1001+ Books: On the Road

1001+ Books:

#6 - On the Road

by: Jack Kerouac (1957)

       A book, at it's best, can be a window into the soul of another human being, another mind at work with ideas about the way things are and what not and all that goes on in the world to them. This is such a book, less a narrative, more a wild screaming road down out and through the great landscape of the world known as America, buzzing and zooming past characters and beats through the night hopped up on booze and tea and life! It's a generation definer, a snapshot in the history of the highways and routes and roots and wayward travelers in the time of freedom on the open road and wild abandon down life's ephemeral ways with reckless youth and infinite, spiraling life force that permeates throughout the text like the blooming headlights passing you in the dark of the American dream. Quite the ride, and that's what it is above most everything else: a ride, not a story. A life, not a linear line or a narrative structure.

       Dean Moriarty is not the protagonist of the book, but he is what the book is about, for lack of a better phrase or term. Dean is a rambunctious, crazy, and wild man who travels the American landscape with friends and strangers in the eternal pursuit of kicks. Getting his kicks is, for him, achieving the very American dream, as it were, and finding his moments and swathes of grace to enshroud himself in and breathe in with fire and vigor that the people around him can only hang onto and become hurtled along with him in his mad voyage. He is the touchstone of everything wild and careless and free in the world (or at least the USA) and he attracts people who want to be like him like flies on sugar, and repels others like oil on water. Some get him (it), others don't. Truman Capote didn't, deriding the book by calling it typing, not writing. I feel like I understand Dean. I'd like to be him. That's not to say I would like to be his friend, or even be around him. That's not my life, but reading this book makes me feel, however briefly, that I wish it were.

       So what's it about (the book)? It's about America, and the open road, and the burning youth and desire for freedom, and not much else. The story is told from the perspective of Sal, who is infatuated with Dean and tells his story in some kind of a crazy remembrance of himself and things that he felt and things that happened to him. He recounts his various adventures with Dean and other friends and lovers, relishing the times they had together traveling across the country there and back and all over again. It is a breathless, free roaming book full of little moments and unwavering momentum that never really breaks down. Nothing, and everything, seems to happen all the time, and it has the wild dash spirit of the characters lives. Apparently autobiographical, it is a keen insight into the mind of a madman, a man high on life, man!

       But what is it really about? It is about a certain lifestyle, and a certain kind of person that can simultaneously be a loathsome detriment and a kind of crazy beauty and purity, like fire that is so alive yet so dangerous to touch. It's about being totally free, and the consequences that come with freedom. Dean is free, but if you look at his life, and simply look into the future a few years, you see an accident waiting to happen, one that is inevitable. The book doesn't dwell on it too much, but there is certainly a feeling of things turning out badly for the lives of the people Dean touches. He leaves a line of bastard children across the States like a trail of abandoned eggs waiting to go bad or break to easily. He steals cars, and you have to think about the people who's cars are being stolen at some point. At one point he is confronted by his friends, he accuse him of being a user and a con man, only worried about his personal satisfaction and nothing else. Sal defends him, but in his heart he knows it's probably true. It's hard not to get wrapped up in the glory of Deans blaze, and you end up feeling life's pure excitement hit you like a lightning bolt when he is around. But he leaves a path of destruction, something he seems to be running from and never looking back at.

       It's a cultural touchstone, and a bonafide classic, as well as a divisive and polarizing one. You either have the patience for the never ending exuberance and wild prose Kerouac spills out, or you don't. I'm glad I do, because it made this a fascinating and powerfully raw and visceral work. Bonus points to Will Patton for being the perfect reader for this story, giving it an amazing life force and propulsion. I feel it may have been a difficult read without him doing great on the audiobook.

