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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
And some
more truly great reads...
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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.
Megan
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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.
Megan
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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.
Megan
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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!
Megan
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