Shelfology Book Pairing

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's groundbreaking novel soon to be a major motion picture with a star-studded cast. In what is sure to be one of the major cinematic events of 2012, Jack Kerouac's legendary Beat classic, "On the Road," will finally hit the big screen. Directed by Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"; "Paris, Je T'Aime") and with a cast of some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Kristen Stewart (The Twilight Saga), Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams ("Julie & Julia," "The Fighter"), Tom Sturridge, and Viggo Mortensen (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, "The Road"), the film will attract new fans who will be inspired by Kerouac's revolutionary masterwork.

by Hermann Hesse

Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation A Penguin Classic At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters—accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitching Hermione—the misanthropic Haller undergoes a spiritual, even psychedelic, journey, and ultimately discovers a higher truth and the possibility of happiness. This blistering portrait of a man who feels himself to be half human and half wolf was the bible of the 1960s counterculture, capturing the mood of a disaffected generation. It continues to resonate as a haunting story of estrangement, redemption, and the search for one’s place in the world.