I absolutely love Jack Kerouac's writing. I love the flow of it all, the easiness his story telling has, the pure beauty of his sentences. For me, reading Kerouac is like revisiting an old friend who always has plenty of new stories to tell me every time we meet. During On the Road, I got to know and admire that friend for his free spirit and his prose. In The Dharma Bums, I met that friend again, but it felt off, like that friend had been through a major experience and couldn't accurately explain it to me.

Kerouac's writing is as captivating as it was in On the Road, but it gets drowned out on occasion by its heavy religious influence. I know very little about Buddhism. I'm currently taking a World Religions class that will cover this topic, but when I was reading The Dharma Bums I was completely lost. I still enjoyed going on adventures with Kerouac, but I didn't always understand why he was going on them. I honestly did not like any of the characters (mostly because the Buddhism makes no sense to me and that what seems to drive everyone), but it was certainly interesting.

Definitely not my favorite Kerouac. I'll continue to read his work though. I just won't be rereading this one ten million times like I did with On the Road.