On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) | Jack Kerouac

On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) | Jack Kerouac | eh

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On the Road (Pengu...

	On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) Jack Kerouac Penguin (Non-Classics), 1999 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 629 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Almost as bad as Catcher in the Rye......

This book is a mediocrity. It is readable and fluent, but there is no real substance, either intellectual or historical. Its appeal puzzles me, but I guess I can see how it might "speak" to non-athletic lower-middle-class white kids from small towns, with 115 IQs and nose-rings, who like to sit in diners late at night, smoking cigarettes and talking about poetry, tattoos, and Tom Waits.

Kerouac is a competent writer, not a good one. (Tom Wolfe--there's a good writer.) He displays no real creative well in this book...he simply recounts his various (rather boring, often drunken) interactions with his coterie of artsy-fartsy pals, and their frequent road-trips.

The adventures are lackluster--Kerouac goes to "Frisco," and goes to Denver...then goes back to "Frisco"...then goes back to Denver--and the friends are, for the most part, pretentious, uninteresting, drug-addled hipster douchebags.

The fact that this middling book is listed on the MLA 100 is a travesty...were there any justice in the world, its slot (#55) would be occupied by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

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If you've read Thomas Wolfe this book isn't going to seem that great or original.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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