On the Road in 12 hours or less

My darling wife is crazy, but in a good way.

We just finished a marathon reading of On the Road by Jack Kerouac that she organized at our humble abode. She got the idea from another crazy woman, an ex-colleague of mine in Los Angeles who organized an annual reading marathon. I still have a momento of one we attended in LA - the 13th event she had organized, in 2001, when we read 1984 by George Orwell, though the really committed nuts picked up Animal Farm as soon as they closed the cover of the first book.

The way a reading marathon works: one person begins with the first word and reads aloud for a while - a page or 2, or a sentence, or a paragraph or a chapter or whatever. Then they stop and somebody else starts reading aloud. There's no particular order, just whoever feels like reading, reads. People get up to get drinks, use the bathroom, have a cigarette. And you make your way through the entire book. We started around 5 pm, took a couple of breaks for dinner and stretching and so forth. We finished this morning at 5am, having read the whole book.

My wife made this happen. It's one of the things that I most love about her. She gets an idea to do something and she just does it, makes it happen. And so, she did. And despite my skepticism, it turned out really well. Admittedly, we only had one hardcore reader who stayed up with us, but 5 other people came in and out over the course of the night. It was cool to meet people and hang out and read together. It was even cooler to be there at the end having accomplished the goal.

On the Road was probably the perfect book for a marathon reading. It's written in a really poetic, lyrical style. I had never read it before, but found reading it aloud brought it alive in ways I wouldn't have caught otherwise. It's got a rhythm to it. Of course, given that it is a product of the Beat generation, jazz is the primary inspiration. It was funny though, we had a mix of jazz CDs playing all night in the background and so often the rhythm of the writing matched the rhythms of what we were listening to. It was a beautiful thing.

On the Road is also a book about crazy, counter-cultural, non-conformists who criss-cross the country looking for, well, God, maybe? Direction? Life? Love? Anyway, there was something of that realness in the people who participated in the marathon. People open to this crazy idea, who love literature enough to want to experience it in a different way, who see great art as a means for human connection.

I'm going to bed.