Rubbish - Rated 
This is a book for sad people who like to think they're cool and clever - like most of the `beat' texts. It plays with being difficult and wallows in degradation for the sake of it.
Having read enough difficult books to be able to tell the difference between honest and necessary difficulty on the one hand and self-indulgent confusion on the other, I can confidently put The Naked Lunch in the second category.
As far as the subject matter is concerned, I've seen enough to be fairly unshockable, and I can look at it calmly enough to recognise self-indulgent wallowing when I see it.
If you really want to read something difficult for the sake of it, you're better reading a book that's also rewarding and meaningful, like Finnegans Wake. James Joyce has vistas of significance and depths of humanity that Burroughs can't hold a candle to.
I first became aware of Burroughs a long time ago, in my teens, but never got round to reading him. In the meantime I've read a lot of books in the course of getting a master's degree in literature. Some are worthwhile. Others aren't. Some are merely hyped-up trash. This is one of the latter.
... and funny - Rated 
OK, it's black, bleak, about control and the "algebra of need" ... and startlingly funny!
Knowing the score - Rated
You don't need me to tell you this is a great book. Writing has never been this good.
But are you ready for it?
The images are out there. The style is out there. If you haven't been out there with Burroughs, you may want to start with a similar message in a more traditional form, namely his trilogy that begins with "Cities of the Red Night".
But the power is here in this book. The power of the truths about control, about desperate needs, about everything that is lurking beneath even well-structure, settled lives.
If you're studious, then after the thrill of Naked Lunch, if there is an "after Naked Lunch", you can grow your understanding of your social conditioning with Peter Handke's play "Kaspar" and with B.F.Skinner's study "Verbal Behavior" (read Skinner's "Science and Human Behavior" before "Verbal Behavior"). These are all you need to be able to stand on your own two feet. But start with Naked Lunch to get the jolt you'll need to start understanding how the control systems have you pinned down.
Heroin addiction and outlandish s*x are only small adornments in "Naked Lunch", the escapes could have been instead workaholism and fundamentalism, or reading books and writing Amazon reviews. But you probably wouldn't be drawn to a book about Amazon book reviewers. Still, Naked Lunch isn't describing anything far away. It's not "out there" after all but right in our guts. Enjoy.
A journey into paradox - Rated 
It took me several weeks to get into this book: then I got to half-way and suddenly felt comfortable with the style and the remainder got gobbled up in a couple of days. It is a very different "novel", and one which certainly won't appeal to everyone - particularly unsuitable for immature readers or religious fundamentalists of any persuasion. There is extensive explicit reference to heroin use and homosexuality throughout, with an often sadomasochistic or twisted medical angle.
The book's plot is loose to say the least, and the stream of consciousness style caused me great difficulty in the early stages. Once I realised that this was the books strength and started going with the flow, it became much easier to read and was highly enjoyable. Although the subject matter is often disturbing and the characters generally frightening and detestable, the prose is beautiful and often very poetic. Loose concepts such as Interzone, Islam Corp, Dr Benway etc are intimated like pieces of exquisite modern art.
If you think you won't huff and puff due to the references to homosexuality, drugs, casual violence, and florid prose, give this dizzying journey into dark beatnik fantasy a go. And hope you never have a GP called Benway...
What is this? - Rated
'Read' this book as part of my Eng. degree and only managed to get to page 10 before I had to put it down and promised myself never pick it up again. It's too much. It has no context, coherence or any of the elements which we rely on to understand text. It just relies purely on shock factors, which is franking just disturbing, and please do not tell me that it require Post-modernist reading perspective or as readers we are meant to make sense of what we have. I have read Faulkner and so-called other `difficult' writers and believe me this not on the same level. Some books you just cannot put it down, with this book, if you must read it, I suggest you put it down before it does something to your psychology. I do not often agree censorship in Literature, but some body has to answer the question of what happens when child porn, blasphemy etc is not dealt with intelligently in literature?
Unfortunately I still have this book due to the fact that the bookshop at my uni refused to process any more returns on this text, after people opened it and realised it for the poor excuse for literature that it is.
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