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And his best book by far was Hells Angels. Followed by a tie between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the one about the McGovern Campaign.

I think the most attractive and memorable short books that spring to mind are:

1. Fear, Thich Nhat Hanh, helps you cope with anything

2. The Stranger, Camus, Nihilism/Stoicism

3. The old man and the sea, Hemmingway

Fantastic letter. Never read anything of his, just saw Fear and Loating, so didn't really know he had this depth.

Thank you for that.

My favorites: 9. Doctype Decoration , 16. Fear Driven Development - very common these days , 20. Ninja Comments - classic!, 22. Protoduction - Hilarious! , 27. Mad Girlfriend Bug

Along that same line, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pretty good movie at warning that playing it fast and loose with recreational drugs beyond alcohol can have you end up with a very bad time

Barbarian Days probably, it was recommended on here as on from Obama's reading list. I love the sea and surf and it brought back memories of travelling.

From last year (but even more relevant this year), Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh. I must have read it over 20 times when I was going through hard times.

If you're intending to follow this advice, don't start with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's a great story, but doesn't really capture gonzo journalism. Gonzo, perhaps, but not journalism. Hell's Angels or Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1972) are much better starting points.

I think it's the price for eBooks. A good example is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Kindle - $15

Paperback (new) - $10

Paperback (used) - $6

Paperback (library) - Free

The Kindle version is a significant premium and I don't think there is a matching convenience factor. It's unfortunate that is the case because I'm sure it'd be a lot more eco-friendly and efficient to distribute ebooks.

If you enjoy this, please try "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" from the same Director.

This list is somewhat dated. After looking through the editor's top 100, many of these are indeed very good. However, a cursory glance through the 'Readers' list reveals some strange/unexpected list members, that might suggest strange/skewed sample population.

Things that immediately stood out as different:

- 3 Rand books in the top 6? Really?

- 2 Scientology / Anti Psychology books near the top (#2, #11)

A look at the fiction list reveals the same bias:

Top 10 from the 'Novels List'

  ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
  THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
  BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
  1984 by George Orwell
  ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
  WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
  MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

There are still gems in these lists, I'm just surprised that many of these made the list, especially some of the high ranking ones. Something seems off.

I used to speed read fiction. I found that I would get a couple pages ahead of my understanding. As I aged, I realized that understanding a few books deeply is much more important than understanding a lot of books superficially.

Why read Hunter S. Thomson if you can't pull out the few awesome lines. When I raced through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I missed "And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back"

How many more of these did I miss? And this isn't even deep literature.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for those who are ignorant as I.

Aldous Huxley, dying of terminal cancer, took LSD on his deathbed, and died while on his final trip (it was planned that way), although a relatively low dose of 100ug.

It seems to me like it would be a good way to go, a good way to conquer the fear of the unknown after you die.

In a related experience, once when I was on a bender, I took 3 tabs of lsd, along with a whole plethora of other substances. I actually thought I was dead for a while, and strangely enough, I felt OK about it. I saw some pretty weird shit on that trip, it was the most mindblowing experience of my life, and not one I'm about to repeat in a hurry, it honestly wasn't that fun. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not an instruction manual.

But then I sobered up. I really think that Hunter S Thompson was right: it's all bullshit. You're not connecting to another plane of existence or getting in touch with your ancestors. You're just fucked on drugs. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not spiritual.

He really nailed it in Fear and Loathing:

> All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.

From (1) Fear of Macros ( this is from someone that mainly program in racket, not my personal opinion)

But the moment I stepped past routine pattern-matching, I kind of fell off a cliff into a terminology soup. I marinaded myself in material, hoping it would eventually sink in after enough re-readings. I even found myself using trial and error, rather than having a clear mental model what was going on. Gah.

(1) https://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/all.html

My personal opinion: I think racket is more an ivory tower for researcher, many for northwest university. “PLT” refers to the group that is the core of the Racket development team. PLT consists of numerous people distributed across several different universities in the USA.

As I am getting older I should prefer some middle ground between racket and go. Hygienic macros are difficult to understand in this context, that is I don't want to buy the power of hygienic macros, it is over sold.

Anyway, I admire Mattew Flatt efforts in compilation tecniques and the author of Beautiful Racket.

Overall I read a mix of some sci-fi, business type books, and a little Clancy mixed in.

1. Fear - Bob Woodward (did not actually get too far before dropping it)

2. Radical Candor - Kim Malone Scott (interesting)

3. Black & Decker Complete Guide to Wiring (VERY helpful during my home renovation, did most of my electrical)

4. Pitch Perfect - Bill McGowan (helpful for communication)

5. Quantum Thief/Fractal Price/Causal Angel [Jean le Flambeur series] - Hannu Rajaniemi (I enjoyed the first book in this trilogy the best, the third was too difficult for me to understand! Very hard Sci-fi)

6. Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (enjoyed the audio production from BBC radio)

7. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories - Ken Liu (enjoyed several of the short stories very much)

8. Revelation Space/Chasm City/Redemption Ark/Absolution Gap - Alastair Reynolds (love the series but it is long!)

9. Executive Orders - Tom Clancy (not my favorite Clancy book but still fun)

10. Rainbow Six - Tom Clancy (also not my favorite Clancy book, a little more fun than Executive Orders though)

While waiting for the next Game of Thrones book I picked up a few new series that I really enjoyed! I hope to get a few new suggestions out of this list.

