The most recent disciple to weigh in is William McKeen, a friend of Thompson’s.

I am clinically obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson. The man and the myth.

But mostly the writing.

So it is with slight fear of being labeled a poseur that I frequently don aviator sunglasses and a red Las Vegas visor. It is with a smirking pride that my neighbors start calling me “Hunter” when I’m out on the balcony howling at the moon in aforementioned accoutrement and a t-shirt that reads, “Fuck Ya’ll I’m From Texas.”

But such fears are unfounded, unmerited, and unfair. HST gleamed his infamous cigarette holder from FDR. Bob Dylan imitated Woody Guthrie. These facts alone exonerate my behavior.

But more importantly, I consistently encounter people who are inexplicably unaware of who Hunter S. Thompson is. And this in the post-Deppized world that we live in.

So I will continue to be a manic imitator and proponent of Thompson.

And I will most assuredly read Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson.

Not to be confused with Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson.

Or Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson.

Or The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Or whatever the next one will be.

In many major news stories affecting our lives, books have become the final say.

So it was with distinct pleasure that I found myself reading Pamela Druckerman’s Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee when John Edwards admitted to having an affair. If only I had picked it up during the Spitzer Scandal! Clinton! Kobe! It’s so applicable!

When the shit first hits the fan or when the dust finally settles, books are there to provide a welcome breath of analyzed, reasoned lore.

For her anthropological romp on infidelity, Druckerman discusses the cheating lives of citizens in America, France, Russia, Japan, Africa, and China, weaving statistics with anecdotal research with the casual ease of a smart, interesting friend after two glasses of wine. It’s all very interesting, as captivating as a light, breezy travelogue as we visit Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and polygamist Muslims in Indonesia.

While hard facts on infidelity are inherently difficult to obtain, this much emerges: Americans, the British, and the French are, despite the scandals and the railing of puritanical moralists, decidedly chaste; Russians and Africans, however, much less so.

The politics of professional sport’s sexual culture and the (in booming voice) “marriage industrial complex” both seemed so interesting as to warrant their own books.

The next time a sex scandal breaks, say, a professional athlete is found cheating with some random girl he just met, remember Max Clifford, the publicist who explains how young girls go to clubs with targets and call his office so as to determine which john would garner the highest compensation in exchange for a “story” with said individual.

And in a real coup, Authwhore has received its most prestigious endorsement yet. A 1950’s Ladies Home Journal “advised its readers that the way to hold on to a husband isn’t to lose weight and buy new lingerie, it’s to ‘read, read, read! And then talk about books, articles, movies, and news together…’”

That’s right. Because Reading is Sexy.

Look for the Authwhore diet books next Spring.

This is good and bad news.

Good news for us sensible folk dismayed by the puritans blaming society’s ills on Grand Theft Auto and the like.

Bad news for us sensible folk bothered by the puritans railing against books and campaigning to have them banned.

But of course, there are some fine lines to be distinguished in all of this. Books, nor television, is a monolithic medium to be generalized en masse. I have quite a different experience watching Wipeout or America’s Funniest Videos than I do Jeopardy or Seinfeld or 8 1/2. Same goes for reading Zadie Smith or Hunter S. Thompson versus reading someone like Michael Crichton.

But one thing is sure that I wish the study would have explored to verify my lifetime thesis: Reading is Sexy.

Sexier than the boob tube for sure.

The “artwork” is by J.J. Sempe, a New Yorker contributor since 1978, and is called “Future Memories.”

Future Memories. Yeah, of false nostalgia blotted with sentimental Thomas-Kincade idealism. The image shows two adults roasting what can only be marshmallows over a campfire on a beach as seventeen ankle biters sit around enraptured by the fire’s glow and the sky’s sparkling expanse.

But certainly there will also be future memories of the bugs, the smell, the noise, the homesickness, the bad food, the annoying kids, the bed wetter, the crier, the stealer, the itches, the sickness, the sweat, and the discomfort.

At a time of war, grave athletic duels, and economic crises, I cannot fathom why such a distinguished publication as The New Yorker would resort to such escapist fantasy.

Is this what we want our children exposed to?

The ostriches at The New Yorker predictably resorted to a Frenchman for this drivel.

J.J. Sempe, born in the disreputable and ramshackle town of Bordeaux, is the author of “Sempe: A Little Bit of France.”

Buy it and the terrorists win.

Do enjoy, but some highlights:

“The Mormon guy who wrote all those books about the innocence of a child winning out over war and hatred wants us to raise arms against any queers who feel like expressing their love legally. I mean, I understand a devout Mormon having some issues with gayness, but when your brain tells you that it’s an important enough issue to divide the country in a bloody coup, it’s time to get a new brain.”

“What the hell does it matter to you if two hot lesbians want to settle down and be respectable (which isn’t the way I like my hot lesbians either, believe me)? Until such a time as they bring down your property values with raging lesbian drug orgies, you’ve got nothing legitimate to complain about, and even then, I’ll trade houses with you.”

“You’ve spent your life imagining diverse races and cultures, and doing a hell of a good job. Yet your inability to imagine true love manifesting between two members of the same sex almost classifies you as retarded in my mind. It’s not even a moral issue. You’re just an idiot to me.”

“I know it’s pointless to ask you to change your mind; bigots armed with the intransigence of religion are rarely swayed. But hopefully some of those reading this post will be forewarned that Orson Scott Card has become a poison-spouting lunatic.”

The Hugo Awards are Authwhore’s favorite literary awards.

And not because we’re closeted sci-fi-loving, graphic novel-reading nerds. Authwhore is just uniquely situated to singularly appreciate any award that prominently features a bright, shiny phallus:

The Hugo Award trophies vary year to year but always feature the finned Hugo rocket (also known in literary works as a penis (dildo, vibrator are also acceptable interpretations)).

