Idleguy.com April 2025 Books page 10 features some classics of off-beat literature by Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; J.D. Slainger's Catcher in the Rye and Carlos Casaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan.
All of these are available for free download, along with a growing number of titles of all genres, at the IdleGuy.com Library.
When Jack Kerouac's On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac's beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction. Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road.
Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but 'life is holy and every moment is precious'. With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs. Kerouac's prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape - 'the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy'. Now acknowledged as a modern classic, On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is possibly the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. The tale of a long weekend road trip to Sin City with the author and his lawyer set the stage for Thompson's incredible career as a novelist, opinionator, and the sole progenitor of "Gonzo Journalism" at the Rolling Stone magazine and in countless articles, TV appearances, and drug-induced escapades that marked this incredible man's life.
"The best book on the dope decade." - NY Times Book Review - kind of sells it short. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas has more than earned a special place in American literature that could only be occupied and filled by a person like Hunter S. Thompson, a man of such daring wit and sense of adventure that few - even such writers as Ernest Hemingway or Jack London - could even fathom.
Through circumstances that preclude adult, secondhand description, the hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caufield, leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The 16-year-old is at once too simple and too complex. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about Caufield is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but almost hopelessly impaled on it.
There are many voices in this novel: children's, adult's, underground voices - giving rise to Caufield's most eloquent of all. The language is transcendent in J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst, seeking, and rebellion. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923 and was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the courts for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenager wanted to read. It still works for kids and adults today.
Castaneda casts the story of a remarkable spiritual journey, the first awesone steps on the road to becoming "a man of knowledge," through teachings of a mysterious shaman in Southwest America and Mexico.
Castaneda's works are still greatly mythical and largely misunderstood, though the lessons from Don Juan are timeless and filled with passion, truth, wisdom, and spirit.
The Teachings of Don Juan sets the tempo for the road that continues with the second and third parts to this amazing trilogy of understanding, perception, and empathy, A Separate Reality and Journey To ixtlan which will be made available to IdleGuy.com readers in May.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (1971)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
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