The 306 Greatest Books #169 - On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The book can be found on the Observer and BBC Book Lists.

As one of the seminal books of the Beat Generation, On the Road gets a sort of larger than life impression every time that I hear about it. Before I started the book I had thought it was a sort of autobiography/life lessons tale and that is sort of how it turned up after I read it. The book is essentially an autobiography, except with the names changed and, as far as I am aware, some of the circumstances adjusted for the narrative. The book essentially follows Sal Paradise in the first person role (standing in for Kerouac himself), along with the other prominent figure in the book, Dean Moriarty, standing in for his real life friend Neal Cassady. The narrative is broken up into 5 parts, each of which encompasses a unique cross country trip where Sal "just has to get away". Often times the trips are hitchhiking, bus travel, or driving a car into the dirt, and all of them are with Dean along with an assortment of other characters that come and go throughout the narrative. Taking place in the mid 1940's, post war, we are getting a different picture of America than we have today. Yes, things are cheaper, such as gas, but people are making much less and we see into the lives of those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. We live with them through the book and talk to them and really get a sense about who they are and what matters to them. That along with the prose, which is absolutely riveting, really draws you into the story. The style of the book is written based on a rambling, run-on letter that Kerouac once received from Cassady with the sentences sometimes going on and on, and other times being cut rather short. Ideas, themes, and questions are often brought up in the story and then immediately dropped, never to be answered or even acknowledged again. Kerouac's descriptions though, and his often poetic prose, makes this a beauty to read with bits and pieces of contemplative fiction and philosophy creeping in that is often profound in its take. 

With all that being said, there is a major negative to the book. And that is that it's content is often homophobic, racist, misogynistic, pedophiliac, and probably lots of other negative adjectives that I can't think of at the moment. It's like these characters dive into these worlds of sex and drugs and are still able to pick out the negative stereotypes about everything. But it is weird, in that they "love" those stereotypes so it is a kind of "romanticized racism". With all of the gay characters in the book it is also super weird at how homophobic the book really is, however reading outside the book, I found out that Kerouac was rather a homophobe himself despite having almost all of his friends it seems in the LGTBQIA community. And although the book is often romanticized about it's "get out and see life" message, I see it as a tragedy, with the character of Dean slowly destroying his life through one method or another, and a character that could seriously have used medical and therapy intervention that could have perhaps helped with his constant downward spiral throughout the book. He gets to the point where he is often characterized as not being able to speak or make a sensical thought by the end of the book. If anything I see this book as a warning, and not necessarily a romantic adventure book. Overall, I would say that despite the beautiful prose, and the fantastic look at America in that time period, it is hard to recommend given all of the negatives throughout the plot and I would have to say unless you are really interested in reading it you could likely skip is and be fine.  

The 306 Greatest Books #168 - The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List.

Taking me almost exactly two years to finish, The Complete Stories by Edgar Allan Poe was the version of the book I chose to read for this list. It is listed as The Complete Tales and therefore I assumed The Complete Stories would work. I collect the Everyman's Library of books and the version they had only included the short stories and none of the poems. Still, at over 950 quite dense pages and 68 stories, it took a while to work through. That, and Poe's writing style was a bit more, verbose, than I was expecting. Of the 68 stories, I had actually only heard of, and read, three or four of them, with most remaining a complete mystery to me. The book is arranged chronologically and this is both a help, because you can see how his writing style evolved over time, but also a hindrance because in the beginning he wrote very sesquipedalian (ha! now there's a word). This means his vocabulary was so large that trying to read any of his early stories was an exercise in frustration, because not many people could understand his writings without extensive dictionary work. He was plainly brilliant, but his writing had a high barrier to it and I quickly grew tired of trying to wade through the text. I kept trying again and again over the two years and I noticed he eventually was able to hit a rhythm where his prose, while still having some larger words, was "dumbed down" enough to allow the regular reader to be able to enjoy the text. This turning point actually happened right around the time he published his longest work, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". It was from here that I really started to enjoy his work. 

Personally, I am not the biggest fan of short stories because the quality is often all over the place. Some are great and some not so much, and I feel Poe is much the same. He wrote many of his stories with these random asides at the beginning that felt less a part of the story and more like he was philosophizing about anything. But once you get past these random asides, usually about a page or two in length, the story kicks in and is often enjoyable. His well known stories, like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" are truly masterpieces and noticeably enjoyable amongst his other works. There is a reason they are picked out among his ample catalogue. But there are others I would recommend as well including the afore mentioned "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", "The Premature Burial", "The Gold-Bug", and one that is especially important in literary history, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". As I was reading "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" I was convinced Poe just ripped of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character. But as I thought about it, the timing didn't seem right and I looked it up and sure enough, one of Doyle's influences was Poe. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is essentially the original detective fiction. Poe then followed it up with two sequel short stories, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and "The Purloined Letter". And although these aren't the sitting on the edge of your seat thrillers that we know of today in many detective stories, they are still enjoyable for what they are and a fun mystery to work through. Overall, I would say that the majority of Poe's work is excessively difficult to wade through and I wouldn't recommend most people to attempt it, however many of his works do stand out as simply outstanding and those are the ones everyone should cherry pick to read.