On the Road

I really have trouble writing reviews on books I fall in love with or that change my life. It's just, how do you explain your deep inner love towards a book to other people? It's extremely difficult. So this will probably just be a ramble of thoughts.

At the time I picked up On the Road, I had been having an extreme desire to travel and see the world. As I got further and further into the story, the desire became a need, you know that needy, heart-fluttery feeling you get under your chest? I was experiencing that from start to finish. I didn't read this book in one sitting though, because this feeling kept arising I could only handle it in short bursts, so I settled for four chapters a day.

I LOVED the character of Dean Moriarty, not in the "I have a crush on a fictional character" way, but in the way that I could relate him back to people in my own life. The symbolism at the end of the book that relates back to the most famous quote in this book, broke my heart "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." Dean IS this quote, but all roman candles burn out and so did Dean at the very end. All he was at the end was a sputtering, but beautiful roman candle. When I came to this realisation in the last few pages, I began to cry for him. It reminded me a bit of Mcmurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Such a big, wild, vibrant man and then to have that stripped of him, it is heartbreaking.

I highly recommend this to people who want to see the world and have the sudden desire to do so. Five out of five stars.

This story changed my life. I am more determined to see the world than ever, my savings are growing and so is my passion for the world.

I understand it was wildly popular and influential … but I just never drank the koolaid.

i love reading red flag books

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’t it. At one point, Sal travels to Detroit, but there aren’t even any details.

The entire book is some form of “Hey, man. That’s cool. That’s right. Cool. It’s all cool. Let’s go find some girls. Let’s talk about talking. Let’s hitch a ride.” Nothing happened.

Sorry, Sal, Dean just isn't that into you.

Some critics argue that On the Road is a metaphor for the lost freedom of the American Dream. That is laughable. Sal and Dean have no ambition and no morals. Sal is offered a job with Eddie at one point, but he doesn't show up. Instead of putting in a bit of hustle, he bums off of women, particulary heartbreaking is his abuse of Terry, a single mother. Sal literally sleeps when he is supposed to be working!

Additionally, Sal is a poverty poser. Of course, it is all fun and games for him because he can always give his aunt a jingle and request more money as soon as being poor isn't fun anymore. She unquestioningly sends him cash without a moment's notice. How convenient!

This book is astonishingly bad. Although the characters were unpredictable, the character response was not. Anything could have happened, but the characters would just say something along the lines of, “That’s right! It’s all good.” So the suspense never increased. Good grief! I was so bored that I was hoping that Dean would step in front of a train so the book could finally be over.

In 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote this book on a giant scroll with no formatting and no paragraph breaks. It should have stayed on the scroll. The jumbo paragraphs don’t help, and this book does feel like one really long rambling that doesn’t go anyplace.

At least now I can go around telling people that I have read Kerouac but I would rather have the 11 hours that I spent reading this back.

How much I spent:
Softcover text (Penguin Classics version) - £9.99 from Waterstones
Audiobook – 1 Audible Credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or roughly $9.56 per credit)

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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I am a firm believer in a checklist for life. This wouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows me, for I am always attempting to enforce order onto chaos. This was my favorite part about college and lawschool; the fact that it broke life into fall semester, Christmas break, spring semester, and summer. It created a marvelous little cycle of struggle and reward.

Life is not necessarily chaotic. However, it is certainly undelineated, uncertain, sprawling, sudden, and unknowable. It is only bounded by birth and death; everything else is guesswork and prophecy. A checklist for life - or if you are fan of crappy Jack Nicholson movies, a "bucket list" - creates a kind of framework in which to live. It provides tangible goals for what sometimes seems an existential struggle for meaning.

Now, I'm sure most people, if asked what they want, would say things like "marriage" or "kids" or "a house with a yard." These are all wonderful aspirations, and far be it from me to disparage any of these. My list is a little different, though. For instance, I would place my desire for "kids" at the same level of scuba diving. (Just kidding, dear!). Furthermore, a lot of my checklist is really specific as to time-and-place. I've run a couple marathons, but what I really want is to do the Midnight Run in Alaska. Also, I'm a lot like Abed from Community in my desire to reenact scenes from my favorite movies (lest you fear, my favorite movie is not Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer).