Except for 1958. Something very unfortunate clearly happened in 1958 and rendered the science fiction community void of sexual impulse and creative drive:

What happened in 1958?!?!?!???

We all love a good list. Especially a list of books we’re supposed to have read. We scour these lists, smirking in satisfaction at the ones we have actually read, and making mental notes of the ones we think we ought to read.

A list of banned books provides all the things we love about book lists and more. There is something very illuminating about a culture’s puritan biases based on the ill it harbors for certain books.

So which one(s) do I read?

Some books are more obviously likely to raise the ire of certain citizens, like The Homo Handbook-Getting in Touch With Your Inner Homo. And some are a little more peculiarly controversial, like Forever by Judy Blume.

Judy Blume! I actually have a lot more respect for Judy Blume now. Way to go, Judy, getting a book banned. Alright.

Now, most of the banned books on the list seem to be “one of 55 books that parents in Fayetteville, Arkansas are petitioning to have removed from school libraries. The parents, who formed Parents Protecting the Minds of Children, object to the profane language and depictions of sexuality in many of the books and have accused the librarians and other opponents of their efforts of promoting a “homosexual agenda”.

So yeah. We have a small, vocal group in a single community seeking a narrow agenda. Which is their prerogative of course. But it doesn’t indicate that we are on the brink of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. I don’t think I’d want How to Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson displayed too prominently around my ankle biters either. Even if it is a “cautionary tale.”

So which one to read? There are a few surprising ones on the list to be sure.

Bringing Down the House?

All the Pretty Horses?

Barbara Kingsolver?

I think I’m going to play it safe and go with Bless Me, Ultima. It comes with a fabulous story:

“High school students in Norwood, Colorado, staged an all-day sit-in to protest the removal of the novel from a ninth grade English classroom. The book had been removed following parent complaints of profanity and “pagan content” (the book’s title character is an herbal healer). Bob Conder, superintendent of schools, confiscated two dozen copies of the novel and threw them in trash cans, then allowed a group of parents to retrieve the books and destroy them. Conder later apologized, admitting he had never read the novel, which appears on First Lady Laura Bush’s “top ten” reading list for all ages.”

With graphic novelist’s prominence on the rise, I was recently fielding candidates to fill the vacuum of artists groveling for respect.

I shamefully failed to mention sand sculptors. Their work is sheer poetry in sand and deserves passing acknowledgment from the most insignificant of web logs.

Notice the jaunted flip flop on the left foot. Such thoughtful detail distilled in sand is truly breathtaking.

Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation is what would happen if David Sedaris wrote The Devil in the White City.

Now I know that we’re supposed to lump the likes of David Rakoff, Sarah Vowell, and David Sedaris into a category of humor or essays or some other less-than-serious class, but Assassination Vacation is an important book.

And I mean that in the traditional, classic sense. So I’ll say it again. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell is an important book.

AV belongs up on the eye-level shelf or right on the nightstand with all the other tattered, well-read, really good paperbacks like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc, etc, et al.

You see, Vowell embarks on an adventure to satisfy a macabre personal fascination with presidential assassinations, but does so with a grace and wit and piercing intellect that reveals an entertainingly enormous amount of relevant US history. Her book is equal parts well written, informative, and funny. While she’ll gently remind us that the dedication of Lincoln’s Memorial in 1922 was segregated, and that our use of the “water cure” during the Spanish-American War predated our current use of “water boarding,” she’ll also describe the McKinley National Memorial in Canton as “a gray granite nipple on a fresh green breast of grass.”

Sarah Vowell should write and edit textbooks. Our schoolchildren would be smarter, and our country a lot better off. And I mean that. Sarah, please edit high school textbooks. You could single handedly eliminate Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

But whether you have ADHD or not, you’ll find Assassination Vacation a damn readable brew of dry humor and understated intelligence that makes important slivers of our country’s history relevant, approachable, understandable, worth knowing, and most of all, entertaining.

This is the situation we’re in folks, it is not pretty, and it’s the situation I was in a few days ago right before I came home to find a piece of atrocious mail on my foyer, having been shoved through the mail slot by some schoolboy prank punks. Or a disgruntled postal worker.

You know the times are getting tough when disgruntled postal workers start shoving New Yorkers through your mail slot instead of raking their places of employ with bullets from an automatic assault rifle.

This is the situation we’re in folks, it is not pretty, and it’s the situation I was in a few days ago as I came home, having fended off a wobbling vagrant asking me for “a couple of bucks” instead of “spare change,” and found the single most disgusting piece of art I have ever seen in my life, “Night Cap” by Kim DeMarco:

You know the times are getting tough when American publications have to resort to silly puns and plays on words to sell us their pulp. In the good old days of yellow journalism they’d start wars, now they just smear some sloppily thrown together, half-baked image of a swimmer at night wearing a swim cap and call the drivel “Night Cap.”

Oh how clever.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

This is the situation we’re in folks, it is not pretty, and it’s the situation I was in a few days ago as I came home to be insulted by this mindless humor. When will American publications be brave enough to engage in some serious satire and culturally relevant commentary on the world we live in?

When?

I know what a nightcap is. It’s a drink; a libation one imbibes prior to retiring to the bedchamber.

You know the times are getting tough when American publications have to resort to weak homonyms.

It’s as if Obama is treading water? Is that what you’re saying?

The 2008 Olympics are such a contrived spectacle of disappointment and corruption and since no one cares about them, they might as well be held at night? Is that what you’re saying?

The fervor over the Olympics and the Obama campaign has been so intense that everyone needs to just chill and have a nightcap? Is that what you’re saying?