I can't stay I really enjoyed reading Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting" but I am certainly glad that I took the time to read it. The book follows a group of Scottish slackers who are addicted to heroin, alcohol, stealing and general mayhem. They are poor, have little to do and are escaping from their circumstances in the few ways available to them -- drugs, women and crime.

Marvelously written in a Scottish dialect, it took me a few pages to really get into the flow of the story. (I was perhaps helped because I saw the movie many moons ago and had a general idea of the plot.) The story is not told in a linear fashion, but short sketches and stories told by a variety of characters.

Overall, I found the novel to be a fascinating look at a subculture -- the drug scene of 1980's Scotland -- and disaffected youth who have lost their hopes and their way.

Well worth reading though off-putting due to the language and the content.

It's a great look into a part of the world you'll likely (hopefully) never experience, drug and aids blighted inner city poverty during the 1980s. The characters are all despicable but thoroughly human. You are often bouncing from POV to POV so you get to see how they reason what they do. Unfortunately, the book does a terrible job showing who's mind you are in at any one point and they are all overlapping kinds of awful, it gets bloody frustrating trying to follow who is doing what and why - quite a glaring weakness and my biggest critique as it brought down my opinion of what otherwise would be a better-rated book. Maybe this is stylistic to show the confusion in their minds; maybe it's me struggling to pick up on obvious hints; maybe the audio book I listened to was just a naff adaption. For whatever reason, it made it hard to know the characters as they mostly blend together, apart from some standouts like Spud.

If you've tried the book and bounced off it's likely because of two things. One, the scots/slang used is very heavy, I'd encourage the audio version because it is much easier to pick up that way. Two, some horrible f*cking stuff is described in excruciating detail. There's no way around that, this book is trying to make you uncomfortable it's part of the story and life these characters are living. Good literature makes you feel and by God this book makes me feel bad - great writing from Irving but never again thank you. If you want some ideas of this I'll spoil some of this below but you'll know if you want to read this if the idea of being disgusted puts you off a book. It is a good bit of humanity on display though.

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A lot of rape, violence and drug use

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violent diarrhoea the character then swims through to get back his suppositories

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Constant physical/verbal abuse of women and kids

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The detailed description of a child's sexual assault and murder

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The use of every bodily fluid as food

I will start by saying that I have read some other books by Irvine Welsh and have enjoyed them, granted that was probably about 10 years ago. I also watched the movie Trainspotting when it was first released and loved it. It almost kills me to say it, but I liked the movie better than the book. I'm not sure if it was the fact that this read was very interrupted by life, or if the book was easy for life to interrupt, but I just had a really hard time getting into it. There didn't seem to really be a story, certainly not one with direction. It was really just a day (or rather several) in the life of a Scottish junkie. It was not even always clear how the chapters fit together, sometimes a chapter would seem to be a random story about somebody who was very peripheral to the characters in the book. Again, maybe I am not giving the book a fair shake because it was such a drawn out interrupted read, but if you like a page turner with a story and direction, I would look elsewhere.

I almost stopped reading this because I was so slow to pick up the dialogue and speech patterns, and of course some of the slang words tripped me up (didn't notice the Glossary at the back until I finished the whole book). Glad that I kept at it though because it was a great read. Also gave me a much better appreciation for how the movie created such a rich world for the story, which is mostly just characters and dialogue on the page.

Difficult, disturbing, and sometimes very, very funny. A rare experiment in dialect, language, and narration that works, if you can hear the voices in your head. Glad I never met these guys.