Tsundoku Book Piles 003, originally posted on Medium, 10/22/2023

I read some books about 1970s paranoia. Stick around until the end to see my new pile this week.

What did you read this week? I’m legit curious! I’m not just saying this for engagement baiting! Tell me! Comment below.

Books:

Two books about hippies and intense paranoia.

Agents of Chaos
Sean Howe
2023, Hachette

Wild read! Easily a personal favorite of mine for 2023. Tom King Forçade was a lot of things, most famously the publisher of High Times, but also a drug smuggler, hippie, radical subversive, cannabis advocate, First Amendment crusader, and possible federal agent or criminal informant. Fans of CHAOS: Charles Manson, The CIA and the Secret History of the 60s by Tom O’Neil, and Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream by Dave McGowan (RIP!) must check this out. I’ll write a longer post about the specifics soon.

I grew up loving “subversive” stuff: rock music, pot, High Times, William S. Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, hippie things. The above books reveal everything “subversive” might be a calculated attempt to reify power by the US military. It’s destabilizing. Beliefs I hold deeply (free speech, for example) were used for pro-market propaganda in an abstract fight with the Soviet Union. And that fight extends to the battle for oil rights, the blood that keeps empires running.

Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon
2007, Penguin

With that context, I had to pick up Inherent Vice again.

I never really understood Pynchon’s pessimism until now. Are the paranoid narrators paranoid if they correctly intuit every bad thing about to happen? The eternal question.

But do any of our paranoiacs (Zoyd, Doc, Slothrop) make out better than where they start? Nope.

P.I. Doc Sportello is funny but also a bummer, man. Stuck in the past, a mental cloud of smoke, confused and hapless, singular in his purpose of forgotten love.

This book makes me feel bad for baby boomers. People often mock the generation because they often had material opportunities and yet remain resentful about nonsense culture wars. But that might be because they were psy-op’d into the intense confusion of 1967–1971. When some Americans tried organizing for a better society, the police state crushed them and the chance for a better world.

Of course, there are strange synchronicities to contemporary violence: housing projects in the desert, the quest for power, and free real estate.

This might be my favorite novel. Here’s a line that always cracks me up.

Killers of the Flower Moon:
David Grann
2017, Vintage

Everybody’s talking about Martin Scorcese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic western crime drama! I saw it this week and enjoyed it. I sat motionless for 206 minutes! I never do that! I also read the book earlier this year and reread it this weekend to write a piece about what the movie left out. Follow me if you want to see it sometime this week!

The New Pile

I cannot help myself. Prime Day had a sale on some books I’ve meant to read or reread, and even a virtuous library user like me gets tempted when the devil offers good books for under $10.

Thank you for considering my piles. As always, I pine to know what’s on YOUR pile! Comment below! Let’s see those piles, people!

Don’t be shy! What did you read and enjoy this week?