A club 30 rip off. Hehehe...
Thought it might be interesting to find out whether SC members
read at all. If yes, what are your favourite titles?
I'll start.
My favourite book: The Rum Diary by hunter thompson.
The grandpap of gonzo said, that The Rum Diary would "in a
twisted way . . . do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun
Also Rises did for Spain.
The story involves a journalist named Paul Kemp, who moves from
New York to work for a small newspaper, The Daily News, in
San Juan, Puerto Rico. Set in the late 1950s, the novel
encompasses a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent
alcoholic lust among the American expatriates who staff the
newspaper.
Thompson himself traveled from New York to San Juan in 1960 to
write for an ill-fated sports newspaper on the island. Thompson had
unsuccessfully applied to work at the larger English-language daily
called the San Juan Star while novelist William J.
Kennedy was the editor.
While in Puerto Rico, Thompson befriended many of the writers at
the Star, providing the context for The Rum
Diary's fictional storyline.
Although Thompson was only 22 when he wrote the story, it deals
extensively with a fear of “going over the hill” and growing old.
The prominent characters are typical of Thompson's work; violent,
maniacal and alcoholic, stumbling through life. It is written in a
highly paced and rather exciting style, also typical of his
work.
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An excerpt:
“Yeamon was familiar too…He was probably twenty-four or
five and he reminded me of myself at that age - not exactly the way
I was, but the way I might have seen myself if I had stopped to
think about it. Listening to him I realized how long it had
been since I’d felt like I had the world by the balls, how many
quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I
was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made
me feel like a roaring champion.
I hadn’t felt that way in a long time. Perhaps in
the ambush of those years, the idea that I was a champion had been
shot out from under me. But I remembered it now and it made
me feel old and slightly nervous that I had done so little in so
long a time.”
