Rating: 
Summary: Sometimes an Incredible Novel
Review: I just completed Kesey's "Sometimes A Great Notion" and found it an extremely rewarding and entertaining read. Its size was a bit intimidating at first, but once I got deep into the novel I just had to finish it. Being from Pennsylvania, I found there was much to learn about the Northwest, a region I would now love to visit. Kesey's writing is so complex and powerful that I found myself noting line after line of great prose. The narrative does wander at times, but the book truly does come together at the end. I think this story would make a terrific movie and definitely ranks as one of the best books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: The Great American Novel
Review: I still consider this to be the great American novel. It's not just people from the Northwest who relate to this book. I grew up in Oklahoma, and "Never Give an Inch" was engrained in me as much as Hank Stamper.The family dynamics are powerful and honest, and Kesey had integrity and clarity. He put effort in this work beyond what I can imagine. My favorite part is the Mailman delivering the letter! It may be more for men than women, and perhaps men over forty-five. The book is about rugged American independence, but even more about strength in your convictions, and this is the lesson our protagonist learns.
Rating:
Summary: Not a book for the simple notioned
Review: For those who dislike the book for its randomness and its wild thinking, I will state that the entire meaning of the book has flew over you head much like the canadian geese flew over Hank's head. The entire book is one masterpiece. The formal aspects of the book are so entertwined and so tightly fixated on each other proving the artistic genius of Kesey. In regards to those who mistakenly view that his drug induced state made the book into a wildly unfocused book, I must say that the book stands on its own, and however much it seems unfocused and unconventional that only adds to the quality of the work.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth Reading
Review: I read SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION as part of an assignment over the Summer. It was a very difficult read and I gave up half way through. I didn't touch it for a month and resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't show up at school the first day having completed the assignment. The first weekend of the school year I sat down and read the last 250+ pages and I'm so glad I did. If nothing e,se NOTION is an experience worth having. It may not always be enjoyable but I feel that it's certainly worth while.
Rating:
Summary: Tough Love
Review: This is the richest book that I have ever laid my hands on. Being from the NW, I greatly appreciate the special attention regarding how the environment, and especially the rain, impacts people's lives here. But, what is really special about this book is Kesey's ability to bring so many different characters to life. This is done through an almost violent storm of narration techniques, which at first seem cumbersome, but end up being very rewarding. The book is over 600 pages long, yet maintains the reader's interest because it develops characters in such detail, as to make one feel a part of the Stamper's small coastal community. In this book, no one person is mostly good, and no one person is mostly evil. But, everyone learns something.
Rating:
Summary: simply the best
Review: this is truly one of the best books i have ever read. it is ken kesey's love song to the great pacific northwest. the story structure and writing style are challenging but ingenious. stick with it, because you will catch on and when you do, you'll love it.
i know this is a cliche', but this is the only book i ever read, that when it came to the end, i looked for more pages. i wanted to learn more about the outcome of all of the conflicts.
this is kesey at his best
don't miss it.
Rating: 
Summary: Sometimes a Great Notion, but Usually an Excuse of a Book
Review: Never have I felt the urge to physically hurt an author more than when reading Sometimes a Great Notion. He can't even stay on fewer than two subjects in a given sentence, although he occasionally offers some help by italicizing and parenthesizing. What results is a big mess. It should be noted that Kesey was actually under the influence of [a chemical substance] when writing this book, and was riding high and cocky from the success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which is a nice, clean and straightforward book), so he must have been content with whatever gibberish happened to come out in writing. A few memorable excerpts come to mind: half a page dedicated to describing a cow's innards...mindless babbling in a letter written by a man freshly high from smoking his third joint of pot...and endless description of the landscape, which is at times poetic but by the twentieth paragraph-long repitition in five pages is simply annoying and irrelevant. Even the grammar is poor (other than in the dialog, which can be expected of simple-minded loggers), and it starts to seem like Kesey himself was hit in the head with a log or delirious of exhastion when writing this (as well as his editor). The plot, though difficult to pick out of the sea of random sentences, is intriguing, and the scenes of real, actual dialog between two unimagined people are actually enjoyable to read. Unfortunately, they are extremely few and far apart. If this novel had been edited well, abridging the impertinent descriptions and straightening out the verb tenses and narration perspectives, it would have been an enjoyable 250-page piece of literature. But instead, here is 628 pages of [weak], doped up diary entries, trying to be artistic by being different and "innovative," but ending up a pile of waste nobody wants to clean up. A lot of my friends actually enjoyed this book; maybe the trick is to not pay too much attention to it and let the superfluous words pass by without inspection. In any case, it's hardly worth the time, unless you happen to be high on [a chemical substance], in which case the reader befits the author.
