Our Lady of Babylon (John Rechy)

Ok, I tried to read this book. I didn't make it very far, but I read enough to get a sense of the tone and the direction of the book. It was just ridiculous, and I couldn't accept what it was trying to tell me. I was initially intrigued by the blurb because I thought it would be an interesting novel that would tie together stories of the many truly whorish women throughout history and mythology...instead it is a spineless revisioning of women who were "wrongfully blamed" by men. Thus, all potential human interest I could have had for these characters is killed. No one is innocent, except maybe boring people, and why read about boring people? Somehow I had a hard time accepting that Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene were a sexually intimate threesome. Behind every description of sex, I felt the disgustingly gratuitous sexuality of a gay author who really should not be writing about heterosexual women. But maybe I'm being unfair. After all, I didn't read the whole book.

The Day of Creation (J. G. Ballard)

I did not finish this book, not necessarily because I didn't think it was worth finishing, but just because I lost interest. The idea of a third Nile spontaneously springing forth from the desert was very intriguing to me, but it just lost me for some reason. Maybe it was the narrator's growing admiration for his pre-pubescent female companion that turned me off, and made me lose my desire to find out what would happen when they travelled to the source of the river to cut off its flow. It was hard to stay with it, but maybe eventually I'll pick it back up and finish it.

Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)

Another book I was led to by an adaptation (David Cronenberg's film). This time, the source material turned out to be utterly different. Not that it was a case of the movie making a lamentable butchery of the book, which is so often the case. It's just that the book is sort of unfilmable, at least it would be impossible to make a satisfying film adaptation of the book and not have it banned worldwide. That's how these things are. You can't show everything on film that you can write about. In any case, the film was a very interesting Cronenberg piece, and the book was something else...my first Burroughs experience, and every bit as rich and exciting as it was confusing and frustrating. It's just insane. And it's brilliant, but I found the frustrating part to be that I felt it could have been planned better and made more sense. Not that art is necessarily meant to make sense, but there comes a point when drug induced hallucinations and descriptions of boys ejaculating, all with little or no sense of plot to ground them in the reader's mind, become tiresome. This book is filled with extreme, bizarre humor, and just running over with material for a potential "Burroughs on life" quotation book. However, not the kind of thing you'd find being sold at the front counter on the little gift book rack, unfortunately. In the end, Naked Lunch is disgusting, chaotic, surreal, funny, and beautiful. It is horrific porno-satire-poetry that you will want (or need) to read more than once.