As a girl - yes I am a girl, well a woman, but let's not get hung up on labels - reading this book, I noticed many manly-looking men glance at me pityingly. It was as if they felt, I would not understand this book, this book about the American Dream, that I was far too simple to leap inside this book and the electric writing and come out with any understanding. Perhaps, I didn't. I would never claim to have understood this book, but I did feel. I felt an incredible rush of emotions crashing head-long into each other with every turn of the page.
If any book could ever conduct electricity, it would be 'Fear and Loathing'. From the first page, you feel the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. As you enter the Mint Hotel you find yourself dissolving into a particularly hairy paranoid delusion that drives you slightly insane, with words running into each other as if they're drunkenly charging down a corridor, crashing against the walls of convention. You are hooked. I felt like the hitchhiker, an innocent locked in a car with two crazy men, speeding along a desert highway desperate for escape - but did I leap out of a moving vehicle? Hell no! I grabbed hold of the door handle and went along for the ride.
If you have ever seen the movie, you will be able to envision the type of journey this book is taking you on, but it is so much more than that. I can't wait to re-read it. Next time, I will grab myself a litre of Wild Turkey, hunker down in a spot of sunlight and not move until I have read it cover to cover. I can only encourage you to do the same (except please, you know, drink responsibly and wear sunscreen, etc. Though, I suppose, Hunter S. Thompson would think that lame.)
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