Thursday, January 4, 2024

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs


 The cover text calls this something like "one of the most important novels" blah blah blah. It's not a novel, it's a disconnected series of drug-fueled and -addled vignettes with no particular point or purpose: Word count alone maketh not a novel. The movie from the 1990s, with Peter Weller, was *vastly* better, mainly because it ignored pretty much everything about the novel other than its existence, and put some effort into telling something like a story. The most interesting thing in the book is the (badly outdated) essay-type material about drug-use, written after Burroughs had at least mostly kicked.

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Basil's War by Stephen Hunter

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