Yes, I'm going to America and yes I'm super excited (two weeks! LA, WTF!) But of late, maybe subconsciously, but more because they'd presented themselves as good deals at op shops and car-boot sales in the Wairarapa I've been reading, almost entirely, since 2010 began (maybe even before - I think one was perhaps a Christmas gift even) novels relating to the condition of people, the economy and, um, animals in the good(?) old U.S of A. And so here are the guys that I've read, and I guess semi-reviews - completely biased and stuff though - on them.
1) Junky William S Burroughs
While I'm yet to fully 'get' the beat writers - except for Bukowski because I get the feeling that he just totally lived the life that everyone else from that generation professes to have tried out but sort of didn't (I guess he was the most real deal) - Junky was probs my fave to date - yes, I liked it more than On the Road. Honest, street level and quick and mean like those '50's poets were meant to be, it's got none of the self-obsession and fraught intellectual undertones that dominate his poetry - although that, don't get me wrong, has it's own merits. Boom, wanna know what the taking and peddling of narcotics was like for young dudes who'd been stricken from all Doctors and therefore couldn't get pharmaceutical scripts filled was? Read this book!
2) Eating Animals Jonathan Safron Foer
Bought this book for three reasons: had been emailed a 40% voucher for Borders, the cover is bright green with amazing typography and, well, it was by Jonathan Safron Foer. Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are two of my favourite books of all time - which I guess makes Saffron-Foer my favourite novelist, yes? - and I kind of purchased this with that lineage in mind. Do not buy it for these reasons. Buy Eating Animals because it's a journalistic account of the factory farming industry in the States and weights all the opinions, options and truths out into a, um, digestable context that contains all the quirky anecdotes (like a double page spread bequeathed to a box describing the amount of room a factory farmed chicken has for its short life) Safron Foer is notorious for. I'm a meat eater, he's not. But this book doesn't argue for or against vegetarianism. It argues that the ethical, environmental and even economic consequences of devouring the amount of meat in the way Americans (and to a lesser extent the rest of the world I imagine) do is not sustainable, and we should sort our shit (literally, eww) out.
3) The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald
I guess Fitzgerald is heralded as the dude that first diarized the contemporary American condition in an economic-social sense yes? Well this book rules for doing just that. So subtle and voueristic in the way it delves, from the perspective of an outsider, into the goings-on of wealthy people's lives and how, really, boredom and money corrupt absolutely. Has anything changed since 1925?
4) The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe
A) Should have read this directly after The Great Gatsby as it eloquently follows the lineage that Fitzgerald created and is pretty much same motto, different day.
B) Did not realise that Tom Wolfe was so significant for pioneering a new genre of journalism that he is likened to Hunter S Thompson and deservedly so. His books are excessively researched, elegantly and engagingly written pieces of historical insight and so it would seem, The Bonfire of the Vanities is my first step down a road of amazing American discovery. Pumped! I'm totally gonna read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in airports across the United States in a few weeks time!
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