On The Road, by Jack Kerouac

We all have a list of books that we have meant to read but have never quite gotten around to. Some of them finally make their way into our hands and we start reading. Most of us will think What's the big deal about this book? It's garbage! about some of the classics, while others fall into the I can't believe I waited this long to read it! category.

Then there are others that leave us feeling so ambivalent throughout the reading that we end up wanting to give it a second reading just so we can decide. That is how I felt when starting On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. It was one of those classics that many people talk about ("Have you read...? No? Really, you should...") while not having actually read. I'd picked up a copy of it from a now-closed bookstore near the University of South Florida St. Petersburg when they were promoting books by many of the Beat writers, especially Kerouac.

Note: Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg's St. Anthony's Hospital in 1969. His name, address and phone number remained in the St. Petersburg phone book for quite a few years afterwards. He is said to have frequented several bars while in St. Pete.

The first few paragraphs very nearly turned me off. I had tried reading it when I first bought the book, but those first couple of paragraphs were what caused me to put it down. They were wordy, bordering on almost flowery. If Ernest Hemingway was known for short, concise sentences, much of Kerouac's On The Road seemed the opposite in its wordiness. While Kerouac did rein this in a bit after the first few paragraphs/pages, he never quite moves completely away from it.

The further I got in the book, the more engaging it became. It is easy to imagine being carefree and on the road, going from place to place. Sal Paradise (based on Kerouac) meets Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady), someone he has heard about, at the beginning of the book. They are soon criss-crossing the country separately, meeting up in different parts of the country, just missing each other in other parts. The one thing Sal hears numerous times is that others are not as fond of Dean as Sal is. While Sal finally sees that others might be right about Dean, he still defends him. By the end of the book, we find Sal wandering off after sending Dean on his way. But he mentions occasionally thinking about Dean Moriarty.

By the end of the book, I had to admit: This book deserves to be considered a classic, and deserves to be read. If you haven't read it, what are you waiting for?

Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, by Sean Murphy

Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone: A Memoir for My Mother by Sean Murphy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many of us have lost loved ones and know the sorrow of missing that loved one. Sean Murphy's Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone chronicles the loss of his mother to cancer shortly after her fifty-ninth birthday.

While many memoirs tend to follow a straight-forward path for the period of time that the book follows, Please Talk... reads more as journal entries and conversations, with a poem or two. At first, I found the fluidness of the book - the back and forth across time - a little disconcerting. But Murphy's writing, his descriptions kept my attention long enough that the ebb and flow caught me. While the journal-and-background way of writing is definitely a different approach from the straight-forward path, it definitely worked with Please Talk....

Sean Murphy's love for his mom, as well as a mother's love for her family, come through wonderfully clear in Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, leaving the reader with only two or three regrets: that Linda Murphy died, that cancer still strikes, and that we all lose people who are very important to us. Sean Murphy has written a beautiful memoir that will stick with the reader.

Note: I won a copy of Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone by Sean Murphy from Goodread's giveaway.

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The Girl in the Italian Bakery, by Kenneth Tingle

The Girl in the Italian Bakery by Kenneth Tingle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Memoirs are a funny thing: some tell about an idyllic life where the main person was born with the proverbial silver spoon and grew up to be a wonderful person who appreciated his or her life and status, while others tell of hardships that the person had to escape and crawl out of to become a productive and (preferably) happy member of society. The latter seems to make the better reading . Kenneth Tingle's The Girl In The Italian Bakery falls into this second category.

Tingle was the youngest of three brothers being raised by a single mother in poverty. While his mostly absent father does occasionally show up, he is seldom able to care for all three boys when they need him the most. Tingle's descriptions of living in the projects, of the disappearance of a young friend, of life in several foster homes are enough to make the reader wonder how he escaped his past. One brother has mental health issues and ends up institutionalized, while the middle brother blocks out much of what happens to the family, becoming part of the cycle of poverty/helplessness.

Throughout the first half of the book, the reader is left to wonder who the girl in the Italian bakery is and how she fits into Tingle's story. We finally see her as Tingle trudges home from a new high school one afternoon. While he never actually meets her, he falls in love with her - with the idea of her - and continues to walk home by the same route so that he can catch a glimpse of her. The one day he finally finds the courage to go in and speak with her, she disappears into the back of the bakery. Does he get to finally meet her?

The Girl In The Italian Bakery ends with Tingle and his wife living not the high-life, but rather a better life than he had grown up in. By the end, he has acknowledged that while he never officially met the girl - who he has seen several times since, but from a distance - he still has feelings for the memory of her, and how, in some way, he was helped want a better life because of her.

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