Sunday, May 27, 2012

On The Road

I forgot how much I loved Jack Kerouac! What a great  book On the Road is. Such sweet poetry in his descriptions of people and places. The trip into Mexico (in the last part of the book) sings.

It's funny, I read this book years ago and did not care for it - even as I was reading and loving his other works. I had get past Dean Moriarity and his many, many sins. What a guy he was. Turns out he (in real life, Neal Cassady) was muse for two authors of two other Time 100 books, as well: Robert Stone modeled Hicks (the psychopath) after Cassady in Dog soldiers and Ken Kesey based the character, Randall Patrick McMurphy on him.
And I probably needed to forgive Kerouac his sins too. It's hard to watch him (as the narrator in On the Road) drinking so hard, knowing that that habit will be the cause of his death. I gravitated instead to other his other more sober books -- like Big Sur, but On the Road has all of the same great writing as those other books, and the same positive (and positively) manic energy that is hard to beat. Five stars in my book!