Grand unified books thread

[Savonarola]

I read "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by Hunter S. Thompson and, while Hunter will always be my favorite Doonesbury character, I'm not so sold on Gonzo Journalism.  There's some journalism there, but it reads a lot more like autobiography.  It is still a fascinating account of the outlaw motorcycle gangs in California at the time; he covers both the outlaws themselves (who were indeed menacing, and would eventually curb stomp Hunter) and the exaggerated public fear of them.

Tonitrus posted in the Trump thread:

A younger Christopher Hitchens kinda foresaw it 30 years ago...

...these rebels as they call themselves, these anti-establishment figures are nothing of the kind; they say they're against the government, they're lone pioneers and frontiersmen...but if the time should come when push came to shove these are the people who would be the freikorps, these are the people who would take orders, these are the people who would be the disciplined and docile forces of a government that would of course always regard them as deniable, and we have been warned.

Which fits in this book, the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels attacked at Berkely anti-Vietnam War march during the course of the book.  Despite being self-proclaimed outlaws they respected strength and authority much like the stereotype of a MAGA supporter.

The book is set about three years before Altamont.  Mick Jagger really should have read this beforehand, it's obvious they were a terrible choice for security.  (The Grateful Dead had used the San Francisco chapter as security, but that was for block parties near Haight-Asbury, not for 250,000 people in the middle of nowhere.)  One of the principle angels in the book Sonny Barger, leader of the Oakland chapter, is also in the movie (he's the one who calls in at the end of the film - and the one who looks like he's considering kicking Mick Jagger's ass as he walks onstage during the concert.)

The book also features Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.  At the time it was the fashionable thing to have a Hells Angel at your party for upper middle class Bohemians in the Bay Area - which usually went poorly.  Kesey was actually able to get along with them; for one thing Kesey was a large man, he had been a wrestler; and for a second he introduced them to LSD.  (Allen Ginsburg is also in it.)

The original article that this was in The Nation, and I thought it was strange that someone like Hunter, who would routinely get drunk and shoot out his apartment window would have articles in The Nation.  But, the last time I tried to read The Nation I think they had hired a bunch of people from Vice after it folded and I kept thinking it sounded like "This time around the revolution will be IN YO' FACE!" so maybe it's not so strange.

[Syt]

I read the book some years ago. It was thoroughly entertaining and an interesting ground level view into the subculture, but I agree it doesn't have much professional distance to the subject matter (even though he does point out that he was always an outsider within their group).

[Josquius]

I got a book from the library for the first time in years.
Now I need to figure out how to get time to read it.

[mongers]

I got a book from the library for the first time in years.
Now I need to figure out how to get time to read it.

I've got several books out of the local library in recent months, as with you first time in ages.

But I've not figured out the second bit yet, either. :-)

[Grey Fox]

I got this book from the city library. : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646154/on-savage-shores-by-caroline-dodds-pennock/

It wasn't great.

[Sheilbh]

So I slightly mentioned it in the other thread but just finished The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - and it's one of the most extraordinary, fascinating books I've read in years.

It's kind of tough to describe but it's a book about the matsutake mushroom which is a delicacy in Japan and the most expensive mushroom in the world. No-one has ever been able to cultivate it despite a lot of research. It grows specifically in human disrupted forests - either the "ruins" of industrial woodland (like Oregon), or peasant managed farms - and is picked by various groups from Yunnanese peasants (largely into ethnic economic structures), to Japanese pickers celebrating their heritage and traditions, to South-East Asian (Mien, Hmong, Lao and Cambodian) pickers in the Pacific North-West both picking and also, for a season, creating a sort of re-creation of South-East Asian life in the Pacific North-West to white woodsmen. Then incorporated into global supply chains before becoming a heavily graded delicacy in Japan that is largely given as a gift. It's incredible - considering the ecological damage and economic precarity of much of this "supply chain", but also thinking "with" mushrooms which are multi-species dependent organisms in these landscapes which are both ruins of modernisation and industrial capitalism. but also sites of new growth opportunity and life plus community making.

Very well written and beautifully produced as well.

I hadn't realised when I started but Tsing was the wife of James C Scott and there are similarities in outset and intellectual project in a really interesting way.

[Savonarola]

Following up on Hell's Angles, I read Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."  The books compliment one another, and Wolfe describes a party which the Angels attended at Ken Kesey's house from the Prankster perspective, which Thomson had described from the Hells Angel's perspective.

