Candy

I know it's strange of me but I love books that center around drug addiction. These can be some of the most powerful books ever written - Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, Smack by Melvin Burgess, and dozens of others. Most of these get turned into movies because the subject can be so moving and disturbing and memorable. One of my favorite books that fits into this genre is Candy by Luke Davies - a story about a man who falls in love with Candy, both a girl of that name and heroin. The sub-title is A Novel of Love and Addiction and that's exactly what it is. The book at times is disjointed, just short little scenes, the narrator talking on and on as if you're actually in his mind while he's using. The opening paragraph of the book had me hooked:

"There were good times and bad times, but in the beginning there were more good times. When I first met Candy: those were like the days of juice, when everything was bountiful. Only much later did it all start to seem like sugar and blood, blood and sugar, the endless dark heat." [Random House, Incorporated]

And now, the book has been turned into a movie starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish (the actress now famous for supposedly having an affair with Ryan Phillippe and breaking up his marriage). It opens in limited release tomorrow so the odds are I won't get to see this one until Netflix gets it but I'm still excited for it. I suppose it's weird calling a novel about heroin a love story but actually, all drug novels are love stories. Everyone loves drugs when they're using them. The world seems so beautiful when they have the drugs. It's when those drugs run out do the stories get really interesting.