Rating: 
Summary: A real booger, I mean a real mother of a book.
Review: I guess I feel somewhere between my fellow reviewers here, although I lean toward the more enthusiastic, as you can see with my generous 4 stars.
I feel compelled to say something on this book because I do agree that it is "underread" and one of many overlooked almost-classics that culture simply didn't have time enough to fit into appreciating during the very busy period during the 60's of (cultural) production and consumption.... I think the story is every bit as exciting and inspiring and rip-boogerin'-roaring as Kesey's first book. The structure of the book is more complex and involving, and unlike many reviewers I think the prose is consistently quite wonderful to follow through all the splicings of perspective and cuttings-in of different voices, like it is being told, -- occurring, -- right before you.... As it says simply in the beginning, "Look:"....
However if it is true that the book is too fat in some places I would contend it is also not fleshed out enough in others. speak mainly of the brother character, Lee. I was just simply not convinced of his actual existence, -- never a consideration with Hank, Henry, Joby, & others who were all too alive. This distance is true also of several of the supporting characters. Myra, Lee's wife, never becomes real at all, and the relationship between her & her stepson (sic) comes across as an "item" and not a dramatic, true event. Who cares for the death of this cardboard, vague character? and so then what care can we have for Hank's (potentially very full of "good stuff") adolescent grief for her departure, as well as Lee's resulting vendetta (the crucial center of the conflict)? The paragraph on Myra's predecessor, Hank's mother, illustrates this sort of carelessness very well, -- it says so itself: "always gray and grim and distant--an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew . . .the boy foundhimself striving to re-create conversations he had had with her . . . in an attempt to convince himself that she had once been more than that carved, peaceful form nestled there in ruffles of satin." This sort of distance, deliberate or no, doesn't work for me. I bring it up perhaps because of the criticism directed toward Kesey's handling of the central woman figure of Big Nurse in his first book, -- that it was vicious women-hatred, that there was no real depth to her character, that she was a convenient, unbelievable Evil Witch. The argument against that possible flaw in the second book is of course the beautiful character of Hank's wife, Viv, -- the only female character I know in Kesey's first two books that is a true counter to all the puffed-up back-slapping boogerin' testosterone, -- not as an adversary, as in the case of Big Nurse, great and evil as she was, but as a sympathetic counterpart. Without Viv all the characters are in danger of becoming very obvious independent compartments of Kesey's psyche: you know, his "country" & "scholarly" backgrounds made into the characters of the two brothers warring against each other.... As it goes Lee's half never convinces me. Perhaps because what he represents never convinced Kesey either.
That said besides, I still recommend this book. *** I wonder also if certain facets of the plot could not have been further twisted. For instance if Hank had been a little older and farther-apart than Lee he might have been Lee's secret father.... But I only wonder....
*** And also I agree with most of the folks here on the subject of the Paul Newman movie adaptation. The scene with Joby drowning under the log IS great, just as great and horrifying ("Oh, no!...." I said aloud when I first read it) as the book, while the rest is just very disappointing (because it couldn't have been casted better). *** And don't forget, if you like Ken Kesey's books you might want to try Tom Wolfe's classic piece on him and his friends, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", which despite what prejudices and generic perceptions of that time and generation you may have (I did!), is a book well-worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Can I give anything lower than 1 one star?!?!?!
Review: The book was horrible!! I had to read it for an english class. It was dull. I could sleep but after read it, I felt asleep with no problem. Near the ending part of the book, he spent three pages describing how the coming of the canadian honker symbolize the coming of winter and how the town differed from other towns. The ending was also very confusing. I still don't get what Lee and Hank realize as the "secret of life." Why does Indian Jenny throw sand and shells on her pillow case? Why did she take off her clothes in the last sentense? The jump between time frames made the book very confusing. Half of the time, I am not sure who is thinking what and who was talking what. During one part of the book, each sentence was about a different person, doing different things, in different locations. Very confusing.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: This is probably the most amazing book I have ever read in my life. It tells the story of a man trying to save his family lumber business. As an Oregonian through and through who has grown up in near the area where the book takes place, I recognize the truth in Kesey's description. His writing has amazingly synthesized the feelings and thoughts of all the different characters into a coherent whole, distilling it down with plenty of passion and truth. Never in my life have I had such an emotional response to reading a book as I had to this masterpiece. Read it when you have time to let it consume you. Note: don't be put off by the beginning, it takes a little while for the book to pick up, but once it does, the first 60 pages or so enhance the intensity of the rest of the book.
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