Ken Kesey was living in a Bohemian neighborhood in San Francisco and had volunteered for psychiatric drug tests (financed by the CIA); so he knew all the best drugs.  He also worked as a night aide, and in his down time he wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest.  The book's success allowed him to finance what was more or less a cult of fellow acid-heads.

One of the high points of the book is the Merry Pranksters attending a Unitarian-Universalist weekend retreat (as invited guests.)  Unitarian-Universalism is a progressive and activist religious group, and most of the middle aged or older members were shocked and despondent at what they had inspired.  (Sort of like the time Kurt Cobain heard the band Bush on the radio and realized what he had done.  Fortunately the Unitarian-Universalists didn't take it as hard as Kurt did and blow their own heads off.   

)

Anyhow the book begins as a wonderful psychedelic carnival, but things start to fall apart as some of the Pranksters (metaphorically) get off the bus (and, in some cases, into psych wards).  Then Kesey's legal troubles increase and he flees to Mexico.  The Pranksters meet him there, but things just grow more pathetic and Kesey seems less like a messianic figure and more just a regular fugitive.

Kesey, in the end, was sentenced to six months on a work farm (the very same punishment that his protagonist in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" received) and would then move back to Oregon.  It might be for the best that he did; the hard drugs would come into Haight-Asbury shortly after he returned home and the groups that stayed to go even further (such as the Levelers) would just end up as junkies.

One of the things that struck me, as they were discussing the Prankster's return from Mexico around 1966 is that the hip scene in San Francisco had changed during their stay.  Previously if you were a member of the Congress of Racial Equality or had been a Freedom Rider or something like that you had status among hipsters.  When they returned dropping out and taking a lot of drugs gave you status.  Prior to Kesey's flight, the Pranksters had attended an anti-Vietnam rally, where Kesey, who had been invited to speak, played "Home on the Range" on a harmonica and told the attendees that protests were simply "Playing their game," the only way to make a difference was to say "Fuck it."

In any event it is well written.  Wolfe didn't meet Kesey until he had returned from Mexico, so some of the accounts of the Prankster's early activities may have been romanticized.  He gives a vivid portrait of a number of the pranksters, especially Mountain Girl (whom he obviously had a crush on) and Neil Cassady (though not the first to do so.  )

[Sheilbh]

So about a third of the way through the Booker dozen longlist. And either it's a very strong year or I've accidentally fucked it and front-loaded all the books I'll enjoy

But strong recommends on all of David Szalay's Flesh, Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter (possibly my favourite), Maria Reva's Endling and Benjamin Wood's Seascraper. Hopefully it's a very strong year because these have all been excellent. Flesh and The Land in Winter have made the shortlist, while Seascraper and Endling seem the two people are most annoyed didn't get to the shortlist.

[Syt]

https://apnews.com/article/nobel-prize-literature-25f9886d2c35dabfc6ab7936a8a159c0

Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel Prize in literature

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whose surreal and anarchic novels combine a bleak world view with mordant humor, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for work the judges said upholds the power of art in the midst of "apocalyptic terror."

The Nobel judges said the 71-year-old author, whose novels sometimes consist of just one long sentence, is "a great epic writer" whose work "is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess."

He's the first Nobel literature winner from Hungary since Imre Kertesz in 2002 and joins a list of laureates that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.

"I am calm and very nervous," Krasznahorkai told Radio Sweden after getting news of the prize, which comes with an award of more than $1 million. "This is the first day in my life when I got a Nobel Prize. I don't know what's coming in the future."

The work that won the Nobel Prize in literature

Zsuzsanna Varga, a Hungarian literature expert at the University of Glasgow, said Krasznahorkai's novels probe the "utter hopelessness of the condition of human existence," while also managing to be "incredibly funny."

Varga said Krasznahorkai's near-endless sentences made his books the "Hotel California" of literature — once readers get into it, "you can never leave."

Varga suggested readers new to Krasznahorkai's work start with "Satantango," his 1985 debut, which centered around the few remaining residents of a dying collective farm and set the tone for what was to follow.

"Satan who is dancing a tango — I mean, how surreal can you be?" she said.

Krasznahorkai has since written more than 20 books, including "The Melancholy of Resistance," a surreal, disturbing tale involving a traveling circus and a stuffed whale, and "Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming," the sprawling saga of a gambling-addicted aristocrat.

