Like South of No North, this book has its ups and downs, although I like Notes of a Dirty Old Man slightly better for several reasons.

Along with the series Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook includes another deep look into Charles Bukowski's life.I was expecting something witty and intelligent, what I got was violent, crude, misogynistic and highly unpleasant, in the beginning at least. Because when I finally, after three days, managed to turn the last page of this 200 page book, I just didn't care.

Once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This is Bukowski at his visceral best - a collection of his columns originally published in 'Open City' in the 1960s.The stories are filled with reference to alcohol, drugs, sexism, sex (a lot of it), toxicity in multiple shapes and forms. Others were sad to me, such as a vivid recounting of how years of beatings and other abuse turns someone into a living but kind of mostly dead person. He displays many of the outcomes that most people with alcoholism show as well: self-control problems, difficulty in identifying feelings, apathy toward external reality, difficulty in emotional processing, and more depressed and/or anxious, and a face deformed by its abuses.

Without taking his eyes from that nonexistent spot straight ahead, he reaches into the inside pocket of his coat and takes out a small object.

Bukowski is so unflinchingly honest about everything, so don't read this if you can't handle the truth. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Oddly enough, academia and peer(pressure) groups didn’t find Burroughs to be a problem at that time. He also exposes things some might wish they had never seen--prostitution, murder, abuse, rape, suicide, suicide by alcoholism, even necrophilia.