I found this book to be incredibly tedious. Page after page passes and nothing happens. The writing isn't consistently good, and the characters are flat and hard to like. There were a few, beautiful passages, but they were so far between that reading this book was not worth it for me. ( )

This book has a long reach; on reading it I find all kinds of echoes, the Grateful Dead singing about the American Night in "Black-Throated Wind," the same reference popping up in a novel I read the following day, and so on. Without Kerouac you never get Hunter S. Thompson, or, indeed, any of his contemporaries. On the Road should remind you that the 60s counterculture that followed was not the product of baby boom hippies, but of their forerunners, the beats; and also, that the so-called "greatest generation" so beloved of certain conservative revisionists in fact included the Beat Generation, who were in every way save their hairstyles proto-hippies. This book is, in short, at the centre of where it all began.

But ... its great influence doesn't excuse the fact that it's built on a fundamentally silly idea, that artists are somehow special, and that great art is the product of a derangement of the senses. You would think these romantic notions would have long since faded away, but no; some people still believe that if you step outside the mainstream, get drunk, and play with drugs, then any old crap you vomit onto the page, and indeed the events of your everyday life, must be Literature.

This is where Kerouac was dead wrong, and perhaps the weakest aspects of On the Road stem from the fact that he was writing his own life. Not only that, but he was in his late twenties at the time, not a period at which we might expect a finely honed sense of one's own irrelevance. So we have continual references to people who have nothing to do with the story itself, pointless anecdotes, and a narrator with no sense of his own reflection.

But ... we also have marvellous language, never more marvellous than when Kerouac writes about jazz: he sizzles and pops through these passages, which give us some of the finest music writing you'll ever read. These passages alone make the book worth reading. And there is no denying that whatever its limitations, On the Road just works. So while this book may not age as well as its worshippers might hope, it remains worth reading. ( )

This book is essentially what I would call a rite of passage. And yet, ironically (and I fully realize that using that word puts me right with the people I'm against in this), it has also come to represent a variety of clichés throughout the "creative" world. It's mocked by literary snobs and hipsters alike, especially when yet another young creative soul finds inspiration in that often quoted passage, "the only ones for me are the mad ones."

I find such judgements to be harsh. Kerouac's writing has inspired several generations since On the Road's initial publication. It's subtly in it's message that life is in the living and the creating alongside it's subversive stream of consciousness style and honesty, makes this classic an essential read during adolescence and then again in your twenties, thirties, fourties, all throughout your life. Each time a different perspective on the work and it's meaning to you will surely be gained.

A classic. ( )

This was a hard book for me to finish. It was rambling, plotless, with characters that I didn't like, but didn't dislike enough to care what happened to them. They drank, partied, moved on, RINSE, REPEAT. Any point Kerouac was trying to get across gets lost in the fact that these guys are useless druggie trash and completely disrespect laws, other people, even themselves. (Note: my husband liked it more than I did. Maybe more of a guy book.) ( )

Swell, feverish, late-adolescent genius. ( )