I notice that many of the 4 or 5 star On the Road reviews on here, especially among my contacts, start with the caveat that they're rating based on their first reading of this book as a teen. As such, I definitely should have read this as a teen, rather than picking it up for the first time now. The best aspects would certainly have spoken to me (they still do): 
 -the exhilaration 
 -the sense of possibility 
 -the call of sheer wide-eyed experience 
 -the exuberance of a sprawling American landscape rolling away in every direction. 
 On the other hand, I just got back from spending my own month on the road, so some of these random locations are still fresh in my mind (I know for instance that Central City, Colorado is all casinos now, which makes reading of it in Kerouac's time pretty interesting.) 
 The downside of all this are the already well-noted Kerouac flaws: 
 -the sometimes rushed or iffy writing ("Things were going on wild as ever outside, except that the fat burpers were getting drunker and whooping it up louder. It was funny.") 
 -the self-aggrandizing 
 -the way female characters are basically non-entities, often nameless, depthless objects of desire or annoyance 
 This latter is ultimately the most annoying part to me. Even the Bukowski I've read seems less sexist somehow, because with Bukowski there's a sort of acknowledgment that everything is obviously desperate and pathetic and horrible, whereas Kerouac seems to be aiming for a kind of ideal. Still, all of that was far far worse to me in Dharma Bums, where all these self-involved characters couldn't stop discussing how enlightened they were. Here, at least, these lives are rawer and further out on the fringe and seemingly less idealized. Plus, the best parts of Dharma were the travel sequences, and this is essentially all travel. 
 I guess one of the unspoken factors coloring my experience here is the fact that this is essentially a memoir. Maybe its a bit of an assumption or reduction, but it's also the common assumption attached to Kerouac's writing. And this certainly reads more like a travelogue than it does a novel. I don't particularly like memoirs in general (you need a really good reason to justify writing one to me) and I especially don't like reading memoirs of people I don't especially like. 
 Sorry, sorry. Another friend on here claims to "irrationally hate anyone who doesn't love or at least grudgingly respect this book." And I do have a grudging respect for it, for the above reasons and for its core drive to see and engage with the world. This impulse is at heart a very good and important one, and if this book has inspired it in a few of its readers over the years (and it certainly has inspired many), Kerouac has accomplished something worthwhile. And I can respect that even through my other frustrations. I, however, don't really need Kerouac to awaken these sensations in me. I already have my own.