For me, if its summer, that means three things: The Jersey Shore, yard-sailing and phoning it in on my blog with easy breezy posts like my second annual summer reading list. Your average summer reading list is typically equal parts bourgeois banality and elitist snobbery which is a fancy way of saying they're fucking shit. Nobody reads the books on them or at least nobody wants too. They just feel an obligation to so they can brag about being an intellectual without the inconvenience of actually trying to fucking learn something you're not told to learn by an authority figure, be it your fifth grade teacher or Time magazine.
So this years list is all short, sweet and weird. That doesn't mean everything here is for everyone. But if you consider yourself to be a freak and/or radical such as myself then I'm pretty sure I got you covered. None of this shit is new. I don't really give a fuck about new. But it's all still relevant and its all still fun if your fucked up enough to enjoy it.
Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell
The amazing thing about George Orwell's 1949 sci-fi classic about doomed lovers in a dystopian police state isn't that it's still relevant after all these years. The amazing thing is that it seems to become increasingly relevant with each passing year (Samsung recently came out with the first Telescreen). It's also the first novel I ever loved and it just gets creepier every time I read it.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
The only thing more revolting than the horrors of Room 101 is how happily its victims assimilate to their imprisonment once they've been rat-caged. Even our dear hero Winston Smith comes to love Big Brother in the heady afterglow of wartime. Sound familiar? If not, your on the wrong blog.
What Uncle Sam Really Wants By Noam Chomsky
This little book was the first thing that really ripped the wool from my eyes in regards to America's roll in the universe. In only a few dozen pages the venerable MIT Professor systematically decimates the premise of America as the benevolent superpower. Using an exhaustingly sourced patchwork of documents, NGO reports and eye-witness accounts, Noam Chomsky proves without a shadow of a doubt that American foreign policy is dictated by an overwhelming preference for death squads, dictators, torture and genocide. If your not a card carrying, bomb throwing, enemy of the state by the last page then congratulations! You're a psychopath! You should fit right into this fucked up country.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
More of a lowlight than a highlight, but the harrowing first hand story of an American nun, raped and tortured by a death squad in El Salvador, only to be released after the squads unseen, American English speaking Commander realized she wasn't a local still fucking haunts me. Absolutely soul Shattering....Having fun yet! Were just getting started.
Fight Club By Chuck Palahniuk
" I am Comrade Hermit's yammering larynx." Chuck Palahniuk's twisted tale of an insomniac who starts an underground boxing club with his enigmatic split personality that evolves into an anarcho-primitivist terrorist organization is often snubbed by uptight literati as little more than a Gen-X Catcher in the Rye. As usual, the snobs in the straight world couldn't be farther from the truth. It's actually a brutal, homoerotic, satire on what passes for masculinity in Post-Modern America and it's also one of the funniest books you'll ever read if you don't make the common mistake of taking it too seriously.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
Everything that comes out of Marla Singer's vile mouth is priceless, "You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger." But my favorite bit is the back and forth between the nameless narrator and god in the mental institution " across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him" ending with the classic one-liner "Yeah. Well, whatever. You can't teach god anything." Ain't it the truth.
Against Empire By Michael Parenti
An excellent companion piece to What Uncle Sam Really Wants. America's finest Marxist historian, Michael Parenti, makes a quick and compelling argument against the empty promises of hyper-interventionism and corporate globalization.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
Parenti's analysis of George H.W. Bush's '92 campaign visit to a supermarket, where the incumbent presidential candidate is shocked by the "new" technology of the check-out price scanner, as being emblematic of America's vast class divide is as prescient today as it was then. When a man who clearly hasn't even had to shop for his own groceries in decades can still tax a pauper you know we're ripe for revolution and that was Nineteen fucking Ninety-Two. Our current president could fucking buy Bush Sr. like a goddamn bicycle on Craig's List.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas By Hunter S. Thompson
If it's a novel then it's my favorite novel. If it's a work of non-fiction then it's my favorite work of non-fiction. Either way, whatever the hell it is, the late, great, Doctor Thompson's savage, drug fueled journey into the dark heart of the American Dream aka Las Vegas is the number one reason why I write anything....You know, aside from the war and oppression and shit.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
Thompson's rightfully sainted Wave Speech halfway through the book is not only the finest thing he ever wrote but is quite possibly the finest thing ever written. A poetic requiem for the promise and tragedy of the counter-cultural revolution that was the Middle Sixties in California. It's enough to bring a tear to even the most jaded anarcho-punk's eye.