Why do I mention all this? Well, one reason is I tend to ramble, a lot like your drunk uncle on Thanksgiving. Also, I read this book because it was on my list: read On the Road while backpacking in Europe. A few years ago, on the verge of just such a trip, I decided I needed a copy in my backpack. So, I bought it from the bookstore, dog-eared the pages, spilled some coffee on the cover, and boarded my plane.

On the Road is one of those classics that often end up on a different kind of list: the list of overrated books. It's very generation specific, and perhaps this has something to do with its decline and fall. I didn't have great expectations for it. All I knew was that it was short, famous, and fit into my frame pack. To my happy surprise, I loved it.

The old story, now widely discredited, is that Kerouac wrote the book in one long mescaline binge. In reality, the only thing he was on was coffee. Moreover, as stream-of-conscious as the book feels, it's really the work of a master craftsman. There is a lot of thought put into the sentences, and the fact you can't see the seams is a testament to Kerouac.

Just dig (to use the parlance) the first three lines:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.

What a start! There's so much information packed into those lines; so much a hint of what's to come. Once I started, I didn't want to stop, which worked out fine, since I had no one to talk to on the night-train from Madrid to Lisbon.

There isn't much to say by way of plot. There's lots of driving, back and forth across this country, in the years following WWII. Don't be mislead by the title; this isn't a single journey so much as a series of digressions. There's boozing and drugs and women, though it's all told in a very chaste manner. There's a vivid image of an America that no longer exists, but is made to feel so real, so immediate, that I felt it might. n  On the Roadn is semiautobiographical, but I don't really care for all the tertiary stuff: the hipster scene and the "beat" generation.

A lot of characters walk on and off stage; the central figure, though, is Dean Moriarty:

He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.

The writing is incredibly. Despite plot's absence, I was propelled forward. Everyone remembers this gem, the basis for a million inspirational posters:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

But there is more great writing where that came from. For all his reputation as a mad man looking for dames and kicks, Kerouac turns out to be a pretty good traveloguer, writing about San Francisco's "potato-patch fog" and a "lilac evening" in Denver. His description of a nighttime ride on the back of a truck, through a sleeping, rural, mid-century America, is one of the most immediate, tactile things I've read. Kerouac made me really nostalgic for a period that disappeared decades before my birth. Reading On the Road was a lot like going to my grandpa's house as a kid. It gave me a soft melancholy I really can't explain.

And yes, it's a good book to stick in your backpack when you set out on your travels and aren't really sure where you're going: "Our battered suitcases were were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."

Um relato duro e alucinado da América na década de 1940.
O livro relata várias viagens de costa a costa nos Estados Unidos. Viagens em camioneta, de carro, à boleia. Relata também as pessoas que se vão conhecendo nessas viagens.

If nothing else, an interesting read because of its madness. It travels geographically and aesthetically through American roads and landscapes. At times it reads like dry travelogue journalism, at other times it reads like mad catholic poetry, and sometimes, like it tends to be marketed, like a hip jazz-beat youth novel.
I was surprised by how much I was moved by the ending, because despite glimpses of genius, it frequently frustrated and bored me. It sealed itself in my mind as a flawed, yet tragic and meaningful novel.

The cliché is correct: you have to read this book before you're 25, or maybe even before 20. I guess that at that age you will be attracted by the careless freedom with which the main character enters "real life" and goes searching for himself, like in a quest. The fascination for his friend Dean has something endearing and childlike, but as in Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier I am not captivated by it. But then again, I read this when I was 50.

I know, you have to see this as the quintessential novel of the Beat Generation, and as such it sure is of historical interest. But what really annoyed me was the implicit sexism, perhaps typical for male writers in the middle of the last century. On the positive side there are the attractive descriptions Kerouac offers of the places on the road; they make you dream of distant horizons.