Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Vintage, $12). The prose equivalent of Sympathy for the Devil. Or is it The Great Gatsby on acid? At last, I thought when I read this in college, a literary equivalent to the manic, visceral energy of rock ’n’ roll and an epitaph for the hedonistic idealism of the ’60s. As well as one of the great first lines in literature.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver (Vintage, $13). I imagine that this book was for my generation of creative writing school geeks what reading Hemingway’s In Our Time was for readers in the ’20s. Carver stripped it all down to the essentials, and taught us to hear speech in a new way.
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