Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Ted Conover: six favorite road books

Ted Conover’s new book is The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.

For The Week magazine, he named six favorite road books. One title on the list:
On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote this novel in the same year that The Catcher in the Rye was published, and some of the language feels as dated. But there is no purer expression in American culture of the energy and glory of road travel, of the possibility of transcendence through movement.
Read about another book on Conover's list.

Also see: John Leland's favorite road books and the Page 69 Test: John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of ‘On the Road’ (They’re Not What You Think).

--Marshal Zeringue