Naked Lunch deserves to be sent back to the kitchen

What a complete waste of time. It is bad from the get-go, I gave it 50 pages (about 1/4^th of the book) to see if it was going to go anywhere, and nothing ever developed. William S Burroughs’ Naked Lunch can’t really be considered a novel, as there is no plot.

My only guess as to this book’s popularity is its subject material and when it was published (1959). It broke down barriers of obscenity and its stark portrayal of drug use, but only because the main character is a raving mad junkie. Burroughs admits he was high while writing, and the book follows no pattern. It is the extreme ramblings of a druggie. There are no coherent thoughts, no story to tell. Paragraphs are held together by the loosest of ideas, and reading it is like looking into the brain of a psychopath. There is simply nothing to follow, and nothing to be gained by reading.

If I’m a 13 year old in the 60’s, I’m probably blown away by this book, at least to open my mind to something new, and to feel like I’m hiding something from the parents. But as an adult in 2016, there’s nothing shocking about the material and I don’t feel like toughing out a book that gives me no entertainment.