Three Books You Would Want To Take On A Road Trip With You

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

This book is the best possible image of what drug abuse and romping around look like. It is additionally the story of a weekend trip that has gone down in the records of American pop-culture as one of the most unusual trips ever.

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”

The book actually shows what Las Vegas really is. It’s a bad dream, a joke. It’s the place Sin goes to bite the dust when it’s humiliated over itself. It’s the place families go on get-aways with ten-year-olds, kids who get given fliers about immoral content. It’s the living, beating, filth mongering epitome of the Holy Dollar. It is the tangible over-burden where drugs can’t be seen as equal, a place where you nearly need to take Valium and a bit of ether to feel fine and not feel absolutely embarrassed at the condition of human kind.

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”

However you never, ever feel like it is subversive in any way. It’s just about a buck, and each flicker helps you to remember it. This is where Hunter S. Thompson was, without much thinking about the law. This is where a legal counselor could abandon you with a hotel charge. This novel will never stop being critical; and one day, as a social relic of an overlooked culture from an overlooked country, it will be a standout amongst the must-read historical pieces.

1) Never trust a cop in a raincoat.
2) Beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway.
3) If asked if you care about the world’s problems, look deep into the eyes of him who asks, he will never ask you again.
4) Never give your real name.
5) If ever asked to look at yourself, don’t look.
6) Never do anything the person standing in front of you can’t understand.
7) Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.” 

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.” 

On the Road describes Jack Kerouac’s years venturing to every part of North America with his companion, Neal Cassady. The two are roaming the nation on a mission of self-exploration and experience. Kerouac’s love of America, his sympathy for humankind, and his feeling for words, join to make On the Road a moving work of enduring significance.

“[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” 

When you initially read this book, you will adore it as a bit of workmanship, however its impact is not the same as anticipated. A huge number of individuals like Kerouac as the craftsman who influenced them to quit their jobs, turn into flower children or a beatniks and surrender to the flows of life.

The book fixates on flower child culture for quite a while, and makes you steer far from it. Most of Dean’s victories were spoiled by the fact that he needed to exploit other individuals at all times. He was a tremendously engaging character, yet he would have been an awful companion. His life cleaned him out, beat him up . . . not heart pulsating, thrilled, just beaten up, bummed out and alone.

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 

“A fragment for my friend–
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night” 

A mesmerizing novel set in the scary days of a collapsed civilization, Station Eleven recounts the hypnotizing story of a Hollywood star, his friend in need, and a group of performing artists meandering through the scattered stations of the Great Lakes district, taking risks all the time.

“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.” 

One cold night a celebrated Hollywood performing artist dies in front of an audience amid a performance of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we remember it starts to break down. Moving forward and backward in time – from the performer’s early days as a film star to fifteen years later, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony meanders through the no man’s land of what remains – this emotional, enchanting novel graphs the lives of the travelers.

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”

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