Road
Fever is a vivid and laugh-out-loud funny account
of a high speed road race from the southernmost
tip of Tierra del Fuego to the nothernmost terminus
of the Dalton Highway in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Author
Tim Cahill and his companion, professional driver
Garry Sowerby, succeed in making the 15,000 mile
run in a record-breaking 23½ days, a fact
you can check in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Road Fever is one of our all-time favorite
road reads.
The
Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
is Bill Bryson's classic account of searching America
for the quintessential small town he calls "Amalgam."
He never finds it, but his journey across 38 states
is non-stop hilarious.
First
published in 1957, On the Road still reigns
as the inspiration for angry young men who dream
of fast cars, fast women, and roadtrips without
rules. Considered to be autobiographical, On
the Road is larger than real life, even one
as gritty as Kerouac's. This book is great for reading
out loud, especially as you head into downtown Denver,
where Kerouac had some memorable adventures.
When
he was 58 years old, John Steinbeck decided to spend
three months taveling the country he was famous
for writing about. Accompanied by his poodle Charley,
Steinbeck moseyed the continent in the camper he
named after Don Qixote's horse. Travels with
Charley takes you along on the journey—
a must-read for anyone who ever dreamed of hitting
the road.
Mark
Twain's tales of adventure in the gold fields of
the American West still rock! Roughing It
will make you want to visit all the places Twain
explored and wrote about with inimitable originality,
especially Virginia City, Nevada, where you can
still walk the boardwalks to the newspaper office
where he worked during the glory days of the Comstock
Lode.
Tourist
Season is laugh-out-loud funny, but it's also
macabre. Carl Hiaasen's classic whodunit is a
dark tale of man-eating alligators, crazy journalists,
a wannabe terrorist, a millionaire Seminole and
a beauty queen. The bad guys get it in the end,
but you'll find yourself wondering what's worse—
people who kill a few tourists or developers whose
greedy voraciousness is destroying the natural
splendor of southern Florida.
Peter
Mayle is best known for his memoirs of life in
Provence, but Hotel Pastis is just as good.
It's the engaging story of a London advertising
executive who, world-weary and recently divorced,
gives up his jet-set career to revamp an old police
station in southern France into a "boutique
hotel." A second plot revolves around the
escapades of an endearing gang of robbers who
plan a complicated bank heist and end up kidnapping
of the son of an American billionaire by accident.
In addition to a delightfully woven story and
an elegant cast of characters, Hotel Pastis
serves up food descriptions so vivid you can probably
gain weight just by reading them.
Winterdance
was recommended to us by a bookstore owner
who said it was one of the best books she had
ever read. A comment like that should be taken
seriously, we thought. We bought ourselves a copy,
and now we, too, mention it as one of our all
time favorites. Author Gary Paulsen set out to
run the Iditarod, and the remarkable fact is that
he actually survived his training and even finished
the race. Winterdance is so vivid you'll
feel as though you covered a thousand miles in
Alaska yourself, but the only pain you'll really
suffer will come from laughing yourself sick.
Paulsen's prose is truly wonderful.
One
for the Money is so entertaining it took us
on an unintentional thirty-six mile detour. It's
the first in a series that features Stephanie
Plum, a New Jersey babe who finds herself working
as a bounty hunter in Trenton. Janet Evanovich's
hilarious prose is wonderful read out loud with
a New Jersey accent, but even if, like me, you
can't manage one, the ambience comes through anyway.
Stephanie Plum keeps you laughing; the mystery
keeps you hanging-- you'll want more, but it's
no problem. Evanovich is now working on the tenth
in the series!
Books
that Take You Along for the Ride
