Kerouac, bit by bit

Scattered

I've decided that I like episodic books -- books I can put down and then pick up again, sometimes months later, without feeling that I need to start over again from page 1. One such is Kerouac's On the Road, a picaresque freight-train of jazz-prose chapters that I started reading last summer, figuring it was about time. (I had read some of Kerouac's other novels before, but never, for some reason, his magnum opus.) About halfway through, I became entangled in a life-changing event -- I moved -- and actually couldn't find the book for a while. Now I'm reading it again, bit by bit, between work and various holiday jaunts and obligations. The starting and stopping doesn't seem to matter . . . I miss the days when I could just sit and read a book all day, though. That kind of sustained attention seems harder and harder to achieve, and not just because I'm constantly interrupted by the slings and arrows of adult life. I think my attention span is actually getting shorter -- maybe from spending too much time online.