Book club - The Dharma Bums

Fully recognizing that I tend to melt on hot, July afternoons, I figured we'd move inside again for a discussion of Jack Kerouac's 1958 semi-autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums.

Where do I even start with this one? The Dharma Bums follows the wanderings of Ray Smith as he rambles, rucks, and hop trains through the American West. During the course of his travels, he happens to encounter a fellow by the name of Japhy Rider, a graduate student in Buddhist Studies at the University of California at Berkely, who teaches Ray how to be a Zen Lunatic - kind of a Beat pilgrim who wanders the countryside seeking truth, kicks, and everything in between. Attics ensue. Japhy eventually heads off to Japan to live at Zen monastery and Ray ends up working as a fire lookout in the Cascade range. The end.

The Dharma Bums is very much a story of a couple of folks who looked around at life in 1950s America and asked "is this all you've got?" It's a question that is even more relevant today than it was then. As modernity does everything it can to socialize us into thinking that we are nothing better than wage slaves - doomed post-capitalistic cogs in the Machine - reading The Dharma Bums is like quick plunge in an ice bath. While its solutions are Romantic, impractical, and will get you arrested in most states that begin with a capital letter, The Dharma Bums snaps us out of our conditioning, gets us to sit up a little taller, and most importantly, gets us dreaming again.

Jack Kerouac was a major influence on the hippy movement of the 1960s. Contemporary fans of off grid living, van life, and spewing disdain at the status quo will adore this book.

Oh, and this one is an easy read. And it's fun.