This book bored me to tears. I dreaded each time I had to read this.On The Road is a book about a man child young man named Sal who hitches rides across the country, giggling, having a string of meaningless relationships with characters that never reappear, and Sal worshipping his bestie, Dean, who has very little redeeming qualities.The beginning of this book was promising. I thought it was going to be like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it wasn’t funny. In terms of a travelogue, this isn’...

I think this book, which launched Kerouac's career and gave him insta-fame, has to be seen as a product of its time.I found it a chore to read, a long dull boast about a series of road trips. It's populated by vacuous largely despicable alcoholics with zero impulse control and an unshakeable belief that they are deeply profound observers of the human condition.One saving grace of the book is that Kerouac has an unusual writing style with a strong voice that he uses well, especially when describi...

Kerouac's masterpiece breathes youth and vigor for the duration and created the American bohemian "beat" lifestyle which has been the subject of innumerable subsequent books, songs, and movies. I have read this at least two or three times and always feel a bit breathless and invigorated because of the restlessness of the text and the vibrance of the characters. There was an extraordinary exhibit at the Pompidou Center earlier this year where the original draft in Kerouac's handwriting was laid o...

A rolling stone gathers no moss…Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.Roads weave into a tapestry of life… Roads interlace into a labyrinth… There is no end to them… One can’t reach a finish… One can only stop… Or to be stopped.A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…There is a time to sow wild oats and a time to reap what was sown……there was nothing behind me any more, all my bridges were gone and I didn’...

This is the book which has given me anxiety attacks on sleepless nights.This is the book which has glared at me from its high pedestal of classical importance in an effort to browbeat me into finally finishing it. And this is that book which has shamed me into feigning an air of ignorance every time I browsed any of the countless 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die lists.Yes Jack Kerouac, you have tormented me for the past 3 years and every day I couldn't summon the strength to open another page o...

Herein lies that gnarly root of our all-American Sense of Entitlement. Coupling this with "Huck Finn" as THE quintessential American Novel is One Enormous mistake: Twain at least entertains, at least follows through with his intention, with his American take on the Quixotean legend; Kerouac might just be the biggest literary quack of the 20th century! The book is awkward, structured not as ONE single trip, but composed of a few coast-to-coast coastings, all having to do with this overused motif....

A View from the CouchOTR has received some negative reviews lately, so I thought I would try to explain my rating.This novel deserves to lounge around in a five star hotel rather than languish in a lone star saloon.DisclaimerPlease forgive my review. It is early morning and I have just woken up with a sore head, an empty bed and a full bladder.ConfesssionLet me begin with a confession that dearly wants to become an assertion.I probably read this book before most of you were born.So there!Wouldn'...

This is probably the worst book I have ever finished, and I'm forever indebted to the deeply personality-disordered college professor who assigned it, because if it hadn't been for that class I never would've gotten through, and I gotta tell you, this is the book I love to hate.I deeply cherish but don't know that I fully agree with Truman Capote's assessment: that _On the Road_ "is not writing at all -- it's typing."Lovely, Turman, but let's be clear: typing by itself is fairly innocuous -- thi...

I've been thinking about this book a lot lately, so I figured that I'd go back and write something about it. When I first read this book, I loved it as a piece of art, but its effect on me was different than I expected. So many people hail Kerouac as the artist who made them quit their jobs and go to the road, become a hippie or a beat and give up the rest. When I read it though, I had been completely obsessed with hippie culture for a long time, and it caused me to steer away from it for a whil...

I'm supposed to like On the Road, right? Well, I don't. I hate it and I always have. There are a lot of reasons why I hate it. I find Kerouac's attitude toward the world pathetically limited and paternalistic. In On the Road he actually muses about how much he wishes that he could have been born "a Negro in the antebellum South," living a simple life free from worry, and does so seemingly without any sense of irony. On every page, the book is about how Kerouac (a young, white, middle-class, ...