   Rating: A-

1001+ Books: Breakfast of Champions

1001+ Books:

#5 - Breakfast of Champions

by: Kurt Vonnegut

       Tip: don't listen to this book, it is clearly meant to be a visual experience as opposed to your straightforward narrative. The book is apparently littered with various hand drawn illustrations by Vonnegut, that have to be described (admittedly somewhat humorously) by the reader. Speaking of the reader, John Malkovich is simultaneously perfect for the reading of a Vonnegut book and an incredibly ill choice for the reading of any audiobook. He lisps, which is part of the charm, but also can be frustratingly hard to follow, especially with his jerky, disjointed, flowed together movement from one sentence to the next. Part of me feels I should try actually reading it, but there simply isn't the time with 1001 books to get through. Unfortunately my experience with the novel, in a car going down the interstate at sonically abundant speeds with a narrator who seems to be mildly impaired in some way or another, may unfairly lower the rating of it.

       Anyway, despite the slightly imperfect conditions to which I experienced the book, it was certainly interesting, but nowhere near the absolute genius of Slaughterhouse-Five. One thing is definitely is is hilarious. Vonnegut remains a master of satire, and his sensibility especially shines through with Malkovich's reading, which is, like i said, imperfect, yet well suited to the author. Vonnegut's observations of humanity, and his insane, funny ideas about the world are beautiful and frightening to behold. He frequently compares people to meat machines filling out their daily purposes, but also describes them as unwavering columns of light. The soul inside the machine. Race relations in America are rarely presented so honestly and unforgivingly as in this. Each character is immediately described as either black or white, and their genealogy is often detailed, like describing black characters as being descended from slaves.

       Overall, this is a solid book, but the experience I had with it could have been better I think. The ideas are provocative and inspire much thought, and the execution and presentation of the ideas is often perfect and incredibly humorous. Not quite the heights I know the author can reach, but enjoyable all the same.

   Rating: B

1001+ Books: Midnight's Children

1001+ Books:

#4 - Midnight's Children

by: Salman Rushdie (1981)

       This is a book to fall in love with, a book to enwrap yourself in, to be experienced, to be led along by the hand by into the twirling, fantastic world it creates with it's spiraling, whirling, and magical prose. It is a book of many things into one thing, a story of scale colossal and detail minute, which relishes in its telling and confounds in the same likeness as well. It is a story of India, and of one boys importance in the story, and his family, and the 1001 children of midnight, and a perforated sheet, and a lapis encrusted silver spittoon, and a nose and knees, knees and a nose, and love, and hate, and death, and hope, and magicians, and 500 year old whores, and smelly old boat men, and all the many other things that make up the wide world.

       Saleem Sinai, who was born on the stroke of midnight, at the exact moment of India's independence, is the narrator and ultimate focus of the novel. But the book goes far beyond him into his parents and grandparents histories, and also the history and prehistory of his country, mirroring each other throughout their developments in time. It is encompassing of many things, but overall it is about families and connections, and histories which leak throughout them. Immensely enjoyable in its characters and story, especially in its complete insight into said characters thoughts, feelings, and lives. A book as rich as India herself, and as colorful and alive as well. 

   Rating: A-

1001+ Books: The Fall of the House of Usher

1001+ Books:

#3 - The Fall of the House of Usher

by: Edgar Allen Poe (1839)

       Sometimes, in this time of gore-splattered sequel-spun frightless and biteless jump scare embellishing marketing, you need a really good fright to get the blood flowing again. Such is the Fall of the House of Usher; a mainstay in the Gothic horror genre and staple in the literary genius of Edgar Allen Poe, as well as literature in general. And it is frightening. Not in a momentary surprise or grizzled violent sort of way, but in something much more... undefinable almost. Morbid. Haunting. Grotesque, on a level somewhere close to the soul. It makes you physically uncomfortable. It leaves an impression, one I'm having too hard a time shaking. Even now I find my eyes gazing back towards my bedroom door, trying not to let it happen, in preposterous yet creeping dread that I may just see something I don't want to. It's somewhat a relief after crawling through Lord Jim, but the feeling of occupying my time with writing so as not to have to turn the light out is not comforting either.

