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My favourite books
I've never made it to the end of Richard Farina's Been down so long it looks like up to me, despite trying many times. Anyway, I still know it's one of my favourites. It's a very deep book. I've got a very old copy that my Mum found in a second hand bookshop with no dust jacket. This is the current paperback cover.
The novel is based mainly on his college experiences and travels and takes place in the American West, in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution and at an upstate New York university. The book is a cult classic among those who follow sixties and counterculture literature.
Aside from being a very good read I am mentioning The Doors Of Perception here because my copy is so very old, and incredibly valuable to me. The Doors of Perception is a 1954 book by Aldous Huxley giving his experiences when taking mescaline. It is considered to be one of the more profound studies of the effects of mind-expanding drugs and what they teach about how the mind works.
In terms of drugged out trippy writing though it's also worth mentioning Tom Wolf's The Cool Aid Acid Test.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream the novel by Hunter S. Thompson is a fictionalized account of his coverage of the Mint 400 motocross race for Sports Illustrated magazine in 1971. Everyone should read it. Absolutely everyone. I like to think it's not really fiction.
I don't know why, possibly because this page has been here for so many years, but I get an awful load of people hot linking to the pictures on this page. I'm afraid that I confront this by periodically changing my file names and replacing the originals with a copy of the cover of Hitler's Mein Kampf. I get a perverse pleasure from this.
Junkie (also titled with the alternative spelling, Junky) is a semi-autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs. First published in 1953, it was Burroughs' first published novel and has come to be considered a seminal text on the lifestyle of heroin addicts in the early 1950s. Junky is my favourite book. I just keep finding myself re-reading it. It is a very gritty statement of what it means to be an addict.
Howl is a poem by poet Allen Ginsberg. It is considered to be one of the principle works of the Beat Generation along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch.
I'm a luddite when it comes to poetry, but Howl really is something else.
Here's a cool story for you... I attended a poetry reading at the Albert Hall with my Mum when I was about 15. Allen Ginsberg gave a reading of some of his work. At one stage when someone else was on stage Ginsberg sat in the audience a few rows in front of us. My Mum tapped him on the shoulder and said "do you remember me?" "Sure..." he replied. She was referring back to the original beat days when he first visited London and had nowhere to sleep... and he stayed with my Mum!
On The Road ought to top anyone's Kerouac bookpile, but my copy of Dharma Bums is the early Pan version, hence the cover shown here.The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet, essayist and Buddhist Gary Snyder. The book largely concerns duality in Kerouac's life and ideals, examining the relationship that the outdoors, mountaineering, hiking and hitchhiking through the West with his "city life" of jazz clubs, poetry readings, and drunken parties. I have to admit that my opinions of JK have been tarnished by all the biographies of him and Neal Cassady I've read. Sometimes you can know too much.
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