On the Road

After a month and a half of on-again, off-again reading, I have finally finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This book had been idolized, raved about and put on a pedestal so it felt like I was joining some kind of cult just by reading it.

But reading a book that was basically legendary, I found it left a lot to be desired. I had really high expectations when I began on page one and those expectations were not fulfilled. The narrations were too jumpy and there was a profound lack of detail. It was something that worked in fellow Beat-Generation author William S Burroughs's Junky but only left me wishing there was more substance in On the Road.

Once I started reading On the Road in class or at home, it was fun to read. It was entertaining to emerse myself in Kerouac and his friends' lives (as he used pseudonyms for each character). But it was hard to find the motivation to sit down and read the book (which is completely the opposite for Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest which I am reading now).

One thing unrelated to the novel itself but I find really interesting is that Neal Cassady is featured as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and now I am reading One Flew... and Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady totally hung out together in the sixties. So the two books that took my interest and that I am reading one after the other have a pop-culture legend to link the two.