   Rating: B+

1001+ Books: Lord Jim

1001+ Books:

#2 - Lord Jim

by: Joseph Conrad (1900)

       This is not an easy read. It is confusing, wordy, and longwinded. I wouldn't call it boring, but I would call it dragging. Its timezones shift, its narrators switch, and all unexpectedly, with little to no indication when things are happening or who's telling the story, at least until it is halfway through its transferring from one to the other. I don't like it when books make me feel slow, but at least this one isn't condescending; just kind of a pain in the ass. A slog, a grind, a hard time, and By Jove! is it not a lot of fun. I will say that it gets easier as you go, but unfortunately it also gets more repetitive as well, at least until the third act. Almost the entire book is in quotations, which doesn't make a lot of sense. It insists on being in the third person, but most of the book is narrated by Marlow (a funny coincidence considering my last book I read in the 1001, The Big Sleep, and how completely different the two characters who share the name are), who is constantly in those confines because the first chapter or two is from the POV of an omnipresent narrator. It's like reading a book that is entirely in comic word bubbles, with all the dialogue in smaller word bubbles inside those bubbles.

       The story is this: Jim, just Jim, at least at first, is a young seafarer who dreams of adventure and heroism that comes with the seaman's life. He is hired aboard the Patna, a ship carrying four hundred Muslim migrants from one land to another. One night, he and the crew notice something wrong with the ship, and convinced it is going to sink, ditch it and its passengers in an attempt to save themselves. Only the ship doesn't sink, and they all have to be rescued, disgraced as sailors in the line of duty, especially Jim who feels an incredible sense of guilt over the whole thing. The second act of the book concerns, from Marlows perspective - the man who would befriend Jim after the Patna disaster - what Jim does with his life and how he wrestles with his demons. This includes lots and lots of getting jobs, hearing something about the Patna, quitting the job in shame, finding a new job, having the same thing happen, and so on, and so forth, over, and over, and over again. Eventually, however, in the much more interesting third act, he finds a new start for himself, and heads for the uncolonized land of Patusan, where he meets a girl and falls in love, also obtaining the titular title of Lord Jim by helping out the people of said land. In the end (spoiler alert, but I doubt you're gonna read this, are you), after a major failure to his people, he walks out of Patusan in shame, much like he abandoned the Patna in the beginning. He is shot dead in the chest by a vengeful villager who's sons death he was partly responsible for.

       Fate, it seems, is the main concern of Conrad's writing here. That, and nature. Not as much the nature of flowers and fruits and jungles, but the nature of men (and pointedly not so much women). Fate and nature seem to intertwine; can man decide his own fate, or is he subject to his own nature?Jim thought he could escape fate, and so did Marlow think so of him as well, but in the end his own inabilities as a man caught up with him and he was forced back into old habits: jumping ship. He realizes what he already suspected, despite his fortune and power in his new circumstances, he is not, and could never be, a god among men. Marlow describes Jim as being "one of us" throughout the text, despite also revering him as being on another plane of human existence almost. The villagers certainly see him as much, and treat him as having power short of a god. It is said, by Marlow, that he, himself, is not good enough. But he adds that neither is Jim, although he is as close as any man ever came. He makes an enigma out of him, one he is determined that cannot be solved, although it is more than likely he is willfully deluding himself into believing that, ignoring man's inherent nature of being much less complicated than it would like to be. The text is full of unclear, foggy notions about things, Marlow being constantly unable to articulate the magnitude of certain situations, or vague feelings. It makes Marlows narration both affirm his idea of the world being unsolvable, but possibly also refutes it in his unreliableness as a narrator (there are many of these in this book, but then again every narrator is, somehow, unreliable). Maybe fate acts with nature to the same outcome, proving that both are true phenomena in their own rights. In the end it is about surviving, which is in every mans nature and against all odds of fate.

