That Isn't Writing; It's Typing

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Penguin Classics

Well, hipsters, I have finally read Kerouac's classic post-war American novel. It took me the better part of a week to get through it and, to be candid, I'm unsure if it was worth the effort. I didn't understand a damn thing. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I was definitely expecting it to blow me away and, well, it didn't.

For the uninitiated, Kerouac's story (told in a sort of groovy stream-of-consciousness) is narrated by Sal Paradise, a fledgling student/writer, who likes jazz, drugs and very young women. Sal yearns to live in a world without rules and one of the ways in which he expresses his rebelliousness is to take to the road. With very few dollars in his pocket, Sal travels across America -- meeting up with friends, making it with girls, and generally seeking out the margins of society. Central to the novel is Sal's friendship with the iconic Dean Moriarty. Dean is a drug-addled, two-timing con man who is unable to commit to anything but the vision he has of himself. He is altogether unlikeable, yet infinitely interesting and Sal is drawn to him despite the terrible things that he does.

Why did I have such a problem with this novel? Maybe because Sal's celebration of "life on the road" was often punctuated by dependence on the very conventions that he sought to reject. His adventures (unlike Dean's) seem little more than an occasional foray into a forbidden world. He always had a safety net (his aunt in New Jersey, his GI benefits) and it seemed that while he tried to live on the edge, it was always a low risk proposition. Sal was, what my friends in the 80s would have called a "poser"; a watcher who collected someone else's stories and tried to live them as if they were his own.

Putting my dislike of the characters aside, Kerouac's writing is brilliant and the novel is worth reading if only for the beauty of his prose. I came across a couple of new (I guess old!) names for certain drugs in the book and I have to give him props for his use of the word "hincty." And no, I'm not going to tell you what it means. Three juke joints out of five.

A Bouquet of Alarming Aphorisms

Horseradish - Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Lemony Snicket
Harper Collins

Daniel Handler strikes again! Horseradish - Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid is a collection of oddly funny, yet slightly depressing aphorisms from the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events. Reading it started me to wonder ... why is it that the bookstore, which is most definitely my "happy place", the source of such angst, sadness and depression in my imaginative life?

I mean, really, just look at the books I have reviewed in the past few months. Why don't people want to write, read and/or publish happy stories? Or is it just me and I am drawn to books with heavy themes like death, war, pestilence and strife? I have liked, if not loved, quite a number of the novels that I have read since starting this blog and I would like to know what, exactly, this says about me. Maybe I should be worried ... Sigh.

Okay, so back to Handler for a moment. His little book of wit and wisdom is divided into thirteen (noticing a trend?) chapters. In each, he offers up a few "kernels of dread" that can inspire or deflate -- depending on the mood of the reader. I will leave you with my favourite and the one that I think, perhaps, is the most true.

It is one of life's bitterest

truths that bedtime so often

arrives just when things are

really getting interesting.

Wanking in the Attic

Apples
Richard Milward
Faber and Faber

Meet Adam and Eve -- two blue-collar kids growing up in the Middlesbrough estates. Adam is a slightly OCD Beatlemaniac who regularly gets beaten up by his dad, has few friends, and is trying desperately to break out of geekdom. Eve is a beautiful, but bored young woman, who spends her weekends going to clubs, getting high, and finding cute boys for snogging and sex. They are both fifteen.

According to other reviewers, Milward's portrayal of Adam and Eve is an accurate depiction of teenage life in the working class areas of northern England. Date rape, teenage pregnancy, underage drinking, domestic violence -- this book had it all. Despite the heaviness of the material, however, I often found myself laughing at the antics of the main characters. The episode where Adam gets caught masturbating to his father's 80's copy of a Razzle magazine still has me giggling.

So, why the title? Well, aside from the obvious, I think the book is supposed to be about temptation, how to deal with it, and what happens when you fail. I think it's also about gaining knowledge, learning the good from the bad, and figuring out how to recover when you choose poorly. While the circumstances and location may be slightly different (it was acid and hot knives in my day ... not poppers and tac) I think everyone can identify with Adam and Eve and that's what makes this book so appealing. Three tempting serpents out of five.

Missives from an Old Friend

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

Sue Townsend

Penguin

When I was a teenager, my parents let me spend summers up at the cottage. I have so many good memories of those years -- kissing my first boy, cruising with my cousin Chris in his white Chevy Cavalier, rollerskating to Electric Avenue at the arena, and spending late nights down by the water watching the stars and listening to the chattering of the raccoons.

The cottage was even fun on stormy days. If the bay was really rough, Mom would let us put our legs through the arm holes of a life jacket and bob up and down in the waves. She'd only call us in if we were turning blue from cold or if the lightning was getting too close. One such afternoon, she gave us the hook and offered to make hot chocolate so we could warm up. We settled ourselves in front of the television expecting to watch an old Elvis movie and instead, we saw an episode of the BBC's The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged, 13 and 3/4. I cried I laughed so hard and I was completely smitten with Adrian and Pandora for the rest of the summer.

Sadly, I don't think the Weapons of Mass Destruction stood up well against my memories of the programme or Townsend's first book. Adrian is still a git, Pandora is still a bitch, and Adrian's life, in general, is still a mess. The only thing that I did appreciate about the novel was Townsend's not-so-subtle political commentary. In this installment of the diaries, Adrian's son, Glenn, is shipped to Iraq and Townsend very poignantly deals with the loss of Glenn's best friend. That storyline aside, there wasn't much else to keep my interest. So much so, in fact, that I think my relationship with Adrian is over. This book gets two scuds out of five. Oh wait ... that was the last invasion, er, I mean war ...