I read a lot, but I'm aware that I havn't read many of what people would call classic or important works of literature, I'm a sci-fi and fantasy fan, I like good thrillers, graphic novels, a smattering of biographies and autobiographies, but I'd like to continue to expand my horizons so on my last trip to the bookshop I came back with Kerouac and Capote.

'The book that changed my life' people say, the most important novel of the Beat generation, 'A paean to the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being'.

It's rubbish, and I'm going to tell you right away what happens at the end, nothing, sod all, nowt, zilch. If you're looking for new horizons, answers to the meaning of life, or just a pleasurable and interesting read, it's not to be found within these covers.

Protagonist Sal Paradise and his group of orbiting wasters, would be hoboes and smackheads potter aimlessly from town to town across America, drinking, stealing, working a day or a week, sleeping with girls, driving cars. Kerouac describes things exactly and as banally as they happen and the whole book contains no discernable plot or coherent narrative.

I think that if you dipped into the book at random and read a page or a paragraph here or there, then skipped back or forth a few pages and read another paragraph, the book wouldn't make any less sense.

Kerouac's descriptive powers are so weak that every city, town, bar, house and gas station blur into the same sense of boredom, perhaps this is intentional, although the introduction claims that Karouac was attempting the 'Great Amercian Novel'. What he achieved was the 'Meandering Waste Of A Good Tree.'

So he wrote it all in a three week spree, so what ? So he was as high most of the time as his portrayed characters are, it shows, reading it is like listening to your drunken mate trying to explain in excruciating detail the best way to travel from Milton Keynes to Wolverhampton on a Bank Holiday.

I really can't for the life of me imagine why this is hailed as a great work, it's a poorly put together, aimless, directionless novel. When you've read the first the first ten pages, just imagine that the next 260 will be just as gripping and illuminating and then put the book down and never pick it up again. There are as many insights and revelations to be found here as there are in the hallowed pages of OK magazine. It's the sort of book that puts people right off reading, well, it will certainly deter me from trying ay more Kerouac.

RELEASE NOTES:

Leeds bookcrossers.

never read any Kerouac but obviously heard about him plenty of times, long overdue read I think. I like the releaser's comments :)

RELEASE NOTES:

got about halfway in and wasn't motivated to continue really

Picked up at tonights Leeds meet to pass onto the needy at Xmas. I've got a friend who's mum is quite ill in hospital at the moment so I'm going to ask her to take it in with her for someone stuck in hospital to read.