The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | Jack Kerouac

The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | Jack Kerouac | It's Kerouac...

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The Dharma Bums (P...

	The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Jack Kerouac Penguin Classics, 2006 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Dharma Bums was published one year after On the Road made Jack Kerouac a celebrity and a spokesperson for the Beat Generation. Sparked by his contagious zest for life, the novel relates the adventures of an ebullient group of Beatnik seekers in a freewheeling exploration of Buddhism and the search for Truth.

Kerouac's best novel

If you're new to Jack Kerouac, this might be the place to start. Many people's first introduction to Kerouac is On The Road. While I love On The Road, I've read pretty much all of Kerouac's novels, and I have to say that The Dharma Bums is my favorite.

Indeed, I loved the book enough to write a companion reader for it (The Beat Handbook: 100 Days of Kerouactions), so right up front I have a bias and thought you should know about that.

In at least one of his letters (Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 2), Kerouac himself acknowledged that The Dharma Bums was 'really bettern ON THE ROAD' (p. 99). So, if you don't take my word for it, maybe you will take the author's and make this your first foray into beat literature. I don't think you'll regret it.

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It's Kerouac...

Stylistically and idealogically its Kerouac through and through. The idea of living a truly free life and one without boundaries truely provoked a lot of thought for me personally. It makes you want to be one of Ray and Japhy's friends; to go find a shack to live in and really exist in what may be the only best way to exist, free of material incarceration. I recommend this book to be read by young adults everywhere. Not all will be opened to a new way of thought and what really matters in this world but some will and it could possibly change their life for the better by not being wrapped around society's focus on material possession as symbols of achievement.

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The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac ***1/2

Both uplifting and boring. Kerouac's Dharma Bums was always one of his novels that depending on my current state I either like it or was bored. Reading this on a plane ride to Los Angeles, California it left me cold.

As always the book feels positive and is writing with excellent style, passion, and literary craftsmanship. It is inspiring and refreshing to read a piece about someone in search of bettering their spirituality while still being able to not pass judgement on others.

That is all great, but honestly this lags. The extent of detail placed on minor things that really don't effect the plot by any stretch create boring passages. This is the only Kerouac that ever bored me and it bores me to no extent.

While he wrote from his own experiences it seems to me that he sometimes became lost in something that was really only interesting to him at the time. As honest and heartfelt as that is that doesn't make it any more entertaining.

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It's OK, but ...

I didn't get much out of it. It was a nice diversion from everyday life but I kept looking for the point Kerouac was trying to make and it escaped me. I've been reading a lot of hiker, mostly Appalachian Trail, narratives and thought this would be a nice expansion of the group. I went in with little knowledge and no preconceptions about Kerouac and came away with little appreciation of his work. I'm still going to read On The Road and might revisit this review if the mood strikes me. I suppose the lack of structure is a product of his writing style but I was disappointed in how the story just ended. Again, maybe I was looking for more than he was prepared to reveal. Maybe I'm just too set in my ways. Maybe I did get the point and just don't realize it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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