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 great biography of Jim Thompson, called Savage Art by Robert Polito.
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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.
Amoral crime fiction 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 psycho running around causing mischief.
It shows 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 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.)
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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 by Bob Dylan: See the love of folk music and reading that went into making the song-writing genius.
A well-structured book, without a straight-forward chronology.
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-copyright Simon Sandall.
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Copyright 2008 ReadersVoice.com