Hard Boiled By Frank Miller
Frank Miller's bug-fuck nuts, ultra-violent, dystopian, shooting fest is basically one long, excruciatingly detailed, gun fight and one of my all-time favorite graphic novels. It's basically like Where's Waldo with blood, guts, skyscrapers, flying cars and homicidal cyborgs. I can't honestly tell you much about the story-line other than it involves an insurance investigator named Nixon who discovers that, unbeknownst to him, he's also a robotic hitman for a major corporation, but it's one wild fucking ride regardless.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
The whole goddamn thing! Like I said, it's basically just one long bloodbath and it's fucking perfect. The kind of illustrated madness that could only come from the early Nineties.
The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
I know, I know, not exactly a crowd pleaser, especially with some of my more libertarian minded dearest motherfuckers, but just try reading the first section aloud on the Fourth of July, surrounded by bombs and stale jingoism, and tell me it doesn't give you chills. No? Well maybe it's just me but on the right night, in the right light, it sounds like a godless prayer for the damned classes of a late capitalist society. You can almost hear the Internationale playing from the smokey abyss like the Karaoke music of a distant haunted cruise ship. Still nothing? well, fuck you guys then.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
The first section, the finest and most bombastically poetic analysis of class struggle ever committed to pulp, is really the only section worth reading. The other two are sadly little more than sniping bitch-fests lobbed against Marx's former allies in the libertarian left. Just think Mean Girls with a bunch of bearded, old, European socialists and you basically get the picture.
Less Than Zero By Bret Easton Ellis
"Everyone's afraid to merge in L.A." Bret Easton Ellis is probably my favorite novelist and the fact that he wrote this book, his best selling debut, at twenty-one never ceases to blow my mind like a job. Nothing captures the soulless hedonism of the Beverley Hills elite like Less Than Zero, Where every character comes across like a board sociopath out of ants to burn. It's like Keeping Up with the Kardashians directed by Werner Herzog. You'll never merge again.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
Clay's flashbacks to his summers spent in the lonesome desert surrounding his grandparents Palm Beach mansion read like ghost stories of a haunted childhood. I don't think anybody has come closer to capturing the grief of burgeoning adulthood better on the written page. The humanity revealed beneath his nihilistic facade only in the past tense make the increasingly heinous events in his current life all the more harrowing.
Addicted to War By Joel Andreas
American Imperialism has never been this much fun! Joel Andreas' classic adult picture book on America's long and bloodthirsty history of hegemonic conquest, from Manifest Destiny to the War on Terror, comes across like Schoolhouse Rock for anarchists. It's the funnest way to learn that you live in a monster.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
The first edition of Addicted to War came out in 1991 in response to the first Persian Gulf War and it's stinging coverage of that often glossed over desert bloodbath is second to none and more relevant now than ever considering that that bloodbath continues to this day, 26 years later.
Howl and Other Poems By Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg's obscenely beautiful tribute to all the freaks, fags, junkies, commies, hustlers and basket cases who crashed and burned during the grey flannel drudgery of the Forties and Fifties in order to make the liberation of the Sixties possible. Forgotten martyrs in an invisible war. Ginsberg lays their bodies blemished and bare and anoints them with the sacrament of the finest poetry of this or any other century. Bow to the master, dearest motherfuckers, for if you consider yourself to be among the freaks and radicals that make this world worth fighting for, then Mr. Ginsberg is your shaman, the only priest you'll ever need, and Howl is your Apostles Creed.
Highlight (spoiler alert)
As exquisite as Howl is, my personal favorite work of poetry is actually America, which can be found in the Other Poems section. A Hilarious one sided conversation between an irate malcontent and a mute and remorseless nation state, America is one of the single biggest influences on this equally irate blog and the genderfuck malcontent who writes it.
Well that's it, dearest motherfuckers. That's my list of fantastically deranged and totally inappropriate books. The kind your teachers fought to ban and your finest fake news outlets do their damnedest to ignore. If ten books in one summer is to few for you then your clearly either smarter than me or you have more free time. Either way, I hate you and you can go fuck yourself....Or just check out last years more exhausting and obscure list. I would talk more but I still have a chapter of a book on the Weather Underground that I've been trying to finish for three weeks now.
Happy reading and Merry Summer.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: Albums to listen to while reading these books.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Greatest Fits By Ministry
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
Bedtime For Democracy By Dead Kennedys
Fight Club
Doolittle By The Pixies
Against Empire
Raw Power By The Stooges
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Clouds Taste Metallic By The Flaming Lips
Hard Boiled
(Album) Generic Flipper By Flipper
The Communist Manifesto
Pink Flag By Wire
Less Than Zero
Pretty Hate Machine By Nine Inch Nails
Addicted to War
Combat Rock By The Clash
Howl and Other Poems
The Velvet Underground By The Velvet Underground
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