briffin

A friend asked what the book was about and I, only having made it through the first couple of pages, said “Oh it's a family saga told from the point of view of a tree.” I couldn't have been more wrong.

This book is more than anything about time, and how things work at different speeds. The human characters in the book occupy the understory in which a majority of the book is set, but they've discovered that the world is meant to work in hundreds and thousands of years instead. It's a sobering read, but a worthwhile one.

Beautiful nature writing- John Muir kills it with his descriptions of the wilderness, of plants, of mountains. He treats it all with a sincerity we don't see much in the everyday. However, the book's not quite a pageturner and I wouldn't quite recommend it to a friend unless they're as much of a nature nut as myself.

It was Faulkner who said that you need to approach Joyce like an illiterate preacher to the Old Testament: with faith. I wouldn't call Ulysses a novel, because if you go into it thinking it's a novel, you'll get frustrated and give it up and maybe light it on fire. You've got to treat it almost like it's a religious text, read it carefully and apply your own meaning and life lessons to the passages. Joyce was trying to find a way to bridge ancient religious texts with the everyday lives that we all live, and he did it by writing this clusterf**k of a book. If you're even considering reading this, give it a try (but don't expect to get it immediately), and you need to recognize that this isn't a mere novel and that he wrote this to give a higher meaning to modern living.

This is a book unlike any other, so you can't read it like any other. The book has a different kind of momentum, which is not built upon plot but upon language. When you read it you need to read it as Kerouac wrote it, quickly. He wrote the entire book in two weeks, taking no time to go back and edit. So, therefore, when you read it, take no time to go back. It's just go go go, no time to be spent mulling the plot because there almost is none, this is all what happened to the author. Essentially this is an autobiography, written in as stream of consciousness as you can get.

And by reading at breakneck speeds, you begin to find a rhythm in the language. Kerouac, when writing, was fueled by coffee, drugs, and jazz.

So it wouldn't be a stretch to call this book literary jazz: there's an underlying beat, improvised instrument solos, and a feeling of discarding all the establishments. There are grammar errors, spelling errors, and Kerouac even makes up words for Gods sake, all because he's so in tune with the beat that he just can't stop writing. And the trick to reading his tome, which admittedly seems intimidating, is to just keep following the beat, following the road onwards, wherever it takes you- even to places you've never imagined.