by Nancy Pearl
The other great memoir about the Beats that came out of the 1950s and 1960s is How I Became Hettie Jones, in which the author writes of her transformation from Hettie Cohen, young daughter of Jewish parents in Queens, New York, into the wife of black poet and activist LeRoi Jones, only to find their marriage ended by forces (both personal and societal) that drove them apart in 1965.
THE BECKONING ROAD
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Here are some wonderful nonfiction reads about traveling long distances, books that will make you want to buckle up your seat belt and take off—anywhere.
In 1964, when Peter Beagle was in his early twenties, he and a friend rode their Heinkel motor scooters from the East to the West Coast to meet up with Beagle’s girlfriend, Enid, then living in Menlo Park, California. He describes their journey in I See by My Outfit: Cross-Country by Scooter: An Adventure.
Another two-wheeled trip is Robert Pirsig’s classic, highly readable, and indispensable Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, an account of a cross-country journey that he and his son took by motorcycle, which is only partially an account of the trip itself and mainly a philosophical musing on the importance of quality in a world that values quantity much more.
Among the many books by the prolific John McPhee, my favorites include the books he wrote about traveling up and down, back and forth, on Interstate 80 studying geologic history. Annals of the Former World, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1998, is composed of four earlier books—Assembling California; Rising from the Plains; In Suspect Terrain; and Basin and Range—as well as an additional section, “Crossing the Craton.”
After he finished his superb Empire Express: Building the First Trans- continental Railroad, historian David Haward Bain decided to take his wife and two children on a car journey from their home in Vermont out to California by way of old logging roads, superhighways, and railroad routes.The result is the equally readable The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West.
Other nonfiction travel accounts include John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, in which the author, along with his poodle (the eponymous Charley), wandered by car the length and breadth of the United States in 1960; Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon, the now-classic account of Heat-Moon’s travels by car on all those back roads marked in blue on many maps; Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr.Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain, which describes a car trip with a definite purpose: to deliver Einstein’s brain (via Buick Skylark) to the great scientist’s daughter in California; and Pete Davies’s American Road: The Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of the Motor Age, in which a convoy of military vehicles wend their way across the country in the summer of 1919, averaging the mind-boggling speed of five miles per hour.
In 1988, ten years after Eric Hansen was rescued from a desert island in the Red Sea by a group of goat smugglers, he went back to collect the journals he had buried there before he left. He recounts his adventures (describing them as “madcap” would not be too far off the mark) in Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea. This intrepid traveler was also beckoned to Southeast Asia in Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo, and recounts more travel adventures in The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers.
See also the “Road Novels” section of Book Lust, which covers fictional long-distance car trips.
BEST FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
To make your choosing easier (though far less politically correct), I’ve attached a symbol to each of these books indicating whether they’d appeal most to a boy or a girl or both. Many of these books will also appeal to young teens.
When both symbols appear, the one that appears first indicates that perhaps boys would enjoy the book a bit more than girls or vice versa.
Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea
Natalie Babbitt’s The Eyes of the Amaryllis
Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer
Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit
Robert Burch’s Queenie Peavy
Betsy Byars’s The Pinballs
Andrew Clements’s Frindle and The Report Card
Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog
Helen Cresswell’s Ordinary Jack, Absolute Zero, and all the other books in the Bagthorpe series
Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread
Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two
Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses, Ginger Pye, The Moffats, The Middle Moffat, and Rufus M.
Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret
Michael Hoeye’s Time Stops for No Mouse: A Hermux Tantamoq Adventure (and sequels)
Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill
Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (and sequels)
Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall
John Masefield’s Jim Davis
Hugh Montgomery’s The Voyage of the Arctic Tern
Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia
Philippa Pearce’s Minnow on the Say and Tom’s Midnight Garden
Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game
V.A. Richardson’s The House of of Windjammer
Louis Sachar’s Holes
Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Headless Cupid and The Egypt Game
Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming and Dicey’s Song
BEST FOR TEENS
These are sure teen-pleasers, ranging from science fiction and fantasy to ultrarealistic and everything in between. Once again, I’ve attached a handy-dandy symbol to indicate whether a book may appeal more to girls or boys. But don’t take these symbols as the final word—try them out on any teens in your life, or yourself.
Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak
M. T. Anderson’s Thirsty and Feed
Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’s Hawksong
Joan Bauer’s Rules of the Road
Liz Berry’s The China Garden
Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat
Edward Bloor’s Tangerine
Ann Brashares’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and its sequel, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty
Kate Cann’s Love trilogy Ready?; Sex; Go!
Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese
Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk
Sylvia Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil
Catherine Fisher’s The Oracle Betrayed
Alex Flinn’s Breathing Underwater
Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere
Jack Gantos’s Hole in My Life
Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade
Ann Halam’s Dr.Franklin’s Island
Susan Juby’s Alice,I Think
Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate
E.L.Konigsburg’s Silent to the Bone and The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
Amy Goldman Koss’s The Girls
David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy
Lois Lowry’s A Summer to Die
Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi
John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began
Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings
Robin McKinley’s Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty & the Beast
Walter Dean Myers’s Monster
Garth Nix’s Shade’s Children
Joyce Carol Oates’s Big Mouth & Ugly Girl
Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging: Confessions of Georgia Nicholson
Sonya Sones’s One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies
Terry Trueman’s Stuck in Neutral
Nancy Werlin’s The Killer’s Cousin
Robb White’s Deathwatch
Virginia Euwer Wolff’s True Believer and Make Lemonade
Jacqueline Woodson’s Hush and If You Come Softly
BIG TEN COUNTRY: THE LITERARY MIDWEST
For those non-college football fans reading this, the Big Ten consists of eleven universities (don’t ask me, ask the National Collegiate Athletic Association) in these states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. For me, growing up in Michigan, the Midwest was characterized by the Great Lakes, the steel mills, the automobile plants, the miserable winters, and also the great sports rivalries such as the University of Michigan vs. Ohio State University and the Green Bay Packers vs. the Detroit Lions. It wasn’t until I started categorizing some of my favorite novels that I realized how many of them were set in Big Ten Country.
Michigan
Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker is the story of a family who leaves their Kentucky home during World War II to find factory jobs in Detroit, where they struggle to make new lives for themselves.
A series of interesting Ann Arbor, Michigan, residents—from teenage lovers to a retired professor to Baxter’s next-door neighbor and his two ex-wives—come to populate Charles Baxter’s home in his inventive novel The Feast of Love. Each person relates his or her experiences of love—a force that variously sustains us, destroys us, and drives us crazy.
Beginning with 1990’s Whiskey River and ending with 1999’s Thunder City (in between are Jitterbug, Stress, Edsel, King of the Corner, and Motown), noted mystery writer Loren D. Estleman wrote seven “Detroit” novels, which taken together offer a sweeping (often gritty) history of the Motor City from the early twentieth century on.
But you sure can’t talk about novels set in my home state, especially in Detroit, without mentioning the page-turning and highly entertaining novels of Elmore Leonard. By my count, he has so far written ten crime novels set in Michigan, and scores of others set elsewhere (don’t miss Get Shorty).My particular Michigan favorites are Pagan Babies and Freaky Deaky, although Mr. Paradise is pretty wonderful too.
Iowa
The best-loved contemporary novel with an Iowa setting may well be W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, the story of Ray Kinsella, who builds a baseball field in back of his house after hearing a voice say,“If you build it, he will come.”
We learn about events in fictional Grouse County, Iowa, the setting for Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism, through the experiences of Sheriff Dan Norman; his wife, Louise; and Louise’s ex-husband, Tiny,a thief and a plumber.
Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres put this author on the literary map (although I still like one of her early novels, Duplicate Keys, and her story collection The Age of Grief even better). The plot—you’ll recognize its relationship to Shakespeare’s King Lear—revolves around a dysfunctional family comprised of an autocratic father and his three daughters. What with conflict over a disputed inheritance, deteriorating marriages, cancer, and groundwater pollution, these three-dimensional characters wrestle with a myriad of contemporary (and timeless) issues.
An Ocean in Iowa by Peter Hedges describes a year in the life of seven-year-old Scotty Ocean, a tumultuous year in which he must cope with the fact that his mother has deserted the family.
Minnesota
The earliest Minnesota novel is probably Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (originally published in 1920), the satirical story of librarian Carol Kennicott’s attempts to bring culture to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota (clearly based on Lewis’s own hometown, Sauk Center), and how everyone, from the townspeople to her physician husband, reacts to her plans. (Incidentally, Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
One of the best things about P. J. Tracy’s novels Monkeewrench and Live Bait is that all the characters—major and minor—come vividly alive for the reader, whether they’re homicide detectives (like Minneapolis cop Leo Magozzi or his cohorts) or software developers (the brilliant and traumatized Grace MacBride).
One of the authors I am most chagrined about having omitted from Book Lust (and about whose omission many readers wrote me) is Jon Hassler. My favorite books of his are the two set at Rookery State College and featuring Leland Edwards, first a faculty member (in Rookery Blues) and later dean of the college (in The Dean’s List). Hassler’s emphasis is on his characters, and what I so loved about The Dean’s List is that he shows how it’s never too late to start growing up.
One of my all-time favorite novels (which is also a terrific choice for book clubs) is In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. It’s the story of John Wade, whose race for political office is derailed by facts that are leaked to the press about his participation, years before, in a My Lai-type massacre during his Vietnam service. He and his wife, Kathy, retreat to a cabin at the Lake of the Woods to regroup—to come to terms not only with John’s political future (and lack thereof) but also with what it means that he’s kept secret from Kathy one of the most important events of his life.
Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms tells about the return of seventeen-year-old Angel to the Minnesota village of her birth in order to get answers about the scars on her face and other events in her past.
Other Minnesota novels not to miss are the Jake Hines mysteries by Elizabeth Gunn (all with numbers in their titles—among them Par Four and Six-Pound Walleye); Leif Enger’s novel about the bonds of family as seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, Peace Like a River; Karen Joy Fowler’s lovely novel about a women’s baseball team, The Sweetheart Season, based on her mother’s life; and of course, both the fiction and nonfiction of Garrison Keillor, most of which is set in his beloved (and invented) Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Among his best novels are Love Me and Wobegon Boy.
Ohio
Ruth McKenney’s Industrial Valley (originally published to great controversy—at least in Akron—in 1939) is probably seen these days as outdated, irrelevant left-wing propaganda, and is therefore largely unread. This is a real shame, because McKenney’s novel of strife in the rubber factories of Akron is a classic work of American labor history. (McKenney is far better known for My Sister Eileen, her lighthearted and immensely popular autobiographical collection of stories about two sisters who come to New York City’s Greenwich Village to make their fortunes in the early 1930s. It became both a successful film and a Broadway play.)
In Mark Winegardner’s novel Crooked River Burning, with its backdrop of Cleveland’s sorry demise (from leading steel-producing city in the 1940s to a symbol of urban failure in the rust belt by the late 1960s), I most enjoyed the way he interwove the story of the on-again, off-again twenty-year relationship between an upper-class girl and her lower-class boyfriend who met as adolescents, with the chapters about major Cleveland movers and shakers, from disc jockey Alan Freed (who supposedly coined the phrase rock-and-roll) to the city’s first black mayor, Carl Stokes. Reading Winegardner’s novel reminded me, too, of how much I loved John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, which does the same sort of thing on a larger scale.
Toni Morrison, who was born in Lorain, Ohio, set some of her early novels there, including, most notably, the painful-to-read-butoh-so-worth-it The Bluest Eye.