Having now read
On The Road, the apparent crown jewel of the Beat Generation (at this point, I prefer "Howl", Allen Ginsberg's poem, but whatevs), I can safely summarize it as: meh.
I should go into some detail, just in case someone 1) reads this blog and 2) loves On The Road to no end. I got what Kerouac was doing easy enough: taking wanderlust, individualism, jazz, and a new idea of what writing should be and setting it down to paper. And though Sal Paradise's adventures gave me a serious desire for being out on the road myself, there wasn't anything within the book that struck me as divinely profound (see the "the only ones for me are the mad ones" quote, which may be one of the most common amongst the hipster set). The language, once, jive, was archaic, the motivations less rebellious, the sex and drugs blasé. At it's heart, it was a good story, but in all honesty I don't see what all the fuss is about, so shoot me.
Anyway, this brings me to my big point of this post: a list! List list list. Today's theme is:
The Top 10 Books To Get Out Of The Way Before Graduating High School
Like it says, these are the top 10 books to read before graduating High School. These aren't necessarily the cream of the literary crop, but they do contain all that profound self-realization crap that most teens look for in books, as well as giving them a good idea of just what a good book ought to be. Naturally, most of these books are on school reading lists, if not, then hand-worn paper back copies of them are shared over the lunch table, where sixteen-year-olds declare things like "dude, this book changed my life" or "read this, though really, it's seriously deep shit". And these words ring true when we are young, I remember feeling like my brain worked differently after reading some of them. But then something happens when we graduate and grow up: is it a loss of idealism? The immersion into deeper, more nuanced things? Whatever it may be, when we read these books for the first time after reaching a certain age, the tone shifts, the language becomes sour, and we are left unimpressed by revelations that would have floored us five years before. Like an inoculation, make sure that every teenager you know reads these books before turning 19:
10.
Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
9.
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brönte)
8.
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemmingway)
7.
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
6.
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
5.
On The Road (Jack Kerouac)
4.
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
3.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
2.
1984 (George Orwell)
1.
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
