books like fear and loathing in las vegas

I truly hope that the sports journalists Thompson encountered at the start of the Mint 400 race were as fucked as he describes in the book. It’s nothing next to Fear and Loathing, though. In comparison with a number of reviews I’ve since glanced at, I bucked the trend by enjoying it in all its flawed naivety.

The only other book by Thompson that I’ve read is The Rum Diary, which I read not quite two decades ago. I felt like I needed oblivion, but I’ve got a job and a mortgage and an inbuilt sense of responsibility, so instead of popping over to the local park to see what one of the mildly threatening dealers might have stashed in his baby’s nappy, I chose oblivion at a remove, described by a man with a stronger liver than me. I’m calling it existential nihilism, even though that gives more weight to my ‘so what?’ than it deserves. I’ve been saving it up for a moment such as the one that hit me this week. Sometimes that’s all you can do when you live in darkest South Wales. I think he was attempting to channel Hunter S Thompson. It was given to me by a chaotic and terrifying writer that I once knew. I don’t need to tell you what it’s about. This is a very funny book, chaotically and terrifyingly so.

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Books like fear and loathing in las vegas