Review: An interesting collection of stories
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2014
So I was recommended this book by a friend.  He really enjoyed it, and enjoyed all of the different stories, and said I should check it out.This book is a mishmash of different people’s stories told through first-person narrative, third-person narrative, or sometimes even poems and things like that.  They all center around pot addiction, in one way or another, with depressing, and sometimes hilarious results.Getting the most obvious thing out of the way first, while I have actually never done any drug harder than painkillers after a tooth extraction, I disagree with the main conceit of “pot addiction”.  The reality of it is, there aren’t really any concrete studies either way to say that marijuana can lead to “addiction”, and I personally don’t believe that it is habit forming.  Addiction gets thrown around way too much these days as it is.  “I’m addicted to chocolate!”  No, you like chocolate, and eat it frequently, you’re not physical and mentally compelled to consume chocolate, or face horrible detoxing consequences.  But I digress…I enjoyed some of the stories and poems on their own, but put together as they were, it just seemed very disjointed and jumbled  together.  I get that it is supposed to be “stream of consciousness”, but the stream seemed to not have a consistent  flow to it, with a lot of sections where you just had to get out of the canoe, and trudge across the slow parts yourself.  Like I said, I did enjoy pieces of it:  a lot of the poems were really nice, and The Candlestick was right up my alley.  But overall, it wasn’t great.Maybe because I disagree with one of the main themes of the book (pot addiction), it colored my perception of the book overall.  But that is something that you have to consider when reading something like this, whether you agree with it or not.  And I’m not saying “If you don’t agree with something, don’t read it!”:  That way of thinking causes more trouble than it helps.  The reason they are called our opinions instead of our facts, is because our opinions can change, and it’s important to challenge your beliefs every now and again.  It can open you up to new points of view, or solidify your already held beliefs.  While this book didn’t really change my mind about anything, I’m glad I read it.