Been reading a little more lately. And thats good. I would like to read much more though. I’m currently reading ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’ by Ken Kesey. I like to find connections (sometimes even where they might never exist But this book has some real connections to the book I was reading just before this – On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Ken Kesey was the leader of this adventurous group called the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s. The exploits of this group has been chronicled in an excellent book called the Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. But back to the connections, one of the key members of the Merry Prankster’s group was Neal Cassady who was also the driver of the bus Further on the Pransters’ trip across the continent just after Sometimes… was published. Neal Cassady is none other than Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Infact the Electric Koolaid Acid Test mentions what appears to be one of the last times Neal Cassady met with Jack Kerouac when the former’s group finally reached New York.

I enjoy reading books about travel, be they fiction or not. V.S.Naipaul is another of my favorites for this reason. While Sometimes… is not much about travel, its a nice book none the less. I must admit I found the title very interesting and one of the reasons I wanted to read it ever since a friend told me about it. I had read Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest before and his style is not (at least for me) the easiest to read at a stretch. I think I read two or three books in between me starting One flew… and finally finishing it, one of them actually being a Naipaul book. And the same has been the case with Sometimes… as well. But in the last two days, I’ve found the book picking up pace and Kesey has been building up the enigmatic Jonathon Draeger character very well, building this whole mystical quality around him, as if he holds a key piece of a complex puzzle.