"Herscht 07769" from 2021 is set in a German town riven with unrest. Written as a series of letters to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, it has just one period in its 400 pages.

Several works, including "Satantango," and "The Melancholy of Resistance" were turned into films by Hungarian director Béla Tarr.

Krasznahorkai also wrote several books inspired by his travels to China and Japan, including "A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East," published in Hungarian in 2003.

How Krasznahorkai came to win

Krasznahorkai had been on the Nobel radar for some time, Nobel committee member Sem-Sandberg said, calling Krasznahorkai's literary output "almost half a century of pure excellence."

The writer was born in the southeastern Hungarian city of Gyula, near the border with Romania, and studied law at universities in Szeged and Budapest before shifting his focus to literature.

Varga, the academic, said Krasznahorkai developed a cult following among young Hungarians during the last years of Communism in the 1980s, when "authors were pretty much like pop stars."

Krasznahorkai has been a vocal critic of autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, especially his government's lack of support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion.

In an interview with Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet earlier this year, Krasznahorkai expressed criticism both of Orbán's political system and the nationalism present in Hungarian society.

"There is no hope left in Hungary today and it is not only because of the Orbán regime," he told the paper. "The problem is not only political, but also social."

Orbán congratulated the writer in a Facebook post, saying: "The pride of Hungary, the first Nobel Prize winner from Gyula, László Krasznahorkai."

How Krasznahorkai and others reacted

Krasznahorkai received the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his body of work and the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S. in 2019 for "Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming."

He said none of his career was planned.

"I wanted at first to write only one book. And I didn't want to be a writer," he told Swedish radio, but rereading his first novel he discovered it wasn't perfect.

"I started to write another one because I wanted to correct 'Satantango,'" he said, and later "I tried to write a new book to correct the first two. ... My life is a permanent correction."

Éva Rédei, the longtime owner of one of Budapest's oldest independent booksellers, said Krasznahorkai was "an exceptionally demanding and sophisticated author" and his Nobel Prize was "long overdue."

"Better late than never," said Rédei, who owns the Láng Téka bookstore.

The literature prize has been awarded by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy 117 times to a total of 121 winners. Last year's winner was South Korean author Han Kang. The 2023 winner was Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, whose work includes a seven-book epic made up of a single sentence.

The literature prize is the fourth to be announced this week, following the 2025 Nobels in medicine, physics and chemistry.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday. The final Nobel, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, will be announced Monday.

Nobel Prize award ceremonies are held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes.

Each prize carries an award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million). Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.

Well, sounds like an appropriate writer for this day and age.

[mongers]

....
Varga said Krasznahorkai's near-endless sentences made his books the "Hotel California" of literature — once readers get into it, "you can never leave."
....
The literature prize has been awarded by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy 117 times to a total of 121 winners. Last year's winner was South Korean author Han Kang. The 2023 winner was Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, whose work includes a seven-book epic made up of a single sentence.

.

Well, sounds like an appropriate writer for this day and age.

Punctuation and me are total strangers, so maybe I should up my literacy game and have trumps' ambition?

[The Brain]

His publisher has this to say:

[Sheilbh]

Just finished France on Trial by Julian Jackson which is about the Petain trial.

I think I picked this up because it won a prize and sounded interesting enough. But I didn't really have particular expectations of it and it was actually really good. It covers the background to the trial so the very last days of Vichy and liberated France, the trial itself and then its after effects. But it's also a really interesting book on the necessity and limits of law in politics and history in really interesting ways. In part because of the particularity of the Petain which I wasn't really aware of. It wasn't, like Nuremberg or Tokyo, straightforward victors' justice with the victorious powers holding the trial. It was a French trial, but unlike, say, Quisling because of his history and position Petain had a degree of legitimacy and broad public support at the moment of the amnesty. This meant that almost every participant was, in some way, compromised. There's a recurring question of basically when Petain committed treason (if he did). And all of these - as well as the absences in the trial, from our perspective (like the Holocaust) - then echo through the historiography and memory of Petain as well, in certain ways, through the politics of the far-right in France.

It's slightly kicked me off so I'm going to read Judgement at Tokyo by Gary Bass next.

Just as an aside I was briefly in Paris last week and popped into a couple of bookshops. I was surprised how much of the recent history tables were taken by new books on Vichy. It might always be that way, but from my very anecdotal look, it seems to be a particularly relevant/interesting topic at the moment.