Fare thee well, HST

For my final year of JC (aka high school for Americans or sixth form for Brits), I took a class where you could design your own reading list and basically set the syllabus. So I decided to do "American novels of the mid-20th century", and these were my books:

• Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
• William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
• Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Thomas Pynchon, V
• Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn
• Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

and with a list like that of course I'd have:

• Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

So goodbye to a man whose writing said a lot to at least one kid growing up in Singapore. (Incidentally, it's great to see a Paul Krassner quote in that obit: "He may have died relatively young but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years")