Road Trip Reads
Our friends at Yakima Valley Libraries have created a list of staff recommendations, inspired by the literary classic Don Quixote.
All recommendations share themes of adventures, sometimes with a close one. All books are available to borrow at yvl.org or on the Libby app!
You can also borrow Cervantes' Don Quixote from the library, but you don't need to read the book to enjoy Richard Strauss' grand symphonic poem!
Book | Summary | |
| On the Road by Jack Kerouac | Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope—a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up. | |
| On the Hippie Trail by Rick Steves | In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied "Hippie Trail" from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way: jumping off a moving train, making friends in Tehran, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for the first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, and much more. The experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world. | |
| Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck | With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers. | |
| The Road Trip by Beth O'Leary | Four years ago, Dylan and Addie fell in love under the Provence sun. Wealthy Oxford student Dylan was staying at his friend Cherry’s enormous French villa; wild child Addie was spending her summer as the on-site caretaker. Two years ago, their relationship officially ended. They haven’t spoken since. They reach a new level of awkward when forced to take a road trip together. | |
| Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad | A deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life. A profound chronicle of of Jaouad's survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. | |
| All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy | The tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. | |
| Fear No Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson | First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever experienced. The writer’s account of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and “check it out,” the book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of the 1960s, one of the defining works of our time and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. | |
| A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson | Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes—and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. | |
| Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun | A rom-com following once childhood best friends forced together to drive their former teacher across the country. | |