26. On the Road Kerouac

I think that this book would have been one to read in the 1950s when first published. The excitement and the suggested explicitness is just not as shocking as it once would have been. When in this challenge you have read a book that involves a parakeet in a bizarre sexual death, hearing the two main characters have a couple of women on the go at the same time is not quite what it once would have been!

Kerouac does have a very energetic way of writing that does add suspense to the whole book, but as has happened a lot in many of the books I have read this year it ultimately fails to deliver.

One particular problem for me was the sheer number of characters, that drifted in and out of the travels. For someone like me who wanted to read the book a section at a time, trying to remember who everyone is was just too difficult and too confusing.

By all means it is worth a read, but not one that I would say is really worthy of its continual placing in the top 100 lists.