America’s 10 Best Travel Books
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.22.04 | 9:27 PM ET
With the summer road trip season underway and travelers looking for good beach reading material, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Thomas Swick suggests they try one of his 10 favorite U.S. travel books published in the last century. Author Jonathan Raban makes the list twice. Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” is there, of course.
Interestingly, Swick included a couple of novels, including Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Writes Swick: “Only people who’ve never read this novel think it’s about sex with a minor. Everyone else knows that it’s the sublimely told story of the seduction of a donnish European by the nymphetish New World. And at its heart is a spot-on evocation of roadside America, where even some of our natural attractions are turned into kitsch which, in the hands of a transplanted Russian genius, is transformed into art.”
I like the list. Reading it, I realize I don’t have many favorites from the U.S. over the last 100 years. I’ll have to read a few of Swick’s selections. If I were making a list, I might include Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” about Utah’s canyon country. I’d have a hard time choosing between Kerouac’s “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums.” The latter is my favorite Kerouac book, but “On the Road” is more closely focused on travel. If I could go back further, I’d include Thoreau’s “Walden,” of course, and, like Swick, Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which was published first in 1835 but in many ways could have been written last year.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
