Classic Literature... What's a Classic?
Last year I tried to read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the beat poet. I made this decision after: a) reading Gabrielle Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude and being absolutely blown away by it, and b) reading the Penguin Great Books of the Twentieth Century List on the first page of this special edition text. I read about 30 or 40 pages of On the Road and gave up. That far in the book, it was about a narrator/college kid who writes and lives with his aunt. He meets and becomes obsessed with a character named Dean. I appreciated the richness of the language -- at times, it reads like vintage Kerouac poetry -- but I kept waiting for a plot. And the characters... well, they were a bunch of beatniks who all got along. No conflict. I just took the book out of the library again. I'm going to give it another chance. There are other books on that list which I've read and, clearly, I'd consider them classics. I've found them, powerfully moving and incredibly well written.