On The Road is a book I have intended to read for years and I’ve finally found the time for. I was certainly wasting time in getting to it, if the first quarter is any indication. It’s a fantastic novel so far, filled with a facinating mix of innocense and corruption.
As Amazon.com tells us:
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac’s works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac’s writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac’s real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac’s alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.
And an audio book’s description says:
On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac’s years traveling North America with his friend Neal Cassady, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” As “Sal Paradise” and “Dean Moriarty,” the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road a work of lasting importance.
I’ve been reading the book on my Clie, and it has been a surprisingly comfortable experience. I expected the small screen size (320 x 200) and the fact I’m reading a book on a screen instead of paper to be awkward, but it was not at all. In fact, I found it to be fully enjoyable. This will certainly prove beneficial for my hope of someday taking to the road (rail, sea or air) myself, as it will always be important to me to have quality literature as company on any journey.