10 books like The Road

Perhaps no one—including Kerouac—embodies this characteristic restlessness more purely than Chris McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. McCandless’s story has captured the imagination of legions of readers, myself included (not everyone is on board; there are those who consider McCandless a fool). I’m sure I’m not the only one who read the book in one sitting, unable to set it down. What’s so mesmerizing about McCandless’s story, for those who can’t resist it, is his utter belief (saintly in its way) that the physical journey is in fact a quest, a kind of soul-searching that leads to enlightenment. That his journey ends badly somehow seems to validate his belief. McCandless dared to go to the limits, even if it meant there was no return.

Although I had read this classic many years ago, I decided to revisit it recently and found it even more enjoyable this time around.

Steinbeck’s real-life journey across America drew me into an older era in America and brought a fresh and immersive experience to the reader. Charley, the poodle, was an absolute delight.

Ah, the lure of the back roads, the unbeaten paths, the “blue highways”—to use the term popularized by William Least Heat-Moon in his stirring, soulful travel book of that name. From the first pages, I heard the song of the open road as I read, and the music didn’t stop until the last paragraph. Kerouac’s novel was published the year before I was born. Least Heat-Moon’s book appeared a quarter-century later, when I was a young man yearning to find myself on the open road. Blue Highways was cathartic: it showed me that a journey on America’s back roads—and a book about that journey—was still possible in an America that had changed significantly since Kerouac’s time.

Beryl Markham was a bush pilot in Africa during the early years of aviation. She is a marvelous writer and an adventurous soul. Ernest Hemingway wrote of her: “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I am completely ashamed of myself as a writer.... She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.”

Hemingway is right. This is the best written travel book I’ve read. I grew up in what is now called South Sudan, not far from Kenya where Markham grew up. Her writing brings back the land and people, the weather and hardships, the beauty of that land and its lonely skies.

Considered by many to be the gold standard of the Peace Corps memoir genre, this volunteer’s account is resplendent in its imagery, witty insights, and down-to-earth prose. The depiction of day-to-day life serving as a schoolteacher in China, interspersed with the challenges of learning a new language and culture, and the occasional plunge into the history of the region (anthropologically, geographically, and politically) round out the narrative to give the reader an immersive cultural experience unlike any other. The narrative’s boots-on-the-ground perspective gives the reader a true insider peek at life in China—at turns baffling, humorous, poignant, and, above all, fascinating.

Another deeply insightful book from Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes explores the cultural richness and sometimes dangerous aspects of Mexico. With a forward style and charisma, he comes face to face with narcos, police, corruption, migrants, and the sometimes frightening indigenous culture. His writings are not just all darkness and gloom. He goes to great lengths to describe the importance of family in a country with virtually no social network. He talks with the educated, the poverty-stricken, and even meets the leader of the Zapatistas.  After reading On the Plain of Snakes' you will develop a new appreciation for our Mexican neighbors, particularly concerning migration and the border control issues that have dominated the US for too many years. This is a long arduous trip which Theroux makes thoroughly enjoyable. 

This is another history that drew me in with a tightly focused story — an 1879 expedition to reach the North Pole — then overwhelmed me with a slowly dawning realization: The expedition was sheer insanity based on assumptions that are whacky beyond belief but were state-of-the-art thinking less than a century and a half ago. George Washington De Long and his crew aboard the Jeanette left San Francisco expecting to spend a single winter trapped in the polar ice before popping into a temperate Arctic Sea and steaming their way straight to the apex of Planet Earth. Instead, the crew endured more than two years of almost unimaginable hardship. That any of them survived to tell the tale testifies to the indomitability of the human spirit.

“The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.” The joy in Kerouac is stumbling along with his absent-minded musings and finding the stretches of poetry that really speak to you. Dharma Bums is spiritual and inward-focused, but the characters spend time in nature, trying to figure out their place in it. It’s the kind of companion that you want to have with you on a canoe trip or sharing space with you on a hammock on a warm fall day. 

All of us who survived our own version of an Unruly Youth will find much to admire, and much that resonates, in this riveting account of one young man’s quest for identity, and for answers to his fundamental questions about life. He journeys along a “pipeline to freedom" on a bed of steel, ties, and gravel, never sure where his path will carry him from day-to-day. Travelogue From an Unruly Youth carries us into a hidden and unconventional world, weaving a romantic tale of roadside mystery and the universe-altering power of love.

Sometimes wanderlust makes us wander farther than we should. I devoured this book! Part history, part thriller, part downright unbelievable, there is adventure and heroism on every page. I'm not sure that truth is always stranger than fiction, but in Tracy’s able hands it is every bit as exciting. Strap on your snowshoes!