As someone who loves learning about 60's culture I was really looking forward to reading this. For a long time. Like, really long. When I saw this a couple weeks ago I thought to myself, how have you not read this book yet!? It inspired a lot of the people who I am so interested in, and yet I still had not read it.

Unfortunately, I am quite torn on this book. On one hand it really submerged me into a time I will never get to experience myself. It's not easy to hitchhike across the country anymore. You'd have to do a lot more walking if you were planning a cross country trip without a car. And everything was so cheap back then! It was really crazy to think about how much inflation has increased the value of everything. I really liked some of the characters and little stories about the places he visits and the people he met. On the other hand, I kinda felt like I was reading a bad ripoff of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I know there are a lot of differences, but at their core they are really just near plot-less books about traveling around and getting drunk. If it was just that I probably would have only taken one star off, but I hate Dean. Like many others have commented I thought he was very self absorbed and as a result treated people very badly. But ultimately, I (more or less) have a friend who is practically a modern day Dean. He