Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson, 1971

Date Read: 6/27/26

So, from what I understand, this novel is supposed to be representative of the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. However, I was not alive at that time (technically, I was born in 1977) and thus I do not really understand what Thompson was going for. Basically he and another guy do vast quantities of drugs and commit a lot of stupid crimes/acts of idiocy in Las Vegas. That's the whole book. I think if you made tea out of the pages of this novel you'd probably be able to get high just from the quantity of drugs mentioned. Thompson even ran out of real drugs to talk about and had to make up some more.

People who know things say this novel is about searching for the American Dream, and declaring it dead. I don't know if that's true or not. I think the American Dream is nonsense that was sold to poor people to get them to work their asses off for little pay. But does Thompson's drug-fueled rampage show anything about that? Not in my opinion.

I am amazed at a world where you can get on a plane last minute, with a gun in your carry-on and a knife in your pocket. Let alone renting a hotel room with a false name - you literally couldn't do that today. He also talks about using a credit card that was canceled. The computers took several days to update so he used it before they caught up. Things like that are so fast and automatic today that it is unfathomable to me.

Essentially, this novel might as well have been about Mongolians or Honolulu in 1873 for all I related to it, despite being American. The world today has changed so much since 1971 (the year before my sister was born) that it is difficult for me to even imagine what he describes.