Ahhhh reading! You don't have to break your wrist and spend all summer in a cast or move to Colorado to get some reading done, but if you do... here's some recommendations:
Norman Mailer – The Armies of the Night
Mailer is a fuckin legend in my world. Nobody writes literature for and about men like Mailer. (Sorry Ladies) He is brutal. He is brash. Mailer is the literary equivalent of watching Kobe Bryant drop 81 points: at a certain point you just sort of sit back, dumbfounded, wondering how someone can be so god damn good at something.
Armies retells Mailers experience in the 1967 march on the Pentagon. I honestly can’t even think of anything else to say about this book. Just read it. It will blow your mind.
Stephen King – The Shining
My local movie theatre is running the Kubrick version of this (as opposed to the SUPER GULLY late 90’s remake) in about a month so I decided to give it a whirl. Whoa. Young Steve really goes in on this one. While it is hard to shake the images of Jack as Mr. Torrance or Shelly Duval going ape and her eyes buggin out of her head, the book delves further into the family’s history as well as the history of the Overlook. (
Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72
Coming off what was for most of us the major election of our time, reading Thompson’s account of the 1972 contest between George McGovern and Dick Nixon places the ’08 election in its proper context. F&LCT72 (as it’s known in the hood) brings all of your standard Hunter antics: Tons of drinking and boge smoking, amazing Nixon bashing, and really astute insight into what makes politics work.
Roberto Bolano - The Savage Detectives
Bolano has been a bit of a trend since the NYTimes rated The Savage Detectives (Jonathan Lethem's review) one of its best books of 2008. Then 2666 dropped and bam, Bolano receives well-deserved post-humus fame. Well my friends, the hype is real. This book reminds me of a late 90's Mexican version of On the Road. Let's be real here, who doesn't love a good counter-culture bromance? Fight Club anyone?
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre
If you thought that P. Reezy wasn't going to be on this list you might be out of your gaht-damn mind. The man went out of his gourd in the 90's: 2 National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prize, and another 2 books that could just as easily have been ordained (and probably would have, except you can't give
As my good friend Oren put it, 'It's one of those books that, when you're on the train, you constantly look up out of embarrassment—because the book is so filthy and enjoyable—just to make sure there's no mind reader around you'. Boners on the train from reading... yeah buddy!
If you haven't read any Roth this is an interesting place to start. Roth at times switches between playful, well written skinemax scenes, and flexing that intellect that has made him one of the dominant minds of our time.
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