I finished re-reading Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion a couple weeks ago. I read this book initially in 2000 after spending 3 months in the mountains of Southern Oregon working as a field assistant on a forest bird monitoring project. I really loved Oregon, the mountains, the trees, the wildlife. I saw my first bear there, also 2nd through 7th bear. I heard my first and only Spotted Owl, we hooted at each other for a few minutes. I lived in a log-cabin in a national forest on the slopes of Pelican Butte on the shores of the Upper Klamath Wildlife Refuge. It was beautiful there.

This book by Kesey really captures some of the residual wild spirit of rural Oregon. It is epic book and the narrative is difficult to follow since Kesey slides from the internal monologue of one character to another with out notice. But the shifting narrator is essential to understanding the complexity of the human relations in the story and the true reasons behind why the characters in the book do what they do. Everyone has a back story; their own damaged egos and psyches that influences the way they interact with and perceive the actions of every other character in the book. Kesey's writing style exposes the nature and complexity of human relations. In the end this book is not so much about Oregon, but about being a person with complex familial relations and personal baggage and how that affects so much of our lives with out our explicitly thinking about it.

I recommend it.