern classic.  It started a whole little branch of reporting. It’s witty. It’s only like 200 pages. Read it.