The Expanse - James Corey

Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds

Broken Earth - NK Jemisin

Three Body Problem - Liu Cixin (translated: Ken Liu)

> In the case of, say, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” you sort of want Hunter S. Thompson to just keep doing drugs, if only so he’ll see more giant lizards.

In the very first paragraph, the author makes abundantly clear that he experienced a major whoosh while reading one of the greatest American novels and drug sagas of all time.

The "Fear and Loathing" books were only about giant lizards, Richard Nixon, or LSD on the thinnest of surfaces - the author needs to re-read.

> What most drug books don’t do is make the reader, upon closing the book, feel as though he or she really ought to think more seriously about experimenting with drugs.

Really? The Invisible Landscape? Food of the Gods? The Human Encounter With Death? The Doors of Perception? The Spirit Molecule? PIKAL: A Love Story?

What exactly is the author reading? Of all the classic "drug books," the only one I can think of that matches the author's description is Be Here Now, which the author does not mention.

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I'm not sure, after reading this review, whether I'm more or less inclined to read Clune's book - probably less.

In this review, such as it is, Lewis-Kraus makes the (sadly still common) mistake of assuming that the reader has an identical understanding of what a "drug" is, and that the category of "drugs" is well-defined and discrete. Are LSD and heroin in the same category of thing? Is sugar in this same category?

It seems useless in this context to compare a book about the highs of heroin with other books that happen to feature "drugs" in completely different contexts or as metaphorical devices.

Reading this, I learned nothing except that pharmacological contrivances still have a grip on the editorial 'we.'

Heinlein is obviously wrong about this, and for all his progressive and libertarian sentiments he seems to have had intensely narrow views on a few topics like drugs.

The one thing I'd say in defense of this quote is that it's from 1967. LSD had only been in major counter-culture circulation for a few years and a lot of the public advocates were people like Huxley and Leary who had produced documentary work on acid, but not major art. To a surprising degree, Heinlein was simply unlucky: acid-derived art got going right as he dismissed it.

Pet Sounds and Revolver were 1966, admittedly, but I'm not sure how well-known their association with LSD was at the time. The really famous and overt psychedelic music like Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and the Woodstock scene in general mostly hit its stride in 1968-1970.

Over in non-academic writing, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was 1968, the same year the Whole Earth Catalog got started. Fear and Loathing was 1971. P.K. Dick wrote about LSD in Palmer Eldritch in 1965, but didn't actually try it until much later. Zelazny's work has psychedelic overtones and one in-story LSD scene, but he was just getting started in '67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty much the only major piece of acid-derived fiction I can think of by 1967.

Obviously, Heinlein was wrong. But I'd be interested whether he ever followed up on this; the acid-droppers started outdistancing the squares almost immediately after he said it.

Speaking of Leary, this quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1] basically sums up my opinion and sentiment above:

> All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...

> ...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel...

> ... This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries.

I think that HST had the right idea. He was under no illusion that drugs were just a bunch of fun and that life was a carnival. Of course, the man killed himself at 67, so I don't know if he's a great role model. In fact, he's no better than Leary, he just went over the deep end of hedonism instead.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/453917-we-are-all-wired-int...

For those not familiar with Hunter S. Thompson and looking to get an understanding of his outsize personality and cult following, I highly recommend watching the 2 movies in which Johnny Depp played his character:

* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120669/

* The Rum Diary (2011) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376136/

If you are not already a fan of Johnny Depp, these movies should do it.

I'm sure the algorithms for time stretching and the effects have been tweaked over the years, but the core principles of snipping wav files, sequencing on multiple tracks and adding parametrized effects are the same.

I'd love to see someone reconstruct some other tracks (like Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet", 1989) with readily available consumer software like Apple's GarageBand.

Having spent a lot of my youth in Louisville, I admire both men. For those that don't know, both Hunter and Ali come from Louisville. Both men had troubled youth, but that's about where the similarities end.

Hunter was forced into the military to avoid jail time and, after that, went to Columbia (TIL, apparently, he only audited classes), and to write Hell's Angels, etc.

Ali (Cassius Clay) was several years younger than Hunter, and grew up half a city away (https://goo.gl/maps/f76SJ). But, under similar, difficult circumstances. Found boxing at 12yo because he wanted to beat up a kid for stealing his bike.

I know that Hunter S. Thompson was a big fan of boxing (and football), and that he had stated Ali as a hero of his. But, I feel that it's sad and unfortunate to read something like this. It seems that Hunter spent a lot of his middle years floating in a pool. It really wasn't until they made the movie Fear and Loathing that he had a resurgence.

I can only look backwards through documentaries and commentary, but I find it quite surprising that the two only met once for an interview. Hunter was embarrassed that Ali didn't know who he was; http://bloguin.com/queensberryrules/2014-articles/when-hunte.... It just seems odd that these two people that were hugely influential (Ali more-so) during the 60s and 70s for civil rights and similar political beliefs, that they never actually met one another.