Hipster 101

A list.

1. Naked Lunch/William S. Burroughs. Rotates with Junky when one or the other gets too popular.

2. Manufacturing Consent/Noam Chomsky. Hipsters acquire key buzzwords as they discover the media sucks.

3. A People's History of the United States/Howard Zinn. Hipsters discover America isn't all its cracked up to be. Reading history books stops here, however.

4. Hell's Angels/Hunter S. Thompson. Because they made a movie of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

5. Population 1280/Jim Thompson. Though the really hip kids prefer Population 1279.

6. Sputnik/Haruki Murakami. USSR chic.

7. A Scanner Darkly/Philip K. Dick. Soon to drop off the list with a Keanu Reaves movie in the offing.

8. Man With the Golden Arm/Nelson Algren. Only for Chicago hipsters. NY hipsters prefer Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk Rock/Legs McNeil. LA hipsters stock up on books about the historical conspiracy to do away with streetcars.

9. A Confederacy of Dunces/John Kennedy Toole. The central character disdains pop culture.

10. Anything by Charles Bukowski. Because it's not cool to pick just one. Besides, none of them are very good.