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When I was younger, On The Road and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning opened my mind to travel and wandering.

I read it at 18 and I wish I had read it way earlier. It taught me to be mad, to live life, to get out and see the world. But looking back at it, it also taught me how to be responsible and how to not to be a jerk.

It, above all, showed me what beautiful writing is.

I also read "On the road" far too late in life, and it just didn't work for me.

On the Road by Kerouac.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

I read Pessoa to feel not so alone. I read Kerouac to feel alive. I read Meditations to not lose my head.

Completely offtopic, but...

i've never been able to finish it. The repetitiveness bored me out of my skull. It's on the stack of unfinished books with, among others, On the Road (by Kerouac) and Catch-22 (by Heller). I'd rather re-read Gormenghast (by Peake), The Plague (by Camus) or any book by Marukami.

If you want to liken Curtis to Keroac, that's a good comparison. Both make shallow things that appeal to you until your tastes have matured somewhat. I'm not going to say AA is Ulysses, meanwhile, but all of AA's competitors' sites were designed by commitee, too, and it worked great for them.

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel)

The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien)

This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
Essentially a children's sci-fi novel, but it doesn't read that way.

A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
*One of my personal favorites, but most people either love or hate it, so maybe save this towards the end.

On my own reading list:

Speedboat (Renata Adler)

Money (Martin Amis)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Kerouac's "On the Road" is another that I read often. Somewhere in the once-a-year phase.

"Slaughterhouse Five" is another I read with some regularity, and I find it different every time I read it, as I have a new set of personal beliefs with which to apply to it approximately every time.

I enjoyed "The Great Gatsby" as a story, but it didn't connect with me in the way it seems to connect with others. However, I suspect that read in a different moment of my life its impact could be profoundly different.

"On The Road" by Jack Kerouac was a liberating, mind-expanding experience with no drugs involved. Kerouac's free-form style and open-ended approach to life made a great impression.

"Cosmic Loom" by Dennis Elwell debunked the narrow-minded, reductionist attitudes of scientists towards astrology and opened up my mind to the value of symbolism.

I read her translation of Tao Te Ching while waiting in 2 hours of traffic for a ferry and it was wonderful and really informs the rest of her works.

I'm currently reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, on the history of U.S. water policy in the West. Frustratingly dry.

Also re-reading On the Road but unlike 16 years ago I'm reading the 'Original Scroll Edition' this time: no chapters, paragraph breaks, invented character names, censors, etc. The book you read in high school is, in fact, the novelization of the original, which Kerouac wrote in twenty days. I've kept my beat-up paperback copy of the 'novel' nearby and I've preferred the scroll edition for the most part.

On the nightstand:
- Annals of the Former World by John McPhee 300 pages into it, but I got a bit tired of the redundancy inherent in combining multiple books into one.
- The Vulgar Tongue by Jonathon Green. 40 pages in. I've been looking for a copy of the dictionary.
- The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino.

- Principles, Ray Dalio

- L'Etranger, Albert Camus

- Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire

- The Dao of Capital, Mark Spitznagel

- Howl, Allen Ginsberg

- On the Road, Jack Kerouac

I could go on and on...

I can't help but believe that Kerouac must have had some misgivings about his lifestyle. Yes he writes about everything being angelic and awesome on the road. But the story also takes on a Sisyphean vibe as they continue to wander across the country over and over and over again. The characters are led back to the road again and again to constantly chase the next ecstatic revelation in hopes that they will find some meaning somewhere. It's like the harder they look for enlightenment, the further they get from it - a theme which coincidentally is very Zen and something I think Kerouac must have been conscious of since he was a pretty serious student of Zen buddhism.

Reading the book as a self-critical, partial satire of the Beat lifestyle introduces a lot more nuance and helps to appreciate the counterculture while also realizing that they weren't so stupid as to not acknowledge the flaws in their own philosophy and lifestyle.

I don't think it takes a special person to enjoy, but it does require a particular mindset that any given person may or may not have at the time. It's sort of how "Catcher in the Rye" is brilliant when you're a teenager, and how very, very different it is when you're an adult.

On the Road is not the sort of book that I'd spend much time with now, but I've grown towards, and to appreciate the brevity of Hemingway or Elmore Leonard more now, but if you're not inclined towards Joyce, wait a while. If it never happens, so be it.

I feel the same way about Catcher in the Rye. I didn't grow up with it and when I picked it up as an adult I found it dull dull dull. I'm pretty sure that with enough digging one might find something interesting here, but it's buried too deep for me. Much like anything by James Joyce, this seems to be a book for Lit majors.

If I do, I'm not going to plan anything, just randomly go for a month only with a destination in mind. I would be camping a lot more and try to stay away from hotels and the usual boring highways.

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

The Society of the Spectacle by Debord

Nihilist Communism by Monsieur Dupont

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

And other classics: 1984, brave new world, planet of the apes, huckleberry fin, slaughter house five (anything by vonnegut actually!). Anything I have managed to get by Stafford Beer has been incredible as well not only as a work of relating to systems analysis but on a philisophical and political level at the same time. Too bad most of his books are in the hundreds of dollars. If you get the chance download Designing Freedom. I will see if I can find a link again.

As a literature major, I think you're misrepresenting the 20th century; more specifically, the '50s.

The '50s gave birth to the Beat poets, Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg (who wrote poetry that would be considered pretty vulgar even by today's standards, including highly detailed sex orgies), Burroughs' Naked Lunch, etc.

Basically, the '50s (and other points in the 20th century), had a lot of literature which was less elegant and less vulnerable--just as experimental as today's works of arts, just as cynical and dishonest.

EB White was a purist. That doesn't mean he was any better or worse. But he does have a particular style he is partial to.

There is more candid, vulnerable, and elegant literature being written today, just as there was in the late 20th century (late 90s). If you tell me the themes you're interested in, I might be able to recommend some stuff.

> But this is supposed to be okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...

It is a safe bet that any book of 1957 still remembered (definitely Atlas Shrugged and On the Road, believe it or not The Anatomy of Criticism, probably not some of the others) has long since paid back the publisher's investment beyond expectations.