Helpful Score: 5
Like the bad seed of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" meets "A Clockwork Orange". Although Thompson's detailed accounts of his various drug trips tended to be overly-long, they were at least amusing to laugh-out-loud funny; and Clockwork was super-creative and interesting about its invented language. This unintelligible mess - which the book jacket described as a "meaningful search for true values" (?!) - was penned while the author was a full-blown heroin addict, complete with every junkie drug-use term every invented, and endless (endless!) descriptions of the grinding squalor and misery that go with being said junkie.
Burroughs claims not to remember writing any of it, which is probably a smart move because I know if I were held responsible for having authored this, I would probably do the same.
Burroughs claims not to remember writing any of it, which is probably a smart move because I know if I were held responsible for having authored this, I would probably do the same.
Helpful Score: 4
This book is very good if you read it like poetry i.e. random pages at a time. It doesn't make sense since it is not supposed to. I highly reccomend reading the history about it before hand or else it just seems like a long trip. I found out later that the first chapter is the ending from Junky, and that is going off drugs snad hallucinates, I just thought that he has Hallucenating that whole time. Fun though.
Helpful Score: 2
This was not a book I could get into. It was one of those books that put me in a strange and foreign place - the world of drug addiction. Though not the first book I have opened that covered this theme, I found the way the content was covered to be quite depressing - disappointing, as I had read reviews lauding this particular book.
Weird Weird Weird!!!!
William S Burroughs is a genius. This book has kind of a plinky plunky diction with the words kind of flowing in and out of correct sentence structures. If you enjoy this you will also love Wild Boys. These stories are honest and raw, candid and chilling. The characters are so real and easy to latch onto even though I have nothing in common with them.
All I can say is...Huh? There are some instances of great writing and imagry, but I can't tell where the hell this book goes. It's insanity at it's most perverse! I love it. Something for the kids!
Hmmm, if this was "one of the most important novels of the 20th century", it might help explain why I had trouble comprehending the 20th century (and I'm not doing too much better with the 21st, so far).
There's lots of funny lines, but I really couldn't follow a lot of it. Maybe it's best if you just open the book to a random page and start reading it.
According to John Leland\'s Hip: The History, this is the the #7 hippest book of all time: \"The first megamix novel, cut up and reassembled. Sorry, Mr. Diddy: Burroughs and Brion Gyson invented the remix.\"
I could absolutely not get into this book. The way Burroughs wrote it, piecing sentences together randomly, just didn't appeal to me at all and seemed like utter nonsense. Maybe I just prefer normal stories with a comprehensible plot and relatable characters, but this book just wasn't my cup of tea.
