Road Trip Books

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What better way to celebrate summer than with a road trip. Whether you’re planning an actual road trip, just doing some armchair traveling, or want to dive into an epic road novel you maybe haven’t read before, this list has something for everyone.

Here’s a link to the list on our catalog –  Road Trip Book List

Here’s the link to The Price of Salt on Bridges.

Short on time and want us to get these books for you? Use Grab-and-Go Reserves! Just place them on reserve and we’ll check them out to your account and they’ll be waiting for you to pick up in the library lobby.

What’s your favorite road trip book?

 

Cover of Lonely Planet's "USA's Best Trips: 65 Amazing Road Trips" book. The image features Mount Rushmore at the top, vintage cars in the middle, and the Route 66 highway symbol at the bottom.

 

USA’s Best Trips

By Lonely Planet

Discover the freedom of the open road with Lonely Planet’s USA’s Best Trips, your passport to the most up-to-date advice on unique experiences that await you along America’s highways. This guide features 52 amazing road trips, from two-day escapes to two-week adventures. Drive USA’s iconic ‘Mother Road’, Route 66, venture on a journey through the amazing parks of the Rocky Mountains, or follow scenic byways through New England among stunning fall foliage; all with your trusted travel companion. Jump in the car, cue up your driving playlist, and hit the road!

 

 

Cover of the book "The Price of Salt" by Patricia Highsmith. The image features a black-and-white photo of a woman sitting alone at a table in a diner, with a sign in the corner indicating that the story has been adapted into a major motion picture.

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.

Author Patricia Highsmith is best known for her psychological thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Originally published in 1952 under a pseudonym, The Price of Salt was heralded as “the novel of a love society forbids.” Highsmith’s sensitive treatment of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from previous lesbian pulp fiction. Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the necessity of being true to one’s nature.

Bridges Link – https://decorah.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/249497430

 

The cover of "Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward displays large blue and white lettering against an orange background with two black birds. It features a "National Book Award Winner" medallion and contains New York Times praise at the top.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

This singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi’s past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power—and limitations—of family bonds.

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her.

When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.

 

Book cover of "Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey" by William Least Heat-Moon. The title and author's name are prominently displayed in blue and orange text against a cream background. At the bottom, it's noted that the author also wrote "Blue Highways" and "River-Horse.

Roads to Quoz

By William Least Heat-Moon

About a quarter century ago, a largely unknown wanderer named William Least Heat-Moon wrote a book called Blue Highways. It was a travel book like no other, a book that revealed its author to be a chronicler of rare linguitic genius and empathy, a listener who knew that the small places can offer the biggest surprises. Heat-Moon, wrote one reader, was a travel writer as Faulkner was a country historian.

Road to Quoz is Heat-Moon’s long-awaited return to America’s back roads. It is a lyrical, funny, and magisterially told chronicle of American passage, a journey into the heart of a nation almost desperate for meaning beyond consumerism and self-absorption, a book that invites readers to “discover America anew.”

 

The cover of the book "On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey" by Paul Theroux, featuring a man in a red shirt and hat standing on an open road with a dramatic sky in the background.

On the Plain of Snakes

By Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north.

From the writer praised for his “curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms” (New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.

 

Lovecraft Country

By Matt Ruff

Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.

At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.

A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

 

The cover of the book "Lost Children Archive" by Valeria Luiselli. The design features layered images of desert landscapes, a border fence, and a lone tree. In bold white text, the title appears prominently with the author's name below. A badge indicates it is a New York Times Book Review selection.

Lost Children Archive

By Valeria Luiselli

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative book, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.

A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

 

The book cover for "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road" by Kate Harris features silhouettes of two cyclists with their bikes against a night sky filled with stars. A quote by Pico Iyer is displayed at the top, praising the book as a modern classic.

Lands of Lost Borders

By Kate Harris

A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road—an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.

Lands of Lost Borders is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore—the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here.

Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other—a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.

 

Cover of the book "American Gods: A Novel" by Neil Gaiman. The image features a dark, stormy sky with lightning striking, and an empty road stretching into the distance. The author's name is prominently displayed at the top.

American Gods

By Neil Gaiman

Days before his release from prison, Shadow’s wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break.

Scary, gripping and deeply unsettling, American Gods takes a long, hard look into the soul of America. You’ll be surprised by what – and who – it finds there…

 

 


Posted: May 30, 2021