       This is a difficult book, as I've said, with profound ideas. One that is worth delving into. That is not to say I would recommend it to many, maybe not even very many at all. It is mostly not enjoyable, and while it begins and raps up powerfully, the middle is so goddamn hard to get through that it makes it almost unnecessary. It is rewarding in the end, and a powerful book at times, but ultimately the fruits of the labor do not quite outweigh the labor. That being said, when it is good, it is very good. The descriptions of Jim's feelings during the "sinking" of the Patna are so forceful and emotionally charged it causes one to almost feel they are going through the same thing, Jim's disappointment at the end of the book similarly so. If you are going to read this, be ready for a challenge, and be well prepared in your endurance beforehand, which is something I was not. On the bright side, most things you read after this are bound to be easy compared. 

   Rating: C

1001+ Books: The Big Sleep

1001+ Books:
#1 - The Big Sleep

by: Raymond Chandler (1939)

       "Not a game for knights" is how Philip Marlowe describes his chess match against himself, and that is pretty close to how you could describe Marlowe's world. Unfortunately for him, he happens to be the knight-errant of late-30s Los Angeles; a city as corrupt and vile in his eyes as the naked young woman in his bed, his damsel in distress, committed to finding herself in distress, with nothing more to say than "you're cute" and nothing more to offer than a warm body. Marlowe is a half decent man operating in an indecent world, a man looking for purity in places of the impurest nature. He knows this, and quietly enjoys in it to an extent. He's committed to his job like a knight to a quest, and he's doing it for the money, yes, but also, in the end, to spare a dying old man his dignity. At least, I think that's what happened. I'm still a little foggy on some of it. Who killed the chauffeur?

       Starting a new project (reading 1001 books, probably a terrible idea considering my commitment to 1001 albums and 1001 movies), I thought this would be an appropriate pick for a nice easy read, a page turner (or, you know, the audio equivalent), something to ease me back into the groove of reading. Easy and breezy as it was, that shouldn't be confused for simple. It's a notoriously complicated plot, so much so in fact that when Howard Hawks was directing the film adaptation, he called up Raymond Chandler to fill in gaps he couldn't connect. Of course, Chandler couldn't help much, he didn't know the answers either. But the plot isn't the thing here, and he must have understood that, based upon how impossibly complex it is and the loose ends that never are really tied up. It's all tone, mood, atmosphere; cigarette smoke, sharp suits with sharp tongues, hot LA heat, coffee, booze, cynicism and smooth misogyny.

       It's a perfect working of atmosphere over story, and I'm not bothered by that at all, it's often what I look for in a piece of fiction first. Marlowe is a great protagonist (some would argue one of the greatest in American literature) and a nice center point for the confused action that happens around him. His witty, sardonic cynicism is key to the understanding of the world, and perfect vantage point from which that world can unfold itself and show all its nasty crevices and corners. Like I said above, Marlowe seems to be the only semi-clean spot in all the muck and grime that the city and its characters live in, not to say that he is by any means an angel himself. He's just a man set to do his duty, get the job done and get paid. It's the tension between his duty and his temptations that is interesting. He kisses the older of the two spoiled and wild sisters that are children to his employer, but refuses to sleep with her. He's chivalrous. He has a strong sense of duty and keeps his word, but even he stooped a little for a moment to embrace life's base pleasures. He's almost like a man out of time, like a knight-errant again, albeit a disillusioned one, with too strong a sense of morality to fit in with a corrupt world.

       But more than it is a character study or an allegory (which I really doubt it is), it's just some nice pulp fun. A classic PI novel a great character and great setups and lines of dialogue. Sure you can dive in an psychoanalyze its characters, but I had more fun letting it all wash over me, and enjoying the quips and strings of extravagant words, the endless and inventive metaphors and similes, and the presence and narration of the protagonist. 

