A few years ago, to celebrate 4/20, Sam Munson at the Daily Beast wrote an article praising “The Best Stoner Novels.” Not a bad list—Wonder Boys, sure, Invisible Man, a bit of a stretch, The Savage Detectives, a very big stretch, but sure, why not. Anyway, six more stoner novels (not that we advocate the smoking of the weed)—
Junkie, William Burroughs
Burroughs’s (surprisingly lucid) early novel Junkie may take its name from heroin, but it’s full of weed smoking. Lesson: weed smoking leads to heroin. And the inevitable search for yage.
Doc Sportello, the wonky PI at the off-center of Pynchon’s California noir, is always in the process of lighting another joint, if not burning his fingers on the edges of a roach. A fuzzy mystery with smoky corners.
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Hal Incandenza, protagonist of Wallace’s opus, spends much of his time hiding in the tunnels of Enfield Tennis Academy, feeding his bizarre marijuana addiction, which is, in many ways, more of an addiction to a secret ritual than to a substance. Hal’s hardly the only character in IJ who likes his Mary Jane; there’s a difficult section near the novel’s beginning that features a minor character preparing to go on a major weed binge. His pre-smoking anxiety works as a challenge to any reader seeking to enter the world of Infinite Jest.
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
I’m pretty sure “pipe-weed” isn’t tobacco.
I kind of hated Chronic City, a novel where characters seem to light up joints on every other page. It seems to have been written in an ambling, rambling fog, absent of any sense of immediacy, urgency, or, uh, plot. Bloodless stuff, but, again, very smoky.
Okay. Stoner has nothing to do with marijuana. But, hey, it’s called Stoner, right?
Bonus short story: Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”
Carver’s classic story features a myopic narrator who comes up against his own shortcomings when he meets an old friend of his wife, a blind man who ironically sees deeper than he does. After drinking too much booze, they spark up, share a doob, and take in a documentary about European cathedrals. Great stuff.
Biblioklept 
Pretty much everything by DeLillo works wonderfully.
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What about “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” byt Douglas Adams and another good one “Good Omens” by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
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I was aiming to think more along the lines of non-genre. Besides LoTR on the list above, it’s stuff I would read while taking notes, which I generally don’t do while having a pipe going, except for DeLillo (though parts of Will Self’s Great Apes was another recent exception), for reasons I haven’t full pinned down yet.
That said, yours would (and parts of the Guide have been) make good stoned reads. Actually, all of of Terry Pratchet is a wonder to read, in any state of mind.
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Reblogged this on Bookbilly and commented:
It’s a day late, but here’s your 4/20 post!
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Pretty sure this list is better than the Daily Beast one. Also, I remember a Raymond Carver story that’s essentially two couples sitting around a new water pipe and eating popsicles and giggling. Titled “What’s in Alaska” or something like that.
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