   Rating: B+

1001+ Albums: 60s Block 7

1001+ Albums:

60s Block 7

Highway 61 Revisited

   Artist: Bob Dylan

   Year: 1965

       That opening drum bang, kicking the door in, is the sound of an icon becoming a legend. It's a perfect song, one Rolling Stone magazine (partially named after it) called the greatest of all time. It lives up to that title. There is no wrong note, no wrong moment, everything fitting perfectly but feeling absolutely spontaneous at the same time. The rest of the album is pretty spectacular, it's slightly unfair that it's essentially eclipsed by the cataclysm that is "Like A Rolling Stone". Dylan has almost totally left folk in the dust (save for the epic eleven minute finale of "Desolation Row"), totally embracing the rock star. If it weren't for this change, Dylan's legacy would still be secure, his original folk singer persona being that enduring and strong. But it's this phase, almost a second career kickstart (along with Bringing It All Back Home, but this is where he really blew the hinges off) that would turn him into one of the greatest musical artists of all time.

   Rating: A

Mr. Tambourine Man

   Artist: The Byrds

   Year: 1965

       The title track: I think I mostly resent turning a wistful, magically surreal head trip of a Dylan masterpiece into a pop song. Also the lead singers voice is so goddamn goofy! Every other song (which is also weird) it's just putting me off. I like the other sounds, the jangling guitars, but that voice I just cannot take seriously. It sounds like its either incredibly mocking and sarcastic, like whiney five year old, or he's disabled in some way. You can see the Dylan inspiration clearly, as they cover four of his songs, a third of the album. When they all sing together, it's actually pretty gorgeous, Beach Boys type harmonies. The overall sound is great, it's just those songs where that guy is singing by himself, in what, I think, is a purposefully put on voice. Like he's trying to emulate Dylan but coming across as nearly a cartoon Woody Allen at times, but mostly part of the cast of scooby-doo. Having heard this version of Mr. Tambourine Man, I was kind of dreading this album. But most of it is awesome, and I'm glad I heard it.

   Rating: B+

Rubber Soul

   Artist: The Beatles

   Year: 1965

       The breakthrough album, and a pretty good one by itself too, although to be honest, a bit overrated. There is a lot of great stuff here, but it is by no means perfect. Songs like "The Word", "What Goes On", "Wait", "You Won't See Me", "If I Needed Someone", and "Run For Your Life" are second and third tier songs, and while some are underrated, others are disregarded with fair cause. On the other hand, "In My Life", "I'm Looking Through You", "Drive My Car", and others are top rate Beatles. To me, it just doesn't match up as well compared to nearly everything after (maybe not Magical Mystery Tour or Let It Be). That is no insult though, in fact it's high praise considering how phenomenal the rest of their discography past this point is. What this album accomplishes is being the first that feels like a complete whole, something that every song involved, while not all brilliant, really fit the album well. When I listen to this, I think of being on the road, in fact I can almost smell gasoline and feel the heat on the seat of the car after it's been sitting in the sun. That in itself is quite impressive, creating an album with such a unique and undeniable feel. It's at the upper middle portion of the Beatles discography, which makes it pretty much a great album just by that.

   Rating: B+

Here Are the Sonics

   Artist: The Sonics

   Year: 1965

       It's like if punk rock happened in the 50s. The low grade production, the speed, the ferocity, the screaming all applied to "Roll Over Beethoven". I've found a lot of things going through the 1001: jazz, early rock, soul, and this is one of the coolest things on this road of discovery. Is it a great album? No, not really. Its just so original and not what I was expecting, easily a contender for the first punk band, certainly an influence on the genre. "Some folks like water/some folks like wine/but I like the taste/of straight strychnine." Thats pretty punk to me.

   Rating: B

My Generation

   Artist: The Who

   Year: 1965

       Speaking of punk rock origins, the title track of this is a good argument as well for the birth of the genre. Aside from a few standouts and that track, the rest is good but not great, with the occasional spot of not very good. I'm expecting greater things from the Who in the future, based upon their reputation and other more famous entries in the 1001.

   Rating: B-